Hawthorn School
Cultivating Relationship:
Experiential Plant Medicine
February through October 2023
Our nine-month immersion program offers students skills, knowledge, and hands-on experience to cultivate practical, magical, and healing relationships with the plants.
We believe that the best way to learn about the plants is to visit them where they live, with care, respect, and friendship. We prioritize the tending of wild plant stands and growing plants at home in our gardens whenever possible. We strive to teach that cultivating healing relationships with plants requires caring for the health and well-being of the ecosystems we share with them.
In this program, we nurture individual and communal plant relationships through multiple points of connection and learning:
- Plant Identification
- Propagation of Plants in Gardens and in the Wild
- Ethical and Mutually-Beneficial Wildcrafting
- Phytochemistry
- Making Potent and Beautiful Medicines from the Plants
- Inviting the Plants into our own bodies
- Formulation
- Plant Communication
- Essential Oil Distillation
- Spagyrics & Alchemy
- Plant Medicine for Specific Health Conditions
- Perfume Making
- Clinical Skills
- Philosophies of Healing
- Plants as Allies in working with trauma
- Elemental Herbalism
- Constitutional Medicine
- Herbal Energetics
- Anatomy, Physiology, and Body Systems
- Personal Plant Communion and Magical Relationships
And Much More!
Time is spent learning as a community in the woods, the mountains, the classroom, the garden, and the lab. We focus primarily on the plants teachers of this bioregion, including those that can be cultivated in this climate.
This program provides students the opportunity to develop intimate relationships with the plants, learning about who they are as they change across the seasons.
We begin in February with Cottonwood bud harvesting, and end by digging for roots and foraging for medicinal mushrooms in October.
We meet one weekend per month, February through October. Class is held on Saturdays and Sundays, with August’s weekend being a Friday through Sunday camping trip. Likely dates for 2023 are listed below.
A significant portion of class time will be spent in the field, working directly with the plants in and around Olympia and the greater Pacific Northwest. While this program is highly experiential and hands-on, classroom instruction is also an important part of this journey. Each of our teachers brings a unique perspective and their own relationship with the plants.
Students will finish the program with the beginnings of their own apothecary, familiarity with the Pacific Northwest Materia Medica, practical skills to share with their communities, and deepened personal relationships with the magic and the medicine of the plants.
