Grass Roots Herbal Foundations is aimed at anyone with an interest in connecting plants with people and will offer additional insights to current or aspiring home herbalists. From a professional perspective, we think that the course will be of particular interest to people working in or wanting to work in community education particularly in the outdoors. That could be a community garden or other growing project, home-schooling or outdoor nursery, herbalist or other holistic practitioner.
Course Content
- Community Herbalism; developing projects, running workshops or walks and putting community herbalism into practice
- Focus on 45 plants which can be foraged, grown or easily sourced in the UK, including ecological cultivation & ethical sourcing
- Comprehensive remedy making guides, including trouble-shooting and matching remedies to situations
- Deep delve into herbal therapeutics, energetics, foundational actions & constituents
- Sensory herbalism and how we might form a deeper connection with ourselves, the plants and our environment
With all of our deep-delve courses, we offer a combination of online learning tools, discussion space and in-person options along with curated plant profiles and comprehensive additional resources. As well as getting access to our Community Apothecary to purchase your own blends of small batch tea mixes and tincture simples.
In Practice this looks like:
The course is offered over 3 semesters, covering 7 modules:
- Community Herbalism & Community and Family Health in Practice
- Sensory Herbalism
- Herbal Allies
- Ecological Herb Gardening
- Remedy Making
- Herbal Actions, Energetics & Constituents
- Herbal Therapeutics
We are offering Grass Roots Herbal Foundations as two different modes of study - Online or Blended - with a further option to add an assessed element for students who are interested in more formal study: All students will have the opportunity to chart their progress via self-led testing.
Online Course
Course Content: over three, 10 week semesters, you'll get access to new content every 3-4 weeks with three content drops per semester
Self-led Testing: throughout the course there will be exercises, case histories and quizzes to help you to assess your ongoing learning
Teaching Zooms: nine live 2 hour long Zoom lessons, roughly corresponding to each content drop
Blended Course (10 spaces)
Full Online Course: Nine course content drops with ongoing self-led testing and nine teaching Zooms
8 Additional Teaching Days:
6 days 10am - 4pm at Lauriston Farm in North West Edinburgh, further exploring the course content
2 days on Zoom in December & January: we anticipate these looking like a 2 hour online session, followed by 2 hours for lunch and homework followed by another 2 hour online session with feedback
In-person days will be on Saturdays at the Lauriston Agroecology Farm in NW Edinburgh
Optional Assessed Route
External Assessment: in addition to the self-led assessment, you will also have access to more formal assessment with feedback from our tutors
Assessment will include plant profiles, case histories and submitting additional quizzes or tests
This option is available to both online and blended students so can be added from anywhere in the UK.
We have developed Grass Roots Herbal Foundations based on feedback over the years that folk feel that the practicalities of community herbalism is a missing element in a lot of herbal education. We are working with other course leaders and partners to identify how Grass Roots Herbal Foundations can best complement other course offerings across the UK. We see this course as contributing to a robust training environment for herbalists, adding another dimension to the magic and science of working with plants and people.