The Herballectual

In this episode of The Herballectual , I speak with Seraphina Capranos about bridging the clinical and mystical dimensions of herbalism, and the pressure practitioners can feel to choose between them. We explore homeopathy, plant spirit medicine, subtle medicine, and an herbalism spacious enough to hold the clinician and the kitchen witch at the same table.

What if knowing itself is an ecosystem, and a single way of knowing a monoculture of the mind; a knowing as fragile as a forest of a single species? In this episode of The Herballectual, I sit down with David Winston, herbalist and ethnobotanist, founder of Herbalist & Alchemist and dean of his Center for Herbal Studies, who, fifty-eight years into studying herbal medicine, still calls himself an advanced beginner. We speak about science, tradition, and spirit as three ways of knowing, and why he holds all of them and grants none the final word. He loves science because it can prove him wrong, trusts the old traditions where cultures that never met arrive at the same use for the same plant, and listens to the plants, which have spoken to him plainly enough that he once heard a nettle say, not my leaves, my seeds. We close where the conversation with his uncle's teaching that the strength of a forest is its difference, and that we are born two-legged animals with the long work of becoming human still ahead of us.

What does it mean to practise herbalism deeply, in a time of ecological unraveling? In this episode of The Herballectual, I sit down with Peter Conway, one of the most respected voices in British herbal medicine. He has practised, taught, and written for over thirty years, helped shape the standing of the profession in the United Kingdom, and now teaches at Pacific Rim College in Victoria. He is the author of Tree Medicine and of The Consultation in Phytotherapy. He has also been called a living mystic. Peter came to herbalism through ecology, and the two have never separated in him. Drawing on Arne Næss, who distinguished a shallow ecology that stays at the periphery from a deep one that asks what relationship we are actually in with the living world, Peter draws the same line through our own field, and explores what it means to practise a form of herbalism rooted in relationship, responsibility, and the recognition that we owe our existence entirely to plants. We speak about herbalism as a political and relational act, about reductionism and holism as partners rather than rivals, and about what is lost when a plant is reduced to a single constituent. From the consultation as its own form of medicine to contemplation as the core of practice, this conversation moves through animism, humility, mystery as something to cherish rather than solve, and the eclectic's refusal to be limited by any one tradition. Along the way, Peter shares a luminous account of juniper asserting itself in a consultation, reflects on what it means to belong to the world rather than to own it, and returns, again and again, to the heart of the work: loving people, loving plants, and tending the relationship between them.

How do you earn a living without turning plants into products, or yourself into a commodity? This month I sit down with Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies to sit with a question a lot of herbalists carry. The tensions we treat as walls, between the honest and the effective, the soulful and the strategic, turn out to be doorways. We speak about the fear of being seen, the steadiness between collapsing and posturing, and the quiet honesty of telling people the truth and trusting them to know whether the work is theirs. Underneath it runs something older: the marketplace returned to kinship and the living world, marketing as a form of devotion, and how to stay human in a technocratic age. Tad ends with the most beautiful definition of herbalism. Find Tad Hargrave Website Instagram YouTube Substack Facebook

What does herbalism look like when it leaves theory and meets the world? In this inaugural episode of The Herballectual, I sit down with 7Song - herbalist, teacher, long-time clinician, and one of my early teachers, to explore what holds in practice. We speak about the making of herbalists: how students are formed, what must be unlearned, and why clinical reality reshapes early idealism. From free-clinic work to disaster response, from the economics of teaching to the ethics of wildcrafting, this conversation traces herbalism as it lives in bodies, classrooms, and communities. Herbal pragmatism is about discernment, autonomy, and choosing what serves the person in front of us. Together we reflect on livelihood, lineage, diagnostic orientation, and the long arc of learning. Find 7Song Northeast School of Botanical Medicine Herbal Database Instagram Facebook Ithaca Free Clinic