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Recipes & Rituals for Community Care: Waking Up to the Herbs Around Us
April 23, 2025 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Wednesday, April 23 | Waking Up to the Herbs Around Us
Join us to make make rejuvenating medicine with spring herb friends! We will take a walk through the greenhouse garden and the surrounding park to find, meet, and harvest spring plants.
Dandelion, nettle, dead nettle, bedstraw, red clover, chickweed, plantain, violet, are just some of the herb friends we may find who often get overlooked as weeds. Many of these herbs offer nourishing minerals, moistening mucilage, and detoxifying powers that help get our body’s systems moving as we come out of hibernation.
Depending on what we find, we will make different preparations to preserve their healing powers.
Your Facilitator: Sebastian Bouknight: I am a garden grower, land steward, environmental educator, and longtime student of herbal medicine. My great-grandmother, who grew up in a rural mountain village in southern Italy and immigrated to Astoria in the 1890s, was committed to becoming “American,” and never passed on her knowledge of the land and healing to my grandmother. I’m committed to undoing this loss – to learning practices of land stewardship, herbal medicine, and ritual lost through assimilation and displacement, and sharing these gifts. Everybody comes from a land and every land co-evolved with cultures of care – I want to help folks connect with their embodied healing memory, and learn the hands-on arts of medicine making.
Find out more about Sebastian’s work at @dirtmagic_medicinals on IG.
Join us for Recipes and Rituals for Collective Care every Wednesday!
What does it mean to heal in community? What does it feel like when we extend care to ourselves and the collective? How do plants and our local ecologies care for us? How can we care for the plants and local ecologies in return?
Weave in rituals and recipes into your own self-care and community care practices through weekly explorations in herbal arts, somatic movement in the greenhouse and garden, folk remedies, and other wild-crafts and meditative activities that foster a deeper connection to plants to care for the body, mental health, and the people you move with.
Each week, be guided by a guest herbalist, healing artist, or wellness practitioner who will help you create your own toolkit and apothecary for self and communal care.
Workshops are rain or shine.When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.
Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to programs@thehort.org