Class Descriptions & Teacher Bios
9:45-11:00
Qi Gong to Mirror the Cycles of Nature
Eva Inglizian L.Ac. will lead a 75 minute Qi Gong Class that will help balance you with the natural forces of yin and yang based on movements inspired by nature.Qi Gong is an ancient healing modality that has been practiced for centuries with medical, and spiritual benefits. Rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qi Gong was developed into a systemic healing art to preserve well-being and vitality. Regular Qi Gong practice has been linked to improved circulation, lowered blood pressure, reduced stress and anxiety, and improved immune function. Eva will guide you through pleasant Qi Gong exercises to cultivate your energy and align you with nature's rhythmic and profound cycles. Participants will become sensitive to their own Qi through the practice of acupressure, self-massage, slow, mindful movement, and healing-guided visualization.
Eva Inglizian L.Ac.
Licensed acupuncturist & herbalist
Sagrada Acupuncture
Eva Inglizian L.Ac. is a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist and has her acupuncture practice here in Missoula, MT and owns a yoga retreat center in Santa Margarita California. She holds her master's degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and has been teaching and studying Qi Gong for 22 years. Eva’s passion is in empowering individuals to feel their own sense of harmony and vitality. Eva’s clients come to her for health maintenance and preventive care, empowering them as unique individuals rather than a disease process. Eva's intuitive understanding of healthy living can be seen in her treatment offerings. Eva has been practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine for over two decades. Born into a family of healers ranging from her Father, an Emergency Room physician and psychologist to her Mother a nurse, Eva has healing in her blood.
Slow Beauty Ritual
Join us for a start to finish DIY holistic facial where you will get to use the extended Sex Plants Rock and Roll line of wildcrafted and home-grown herbal products. You will even get to create a take-home item to add to your skincare kit! While we soak up our slow-beauty process we will discuss the importance and strategies for incorporating a more nature centered and herbal-focused body and home.
Lindsey Martin
Herbalist
SEX PLANTS ROCK AND ROLL CO
Lindsey has lived a nature-centered lifestyle deep in the rocky mountains of Colorado since 2003. It wasn't until 2020 when she decided to turn the lifestyle into a brand to share the importance of a life deeply connected with the natural world. She is an active mountainista where she sources wildcrafted herbs on her backdoor adventures in the mountains as well as an avid grower of medicinal and edible plants. All of her favorite plants can be found infused into the whole line of Sex Plants Rock and Roll products.
9:45-12:30
What the Plants Teach: Stories from Wild and Garden
Over forty years of teaching and practicing herbalism, Suzanne Tabert has gathered not only knowledge of plants, but stories that reveal how deeply our lives intertwine with the botanical world. In this session she shares reflections on her “Ten Essential Botanical Elders,” including Red Cedar, Devil’s Club, Nettle, and Pines. Rather than focusing on lists of constituents, Suzanne brings forward the lived lessons these plants offer, stories of apprentices discovering the power of boundaries through Devil’s Club, the resilience and community found in a patch of Nettle, and the quiet strength of Red Cedar standing along forest edges. These stories illuminate how plants shape our understanding of medicine, ecology, and community. This presentation celebrates herbalism as a living tradition carried through experience, observation, and relationship with the land.
Suzanne Tabert
Bioregional Herbalist, Author
Cedar Mountain Herb School
Suzanne Tabert is a bioregional herbalist, educator, speaker, and author with four decades of experience teaching herbal medicine. She is the Director of Herbal Education at Cedar Mountain Herb School, one of the longest-running herbal schools in the Pacific Northwest.
She is also an adjunct professor at Bastyr University, where she has taught for fourteen years, training generations of herbalists in foraging, phytochemistry, and holistic wellness.
A sought-after speaker at national and international herbal conferences, Suzanne is a frequent presenter for the American Herbalists Guild and a regular blog writer, speaker and podcast guest for Mountain Rose Herbs. She writes for major publications including Willow and Sage, Christian Herbal and Homestead Living magazines and is often featured on radio and podcasts. Suzanne is a member of the American Herbalists Guild and serves as a Partner in Education with United Plant Savers.
11:15-12:30
Wildcrafted Flower Essences: Listening to the Language of Flowers
Flower essences are a form of plant medicine that work on the emotional and energetic level, supporting balance, intuition, and deeper connection with the natural world. In this workshop we will explore what flower essences are, how they are traditionally prepared, and how to work with them in daily life. Ashli will demonstrate the process of creating a wildcrafted flower essence while sharing her approach to working respectfully with plants and listening to the language of flowers. Participants will learn the basics of preparing essences and how flowers can support emotional healing and transformation.
Ashli McCracken
Herbalist & Flower Essence Practitioner
Earthen Abundance
Ashli McCracken is an herbalist and the founder of Earthen Abundance, a small-batch herbal apothecary devoted to wildcrafted plant medicine and flower essences. She has been working closely with plants for over a decade and has created dozens of flower essences from wild landscapes and cultivated gardens. Ashli is passionate about helping people deepen their relationship with plants, reconnect with intuition, and explore the subtle medicine of flowers.
Making Herbal Syrups
If you’re having trouble taking an herb due to its off-putting taste, consider adding herbal syrups to your repertoire. They are delicious and can add to both the pleasure and the compliance of taking herbal remedies. Herbal syrups have a thick, sweet consistency and are a great way to flavor an herbal formula or make it more palatable, especially when using unpleasant-tasting herbs. Join herbalist Elaine Sheff of Green Path Herb School and learn several ways to make delicious herbal syrups from both fresh and dried herbs. Elaine will offer preservation methods for syrups, suggestions about herbs that can be used, and conclude with different ways to use herbal syrups.
Elaine Sheff
Clinical Herbalist, RH (AHG)
Green Path Herb School
The author of several books on herbal medicine and healing, clinical herbalist Elaine Sheff has been passionate about sharing herbal knowledge for over 36 years. Her latest book is Naked: Botanical Recipes for Vibrant Skin and Healthy Hair. Elaine is the Co-Director of Green Path Herb School, located in Missoula, Montana, where she strives to inspire and empower students and clients to remember their connection to the earth, the plants, and their own healing process. She is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild and teaches workshops, and at conferences, both nationally and internationally. Elaine received her BA in Environmental Conservation from the University of Colorado. She is a graduate of the Rocky Mountain Center of Botanical Medicine and the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine. Elaine has an International Certification in Aromatherapy from the Pacific Institute of Aromatherapy. As a certified Instructor of Natural Family Planning and Fertility Awareness Methods, Elaine has helped many couples avoid or achieve pregnancy naturally. She has written numerous articles about her family’s journey with epilepsy and a special needs child. Elaine has written for publications including the Journal of Medicinal Plants and their Applications, Mamalode, Botanical Anthology, and Aromaculture magazine. Elaine is an avid gardener and one of the founders of the Montana Herbal Festival. You can often find her bent over an herb in her garden or marveling at small flowers in mountain meadows with her husband and sons. Elaine’s workshops have been featured at numerous conferences both nationally and internationally.
2:00-3:15
Walking Through the Seasons: Land-Based Plant Medicine and Ancestral Healing
The land has always been the first teacher. Before books, before classrooms, before curricula, there were seasons, plants, and the people who knew how to listen to both. Every human being alive descends from ancestors who understood plant medicine, who read the land, who made healing from what grew around them. That knowledge did not vanish. It was buried. This class is about finding your way back to it, wherever you come from.
Walking Through the Seasons is a living framework for understanding plant medicine the way it was always meant to be understood: through relationship, through territory, and through the hands. Darcy and Jenny Fisher draw from Ktunaxa and Salish ancestral knowledge and years of land-based practice to guide participants through the principles of seasonal plant medicine and on-the-land healing. We begin with the why: why plants heal, why the season matters, why slowing down to observe the natural world is not passive but profoundly restorative. When we return to our natural frequency, when the nervous system settles into the parasympathetic state that land and plant and presence can reliably provide, we remember things we did not know we had forgotten.
Participants will then work hands-on with solar-infused botanical oils and fat-based preparations, leaving with both a finished medicine and a deeper understanding of the knowledge system it came from. This class welcomes all people, all backgrounds, all lineages. The plants do not ask where you are from. They ask only that you show up and pay attention.
Jenny and Darcy Fisher
Knowledge Keepers and Co-founders of Keepers Of The Seasons LLC, Six Twenty
Darcy and Jenny Fisher are Knowledge Keepers, formulators, authors, and land-based educators based in the East Kootenay region of British Columbia and Montana. Their work is rooted in the traditional homelands of many nations, a region that today is home to many beautiful and diverse walks of life.
Together they founded Keepers of the Seasons LLC and Six Twenty Skincare, a decade-long practice built on the relationship between people, plants, and the land that feeds them both.
They spend their seasons harvesting, formulating, and teaching plant medicine the way it has always been taught: outside, hands in it, paying attention. Darcy and Jenny are co-authors of Walking Through the Seasons, a living archive of plant medicine and ancestral ecological knowledge spanning over 64 plant profiles and the full cycle of the year.
They believe the land is the first teacher, the nervous system already knows how to come home to it, and that good medicine starts with showing up and paying attention.
Why Do I Love Herbs?!
Returning to the WHY of what motivates and inspires us to work with the plants as food and medicine.
Do you like learning about the uses of herbs, how to identify plants in the field, make plant medicine, and keep your family and community healthy? Did herbs help you heal from an illness that other healing modalities were unable to remedy? Do you love to teach, and spread the plant love? Did a plant speak to you and open your lens to being a part of nature, and not separate?
We will go out into the field and physically meet the plants who co-inhabit the Orion Farmstead, through seeing, tasting, touching and sensing. We will learn about some of their uses and practical applications, discussed earlier in the course.
As we walk among the plants we will transition and transform into the energetic aspects of plant medicine by partaking in a plant meditation and having the opportunity to be a voice for the plants and then share their offerings, as we regroup and integrate our experience.
Jennephyr Reiche-Sterling
Community Herbalist, Somatic Dance Facilitator
EHSHER-Earth Heart Spirit LLC
Jennephyr Reiche-Sterling is a Community Herbalist, residing in Sun River MT, as a servant and witness of the land that she is lucky to be able to co-exist with. Her education began over 30 years ago, as she began learning about medicinal plants that were identified in the city streets and nature areas of the Netherlands. Jennephyr is a self motivated learner, and is largely self-taught, as well as having studied with The Wild Rose College of Natural Healing, in Calgary; and also as an apprentice to Rosemary Gladstar in Vermont.
Jennephyr was co-owner of The Root and The Leaf, an herb store, in Great Falls, MT with Beatrix Jenness, back in the day. She is also the founder, and instructor, of EHSHER- Earth Heart Spirit-Herbal Educational Resources LLC, and taught herb courses through the adult education programs in her community and privately for many years. Jennephyr was an active member of The Montana Herb Gathering (MHG) for ten years, and president of the organization for two of those years. Jennephyr has also co-taught Herb classes at the Glacier Institute with Heather Nack-Culbreth.
Jennephyr is currently a Hospice Nurse, a Somatic dance facilitator, trained through the Movement For Life (MFL) Method with Gisela Rocha, and she is also practicing as a Death Doula; and while not actively practicing as an Herbalist at this time, the plants are still a large part of her daily life, passion, and motivation for creating a sustainable life support system for all of life.
2:00-4:45
Taste of Place Hyrdosol Making
Smell is the strongest sense, and Part one is a foraging walk where we will be respectfully harvesting and identifying local plants to make a signature 'taste of place' hydrosol. Part two is learning how to make hydrosol with small copper still, preparing all out material, and making the alchemy happen! While we chop, we will be discussing the different plants we are working with and different medicines they hold. BY then end you will have partaken in all the steps to create a unique blend that you'll get to enjoy time and again as a reminder of your favorite last best place!
Cathryn Raan & Sydney Morical
Wild Wanders
Cathryn Raan and Sydney Morical of Wild Wanders are herbalists and longtime foragers of wild food and medicine that have been sharing their passion for plants and fungi with the community for over six years. They offer private excursions and land consultations as well as host a wide range of community events teaching foraging, plant connection, makery classes, and more. They also provide foraging services for restaurants and events, and wild foraged products for purchase, including an annual CSA (Community Supported Apothecary) subscription.
3:30-4:45
Plant Identification
Join Angela as we wander the grounds of the Orion Farmstead to get to know the plants that grace this beautiful land. We will meander along the land, stopping to visit the plants and learn how to identify them in their natural setting. Angela will talk about how to identify and harvest each plant and how to utilize the plants in edible dishes and as medicine.
Angela will also walk you through the process she uses when foraging, such as asking for permission before harvesting and giving thanks for the offerings of the plants.
This workshop will be very experiential and will hopefully awaken the wonder within you to learn more about the many opportunities we have to interact with wild plant medicine.
Angela Devani
Spiritual & Ceremonial Herbalist
Elemental Magick
Angela Devani is a spiritual herbalist, ceremonial guide, and intuitive mentor devoted to helping others reconnect with the ancient wisdom of the Earth and their own inner knowing. With years of experience in plant spirit medicine, energy healing, and earth-based ritual, Angela weaves together Spiritual Herbalism, Peruvian Medicine Wheel practices, elemental healing, and embodiment work to create safe, sacred spaces for transformation.
Through her offerings, Angela supports individuals in awakening their connection to the Earth and living with greater purpose and alignment. At the heart of her work is a deep reverence for plants as teachers, allies, and guides
Angela is the founder of Elemental Magick, where she offers tools, teachings, and sacred experiences to support those ready to reclaim their power and reconnect to their magic, all while supporting each person in staying grounded in their Earthly medicine.
Spring Oxymels
Description coming soon!
Hillary Peters
Quantum Herbalist + Owner of Two Poppies Apothecary
Two Poppies Apothecary
I am a vitalist herbalist, holistic nutritionist, bioresonance practitioner, and mother; living in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley of Montana.
I am the creator, maker and gatherer behind Two Poppies Apothecary. A Kentucky-born and Montana-made business that reconnects you to nature; through whole body wellness, handmade skin care, herbal and vibrational remedies, and local plant goods.
I see clients both in person locally, and over zoom, remotely. Looking deep into the entire being of each of my clients, I take in all aspects of your life, truly getting to the bottom of every symptom and health concern. My main goal; for each client to get back to their original essence, paving the way physically, mentally, and emotionally to fully feel their best, quickly.