Last fall I decided to explore what herbalists in the midwest are well-versed in exploring creative ways to teach about plants. In part, because I've often found, as a neurodivergent person, that I really struggle with some of the more typical ways people teach online.

Many herbalism classes I've taken exclusively rely on the format of a slideshow-driven lecture. There certainly isn't anything at all wrong with that as a teaching aid. But if it doesn't feel like I'm being told a story, or I don't otherwise have the opportunity to connect new information to my own lived experience and existing knowledge, I often struggle. In these situations, I often feel like it doesn't matter if I am creative or curious. There's no story for me to visualize or engage with — and I don't feel seen.

That's a huge barrier to growth for me, so I intentionally decided to research herbalists who engage with somatic ways of learning and understanding the world. I was also curious about herbalism in the context of land stewardship and decolonization, and wanted to learn more about how to practice herbalism in a way that eschews what's trendy in favor of what's abundant and more equitable to attain in my own backyard.

One herbalist doing just that is Alex Williams. Williams is a Chicago-based herbalist who runs a community apothecary and who provides herbal education through individual classes, online learning resources, and a 7-month-long, in-person herbalism intensive he describes as an "embodied, experiential, and bioregional approach to herbalism."

Read on to learn more about how he got into herbalism, what bioregional herbalism is, how to learn about plant medicine through sensory experiences — and more.

What were some of your first meaningful experiences or experiments with herbs?

Early on, a lot of the times I was playing with herbs was with fermentation — because I wanted to make alcohol when I was in high school. Because we had nothing to do. I was a suburban kid, and we were just high schoolers who wanted to play around. So in springtime we’d learn to make dandelion wine. We avoided dandelions too close to the road and I learned about the folklore around dandelions and different things. But really, we just wanted to make a bottle of wine and get away from our parents and float down the river and drink.

And then I got interested in making absinthe when I was in college. I was really inspired by three books by Dale Pendell — I highly recommend looking up his Pharmako series. He has a whole trilogy on different psychoactive plants. Really awesome writeups, very poetic and very beautiful.

And he has a recipe for absinthe in there which is why I got interested in exploring it. So that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't have done that because you need to distill it. Wormwood can be dangerous in very high dosages.

But it was cool because it got me interested in thinking about how people have used plants for a really long time to support healing or to get somewhere in-between — and that's really interesting. How did they learn about the properties of these plants? Why did they use these particular plants?

I used to wonder that a lot when I worked on a CSA farm during college. There’d be mushrooms growing out of manure piles, and I was always curious how anyone determined that certain mushrooms are nutritious, some are poisonous, and others are psychoactive.

Like, was it all trial and error? But recently I also began learning about plant signatures, and how the appearance of a plant can communicate key attributes.

I think there's a really awesome elegance to it. And the way that I think people learned about plants early on wasn't trial and error. It was very intentional and direct communication with the plants themselves, which is something that a lot of different authors talk about.

Robin Wall Kimmer definitely touches on it in Braiding Sweetgrass. Steven Buhner talks about it quite a bit in his early books, and it’s very clear to me at this point that this is how people learned. It wasn't trial and error like “oops like this guy is dead now because we sent him to try this mushroom.” Is it through the language of the human tongue? No, it's not. But it's there and it happens and I think the more that you connect with plants, the more of those experiences that you have.

So I’m primarily self-taught and I always feel so self-conscious and unsure about whether or not I’m knowledgeable enough to call myself an herbal practitioner. I read a lot, and I make herbal medicine. But does that mean I can call myself an herbalist?

You totally can. I think it’s easy to get caught up in, “what does it mean to be an herbalist?” Or for example, if people that cook meals and really enjoy cooking meals should call themselves a cook, or a chef.

[You’re an herbalist if] you use herbs in a healing capacity. You're curious about the body — as a being and as an organism and not just as a machine that needs to be fixed. And curious about the plants and how they have an effect on the body. I think those are the main criteria for calling yourself an herbalist.

What inspired you to open your own herbalism school?

So, I hated school. I was a terrible high school student. I feel like every time I got excited about an assignment, it was because we would be learning about Beowulf and literature or something like that. My friend and I made an awesome sock puppet movie about the plot of Beowulf. And for some reason that wasn't good enough: we would get a bad grade, because I was supposed to write an essay. So I liked learning and I liked exploring but I didn't feel like the ways that I learned and explored were acknowledged.

Then I went to Columbia College for music — I could see myself doing that for a living. But when I learned that wasn't my thing in the world, I went back to school for sociology. I began asking, “Okay, why did I hate high school? Why did it suck? Was it me?” Maybe it wasn't me. Maybe it was a systemic thing. Working in academia, being in a space with people to explore different ideas [like that] was my primary path for a while.

Once I started doing herbalism, and saw the hunger that people had for learning about plants and connecting with the nonhuman realm of their environment I jumped on that. It's one thing to teach students in a college setting who may or may not be interested in the subject of sociology and get them excited and engaged. But it's another thing when people are already really excited to learn about plants and make medicine and get messy in the apothecary.

Not every herbalist has the capacity for or interest in running their own apothecary as a successful, standalone business — but you do. How did that happen for you?

In academia, I was slowly seeing how it's not really the thing that you think it's intended [to be], which is exploration of knowledge and all that stuff. My mentors were great. There are amazing teachers and amazing people. But [everyone] seemed really burnt out, [and] tenure was never a thing that I was going to get.

At the same time, I was going out with the Illinois Mycological Association to different forest preserves and just totally clueless and really excited to get out and find some morel mushrooms or chicken of the woods or whatever I could find.

Looking for mushrooms, you’re going to see plants, too, and say, “Look at this pretty flower. What the heck is this?” And part of finding mushrooms is knowing their tree associations. So you’re learning about the ecology of the whole forest — it has this kind of snowball effect.

If you're interested in exploring natural areas within a day trip of Chicago, some lesser-known places to check out are Cook County Forest Preserves (pictured left) and Indiana Dunes State Park (pictured right).

You don't get paid much as a graduate student at all. So at the time I still had to work at a bar and I was in the cocktail industry for a really long time to pay the bills. I was working at a gin bar and a cocktail bar and a lot of the botanicals in gin are medicinal. Juniper is the primary botanical that you find in gin, but you find a lot of other botanicals as well. And when I started IDing these plants out in the forest preserves, I noticed that they were the same plants that were in gin.

I already knew how to make a tincture through working at a bar — because you make bitters for different cocktails or syrups. So I just started trying that at home. Eventually, the apothecary grew, and grew, and I started a “business” to apply for a permit to get cheaper alcohol, essentially. And then I was like, you know what? I should actually just do this.

The more I did it, the more I fell in love.

One of the things that interested me in your herbal school is its focus on bioregional herbalism. How would you describe the concept of bioregionalism to anyone unfamiliar?

I think about it in terms of identity sometimes. Midwest people are really nice, and they're very kind. But a lot of what makes people Midwesterners is also that we have cold winters, and we have warm, humid summers. That has to do with the ecology of the place.

[Bioregionalism] is about identifying with that ecology more so than arbitrary political lines. So instead of “I’m from Illinois” or “I’m from Chicago”, I’m deeply rooted in the Great Lakes basin. This is who I am.

I have friends that live out in Tucson. They’re desert people. That’s who they are instead of being from Tucson. And it's not to say that [being from Tucson] isn’t cool or interesting, but I think we can find a deeper sense of self if we root [our identity] in the physical earth rather than made-up political boundaries that we create.

There's so many ways I can describe what bioregionalism is, but it really is just identifying and seeing your home as the land and not as a name that we applied from the outside in.

Can you practice bioregional herbalism if there are no farms nearby or other places accessible to you as a source for medicinal herbs?

I always encourage people who can and are able to go out to the wild places, to the remnant prairies, to the remnant oak savannahs, to do that. That's not always accessible to everyone.

For a long time I also didn’t feel comfortable going out to a trail where you got people running, biking, and walking their dogs. I didn’t feel comfortable sitting down and just hanging out with a plant, but that's because I was self-conscious at the time about building direct relationships with plants, it was beyond my comfort level but fully within my ability level. This was something I needed to overcome in order to deepen my relationship with plants.

If you have a backyard, if you have a limited amount of space, the best thing to get into is planting native plants around you, even a couple in your backyard. Focusing on that — and destroying your lawn as much as possible (and plant native species where the lawn once was) — is always great.

Or try to notice the wildness and bioregional elements that are growing in-between sidewalk cracks, or in [a place like] Humboldt Park, in Chicago. Humboldt Park is an amazing place to connect with plants.

Another thing I want to add to that is because I live in Chicago, it’s not legal to harvest medicinal plants (or any plants) from Cook County Forest Preserves. I also don’t want to, for ecological reasons. So I am building relationships with plants that are nearby me, and then sourcing a lot of herbs from elsewhere, ideally as close as possible.

I’m glad you mentioned having ecological concerns about foraging. I wish there was more dialogue about herbalism in the context of land stewardship — and how to avoid practicing herbalism, or foraging, in extractive ways. I know, for example, that there are sustainability concerns about the commercial harvest of chaga from northern Minnesota and other parts of the world.

Yeah, I like the example of chaga because that’s one that I had as a product for a while [at First Curve Apothecary] and then I stopped carrying it for that exact reason. Because I don’t want to create demand for it.

[Chaga] is not a mushroom. It’s the sclerotia — a mycelial mass — of Inonotus obliquus, [​​a parasitic fungus]. And because it’s not a mushroom, which is to say a fruiting body, it doesn’t regenerate as quickly. And that means there are sustainability issues in harvesting it.

For sure. And in my experience, chaga is often included in many culinary-oriented teas, tinctures, and even sodas for a very generalized, non-specific purpose: as a sort of “all purpose” immunomodulator to support overall wellness. Aren’t there a lot of common plants that could be used in that exact same manner, without the risk of biodiversity loss?

Totally. There's a million great immunomodulators. Or [you can buy mushrooms] from Fourstar Mushrooms. They’re an amazing company here in Chicago. They grow mostly culinary mushrooms, but they do dabble in growing Lion's Mane, which is a culinary mushroom, and Reishi, which isn't culinary — It's more of a medicinal mushroom. Reishi is amazing. You can just grow that. I would more likely use Reishi than go to chaga. Focus on what's close and not at risk.

The other thing I wanted to mention is foraging and stewardship are two sides of one coin. They're not separate. They can't be separate. Everyone talks about the merit and the brilliance of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book. It is amazing and I always refer people to it. There's tons of other resources but she just directly gets to this idea — especially with harvesting sweetgrass — about how that is an act of stewardship. And if those two aren’t together, it’s kind of incomplete.

So personally I feel like we are in a very extractive time and we need to do the opposite, as a holding pattern, [and avoid] doing more damage. At the same time, there are indigenous communities who should have access to the lands that they've traditionally foraged because they have the knowledge to be able to steward those at the same time, which a lot of the foraging communities don't really have.

It’s hard. I want people to experiment and be curious and eat wild foods. But that needs to go with stewardship. So, if you're able to do both at the same time, I think that's really great. But if you're only just extracting, then I think it's a good time to reevaluate and reassess your relationship with what you're consuming.

Moving on to some other aspects of your teaching style, I was excited to learn that you teach others about herbs through blind tea tastings. What can someone learn about a plant from a cup of tea?

I love this question. I do the tea tasting with my bioregional herbalism intensive students and I'd like to open it up more and do more “tea tasting nights” or something like that. When I do blind tea tastings, I go through a process where we’re letting go of all the things that we think we know about. It’s a practice of being comfortable with the unknown — and open to emergent things that present themselves when we’re comfortable with that unknown.

The first, most basic thing we learn [about plants are] energetics, which I learned from my teacher Jim McDonald: who’s an herbalist out in Michigan who makes energetics very accessible and very approachable. In his system of energetics, he places herbal actions (how the plant has an effect upon the body) into a few different categories:

• Foundational actions are things that can be viscerally experienced in the body: an example of that is bitterness.
• Primary actions have an effect or an affinity for a certain area of the body: carminative is an example. That’s an herb that is able to ease gas and bloating in the digestive system.
• And there's secondary actions, which are basically outcomes. Anti-inflammatory is a good example of a secondary action: those really tell us nothing about how the herb is working, they just give us an outcome.

So anyway, going back to the tea tastings, what we really focus on are the foundational actions. Main foundational actions are aromatic, bitter, astringent, demulcent, stimulant, and relaxant, according to Jim McDonald’s model.

Just by tasting tea, you can sense, “is this bitter, is this astringent, is this aromatic?” Knowing those things, and understanding how they affect the body, can give you a sense of how [a plant is] going to be medicinal. If you taste a plant that’s bitter, it’s going to have some effect on your digestive system, encouraging/stimulating digestive secretions, like bile, digestive enzymes, stuff like that. I think that's amazing. You can learn directly from your body without any book knowledge whatsoever.

One of the things that overwhelmed me early on about herbalism was deciding that I wanted to study something like, plants that help heal skin irritation and inflammation and discovering there are like, dozens of options. Which is way too many, or at least way too many for me to feel confident I know how to discern between just yet.

Do you think narrowing your focus to herbs growing in your own bioregion is a strategy that really helps with that beginner-level overwhelm?

Narrowing it down definitely helps. I tell all my herb students that when I started learning herbs, I was like ”I'm going to tincture everything I find” — which was kind of good, because that started the apothecary. But at the beginning I learned a lot of stuff very shallowly. Eventually, I had to switch to focusing on a few plants by region — and learning them in-depth, rather than trying to learn everything at once.

[It also helps] to go to that plant and sit with it and learn from it and watch its growth pattern.

You mentioned some great reads, like Braiding Sweetgrass earlier. What else do you recommend others read (or watch, or listen to), if they’re interested in broadening their awareness of topics like ecology, bioregionalism, and environmentalism?

I have a growing knowledge-base on my website called the Greenspell Virtual Garden with a ton of resources related to these subjects including a library of books I often recommend to my students. The Virtual Garden is free to access, but anyone is welcome to support the project financially as a "Supporting Member" which has some extra perks that go with it.

Learn More

• Greenspell Bioregional Herbalism Intensive
• First Curve Apothecary

All photos courtesy Alex Williams