by Willow Murton, SHI Program Assistant
Elder spoke firmly.
“You need to take better care of me. You have planted so many of us and assumed we would thrive without attention.”
The message was clear.
SHI Director, Ann Armbrecht, invited us each to open a conversation with a plant that we had brought with us that night. She did so with a deeply personal story of her own meeting with the plant realm followed by the question: how may medicinal plants and the values of herbal medicine inform our work within the botanical industry? This enquiry sits at the heart of this year’s SHI Alumni Learning Lab. And how true my rebuke from Elder! I have planted many of them and few have flourished. As a common tree of the hedgerows, I had not given them attention and love. I had, as the tree rightly said, planted them in lines and expected them to grow left alone, seeking abundance without generous care.
In a gathering of so many SHI alumni, across screens and continents, it was incredible – almost implausible – to hear the plant voices come through so strongly. Not all were scornful of neglectful gardeners but all were insights into the plant world around us, keen to be included in our gathering. Rosemary was dominant. She asked to be remembered for her resilience, for the possibility of fixing all that is broken, for the connection she grows in. Osha spoke of intergenerational thinking and community living while Black Cohosh, with its strong root, spoke of slow growth based in knowing one’s own path and purpose.
The Labyrinth
The previous Learning Lab I attended in 2025 also took us on a journey, marked with questions and exercises. Within it, we gathered tools, sparked conversations and made maps to help us visualize change within the herbal industry, a 4.0. This time, we are going deeper. No maps.
The Alumni Learning Lab is based around the form of a labyrinth which we are walking through together, stopping at stations to orient ourselves through exercises and shared conversations. It reminds me of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This is a path of pilgrims, scattered with conversations as well as long stretches of meditative movement and encounters with the earth, with solitude, with memories and dreams. Some of the other pilgrims are familiar – they have joined you at different stretches of the walk. Others come and go, sometimes leaving words that resonate and then disappearing as the thoughts dance in your head and heart. The camino is a simple and yet sacred process, placing footstep after footstep with intention and direction.
The Voices of the Plants
In the first session of the Alumni Learning Lab, the practices grounded us in the earth through dance, the history of herbal medicine, and our own qualities of perception. The form of a labyrinth is at once a meditative, disorientating and affirming structure, moving inwards and outwards. This is the work – to be in our senses, guided and yet also lost from the outside world for a while, held and challenged by the plants along the way.
We are accompanied by other participants whose footsteps fall alongside ours and will walk out of the spiral with us, back into the world. Among us are the voices of the plants, calling us to tend, notice and include them. How indeed can I, as an herbalist, make medicine from Elder if I do not offer the tree my care in return? How can we, as a community of herbally connected people, work, if not in harmony and service to the natural world itself? Next week, we walk further into the labyrinth together towards the green heart at its centre.