Day 1 LIVE: Opening + Welcome & Building Your Materia Medica | Plant Path Immersion – Transcript

00:04Hello everybody. Welcome to the Plant Path Immersion. We're so happy to be with you. I can see you all getting ready in the chat and saying good morning or good afternoon if you're over here. And I did see someone say good evening from Germany. Um I'm Pamela Spence. I'm going to be your host for the next 3 days. Um I as you maybe can tell from the accent, I'm from Scotland

00:29and I am indeed based over here in the UK, but I can see Uh oh, Queen of Hearts Budgets, good afternoon from the UK. Hi, we're on the same time zone here. Um I can see someone from Switzerland. I can see plenty of you from all over the states, which is really exciting. From Phoenix, Arizona, from California, from Canada. Good morning to Quebec. Hello,

00:54Florida. Um and from grand rising from Kentucky. What a nice way to say good morning. Chicago also. Australia, BB23, welcome all the way from Australia. Gosh, are you staying up really late or is it really early for you? I can't We've got someone from Toronto, from Denmark. Hi, from Nigeria. Welcome, Nigeria.

01:18Gosh, it's so great when everybody gets into the room and we all start learning together. It's midnight, BB. Oh, gosh. Bless you. I hope that you have a lot of caffeinated drinks to get you through the day. But of course, every session that we have today is going to be available on replay. So if you do fall asleep, you can always catch up later.

01:38Um hi Erica Ruiz from Colorado. Um hi from Abu Dhabi. One of my best friends has just moved there. So that's been on my radar. And Latvia, Evelyn from England. Goodness me, from Missouri, from all around the world. Thank you so much for joining us um at the Plant Path Immersion, which is brought to you uh by

02:01Herbalism Conferences and the Herbarium. And lots more people coming in. We have a team of people who will be able to help you out in the chat if you're having any issues. I can see that some of you are asking some questions there.

02:16I'm going to let my very capable comrades help you with that. So, Torrance, California, North Carolina, everybody, good morning. Welcome to the plant path immersion. As I said for those of you who were here a couple of minutes ago, I'm Pamela Spence. I'm going to be your host for the next 3 days. I'm based in Scotland in the UK.

02:38I'm a medical herbalist, or if you're in the US, you will be saying clinical herbalist of 20 years plus all my years of studying. I'm an author. I'm also a product developer, so I work with big international brands like Twinings, if you've heard of them, and their amazing tea. I help them to create amazing herbal products. Also, I

03:03work with a lot of startups as well. I'm one of the lead herbalist educators at Herbal Academy, and I'm a long-time contributor to the Herbarium. If any of you are already members of the Herbarium, you might have seen videos of my herbal garden, where I help you to meet some of the plants and get to know them a little bit better. So, and the reason I'm doing that is cuz the herbal garden is out the

03:30window that's there. So, the plant path immersion, what is a plant path? So, plant path, when we are talking about that over the next 3 days, we're going to be talking about each herbalist each herbalist. That's how you know this is really live, right? It's when I mess up.

03:49Each herbalist's lifelong relationship with plants. Now, this is really a reciprocal relationship, which we deepen every time we work with a plant or we observe it in nature through observation and study and practice. It's a really unique and very personal thing uh your relationships with the plants that you

04:14work with. Now, whether you're here um and you may be a newbie to herbs and you're just starting to learn um or you've been a clinical herbalist for years like me, the thing about this is that you never stop learning about plants because they always have something to teach us. And every time I listen to another herbalist talk about plants, I will always learn something new about those plants. So,

04:40um you know, so dig in over the next 3 days. Don't feel if you're new that this is not for you. This is definitely for you and we will all be learning as we go along. So, this is a relationship that's always growing and always evolving and it really is a gift that keeps giving.

04:57And as we get to know the plants um Oh, baby, you're talk You feel you're in the right place. I'm really glad to hear that. That's great. As you learn from the plants, you tend to the plants and the plants benefit from that relationship, too. So, it is a path of mutual respect and learning.

05:17So, our goal over the next 3 days is to give you a really immersive learning experience which will guide you through the process of creating your own materia medica. Okay? And you may never have heard those words before, but I'm going to let you know. And good morning, Leanne's apothecary, Scotland. Uh an American girl made with Scottish parts.

05:39I like that, too. Welcome to Welcome to today. Okay, so materia medica. We are going to guide you, our team of really experienced, really passionate herbal educators in the herbarium. We all absolutely love plants. Um we treasure our relationships with uh with each plant in our herbal practice um and each plant in the materia medica.

06:05So, materia medica, what does it mean? Well, it comes from the Latin, as you might be able to hear from the words. It just and literally means healing materials. So, the materia medica, your materia medica, is the body of knowledge that describes how plants have been used therapeutically through the ages. So, these might be from published works, for example. So, I have a a very lovely

06:32herbal library. I've been curating herbal books for a very long time, almost as long as I've been a herbalist. Um and so, you might have something like this. This absolutely gorgeous book is the United States Dispensatory um from the 1800s. It was gifted to me.

06:50It's very precious. And I would count this, for example, as being part of my materia medica, because it contains lots of information um about plants. And then, that would be true for the books all the way up to some more modern um gatherings of plant information, like this, for example, which is a a book that we created at the Herbal Academy,

07:16um which is also part of my materia medica. So, really anything going from those older um books all the way up to more modern times uh and and the information that's available to us now.

07:30So, the importance of materia medica for herbalists is that it's literally our lit- knowledge. Um and it's based sometimes on, you know, the more modern books might be based on what we would call scientific research, but where uh we actually get a lot of our information from in all of the herbal um uh schools of thought um and traditions

07:57would actually be from empirical knowledge. So, that means, you know, in real life knowledge. So, the people who wrote, for example, the United States Dispensatory, um a plant would have got in there because of hundreds of years of collated knowledge and observation. A plant that could really be relied upon to deliver results, um, for the people who were writing those cuz those were written before there were pharmaceutical

08:24drugs, for example. This was the medicine that was available. So, we're looking and even way further back, um, than that. So, um, the published So, So, we have all of that information and then we take that and we create our own way of, um, uh, of keeping that information, keeping it live and relevant and two-hands. So, for example, my bookshelf of books is

08:51just there, but I also have another one through there. I also have some lovely, um, herbal cards that I like to work with, like these ones. I might write things down, I might draw them, I might have workbooks. It could be in many different ways. So, your materia medica is just the ways in which you bring together all of the information on your healing tools. And those tools for

09:15herbalists would be plants. So, a few examples of those that you may have heard of. So, there's the really famous, uh, um, book which is called De Materia Medica by Dioscorides, which was written around the, uh, the year 50 the current era.

09:35That took its basis from Greek and Islamic medicine. There's the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina. You may have heard his Anglicized name as Avicenna. If you've heard of Avicenna, this is the same person. And he was alive around 1 1025 CE. And that was very much a tome of Islamic medicine. Um, we've also got, uh, the Badianus Manuscript, which is an

10:00Aztec herbal from the 1500s. We've got, um, Culpeper's Complete Herbal, which I still use today, from the 1600s in England. Um, and of course, there are many, many oral materia medica, so traditions passed down orally uh around the world as well.

10:20And another fabulous uh example of a materia medica, one that I personally go to a lot for information, um is of course the plant monograph database in the Herbarium.

10:33So, the Herbarium is a trusted members-only online herbalism website and plant monograph database that was created by Herbal Academy in 2014. And of course, today um you are going to get to see inside the Herbarium, and you have a 3-day free trial to peek behind the curtain and look at all the amazing resources that are in there as part of the Plant Path Immersion. And certainly,

11:00it is a resource that I would go to because I know that the monographs have been written by qualified herbalists, and that it is a trusted resource. So, that's part as well of my uh materia medica.