Wild Cherries – Intro to Herbal Medicine Homework

For: April • May • June • July

Check back on this page for monthly homework assignments for our 2026 Intro to Herbal Medicine class.

Turning in Your Homework

Homework can be turned in in-person, emailed to homework@wildcherries.org (to share privately with the teachers), or uploaded to the shared google drive (to make it available to the whole class).

For July

Sexual Health and Reclaiming Autonomy from Patriarchal Medicine

Reproductive Justice

Loretta Ross Defines “Reproductive Justice” (video – 5 minutes)

The Anti-Black History Of Contraception (reading – 7 pages) by Paula Akpan

Midwifery

Bone Black (video – 21 minutes) by the Queen Collective

Witches, Midwives and Nurses (Text or Pamphlet) by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (68 very short pages, plus a 25 page introduction you can read if you want)
Or listen to this (77 minutes) or this (92 minutes) audio recording”

Bonus Content – Repro justice

Autonomy Revoked: The Forced Sterilization of Women of Color in 20th Century America (reading – 8 pages) by Paola Alonso

Bonus Content – Midwifery

Black Maternal Mortality: ‘It is Racism, not Race’ (reading – 2 pages) by Tina Suliman

The culture war between doctors and midwives, explained by Ranjani Chakraborty
(6 minute video)

The Sacred History of Midwifery (multimedia – about 5 pages plus 4 minute video) by Shafia M. Monroe and the Black Midwifery Collective

Reflection Questions and Ritual

  • Define patriarchy for yourself.
  • How does patriarchy show up in your experiences of western medicine?
  • How does patriarchy show up in your relationships with plants?
  • Invite magic and anti-patriarchy into a healing ritual for yourself and maybe others this month.  What do you do?  How does it feel?

Garden Tending

  • Visit the class garden.  Weed, harvest, make medicine, observe!
    • Weeding: pull out obvious weeds carefully, shaking soil back into the garden.  Scratch the ground in between plants with a hoe or other tool to prevent smaller weeds from sprouting 
    • Harvesting:
      • Pluck flowers as they open: Chamomile, Calendula, Yarrow, Spilanthes
      • Continuous top harvest when in flower: Holy Basil, Motherwort, Skullcap
      • Harvest all leaves before just before flowering: Lemon Balm, Catnip
      • Continuous trimming of leaves: Gotu Kola 
    • Making Medicine:
      • Garble and chop up plant material.  Add to labelled jar, topping off with menstruum just covering the plants you’ve added.  Remember, when making tinctures with alcohol, we want the plant material to be packed in and with vinegars, hunnies and oils we want the liquid to liberally cover the plant material.  

Materia Medica

  • Try a tea, tincture, or snack on a plant that we’ve talked about in class – using the grounding and listening techniques we’ve been practicing. Spend an hour with it (or at least 15 minutes), for a week or two, and write down any notes about your observations.

Plants ID & Botany

Find six new plants you don’t know! Key them out!

For June

Sleep and Anti-Racist Practices/Because Rest is Resistance

Rest is Resistance with Tricia Hersey, Become a Good Ancestor, episode 10 (video – 1 hour)

Cotton Root Bark as Herbal Resistance by Karen L. Culpepper (reading – 6 pages)

Plant Re-Memberance from The Land in Our Bones by Layla K. Feghali (reading – 18 pages)

Body Practices

From My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menkem, pages 63-65 and 77 and 78

Readings for White People in the Class (Optional for People of Color)

Reflective Writing Prompts to Help Those With Gentle, Quiet & Highly Sensitive Personalities Explore Biases, by Leesa Renee Hall (12 pages)

(All white students should engage with these writing prompts)

Bonus Content

The Plants of Black Freedom by Leah Penniman (video – 1 hour)

Blue Pill (on MDMA-based therapy for black folks for healing racial trauma and PTSD), The Nod, 2/4/2019 (podcast – 39 minutes)

Reflection Questions

  • How do earth based practices and plant connections and medicines hold you in difficult times?
  • How do we embrace ways to heal and grieve within our communities rooted in our ancestral traditions or plant relationships?
  • How has your relationship with plants embodied your anti-capitalist and anti-racist values?
  • What feelings do you notice in thinking about these questions? (Or what feelings came up from the readings/recordings?)

Materia medica

  • Spend more time with skullcap, lemon balm, chamomile, lavender, or another nervine plant. (In Pittsburgh, you can get herbs at Cutting Root’s stall at the Bloomfield Market, or at the East End Food Coop.) Do another plant sit, starting with a body scan (here’s one on youtube), then quietly and slowly feeling the effects of the tea or tincture in your body. How does it feel similarly, how does it feel different? How do you feel different if you take it more casually?
  • Formulate one or more teas or tinctures to support your mental health.
    • Extra credit: actually make these formulas and take them for a spin!
  • Put a loved one in a foot soak.  How does this act of community care feel?

Plant things

  • Tend the garden twice this month (water, weed, pick up trash, hang out at the garden and observe/just be there)
  • Key out 5 plants in Newcombs

For May

Capitalism, Mental/Emotional Health

Reflection – pick two or more of these questions to think/write about

  • How has capitalism shaped how you think about your own health?
  • How do your ideas about health perpetuate health stigmas?
  • How do we build anticapitalist care networks?
  • How do the stigmas around mental illness affect your relationship to your own emotional health?

Materia Medica

  • Seek out plantain or violet — finding it in the world, observing, keeping it company, eating it, using the medicine, meditating with it, daydreaming about it. Write about your experience.
    • If you pick the flowers or leaves, notice how it feels to do so. Notice the impact you have on the spot the plant is growing. Also be mindful that you’re not eating plants from a location that’s likely to be polluted with lead or chemicals!
  • Bonus: Make a tea from fresh violet flowers! Add a little lemon, and watch the color change! Cool! Take a video of it and post it to the discord!

Plants and Botany

  • Key out five plants. (Turn in a sample or drawing of the plant, plus the steps you took in Newcombs and your id.)

Change Work

  • What does care look like in your life, and the lives of people you care about? How can we give and receive the best care possible? What are the barriers? What are the resources we have for our care or to share with other people?
  • What role do you feel more comfortable in: a caregiving role or a care-receiving role?  Reflect on that. How could you feel more comfortable in both roles?

Other things we love

For April

Wildcrafting

Cultural Appropriation

Reflections

Write ½-1 page about a family healing tradition you grew up with.

What ways do you strive to or want to practice a culture of gratitude?

What are ways you want to have relationships with wild plants that don’t involve gathering them?

What are the impacts on us when our cultural practices are appropriated? What healing do we need around that?

What are the impacts on us when our cultural practices are lost, and what healing do we need around that?

Materia Medica

We spent a lot of time with wild cherry medicine this past month. Pick a different herb, and investigate it with the same curiosity: try the tea, tincture or another preparation.  Experience it slowly. What tastes and energetics do you notice?  How does it make your body feel?  Where do you feel it in your body?  What do you like about it and what do you dislike? How does it shift your thoughts and emotions? Try it a few times and see how it shifts in different moments.

Plants and Botany

Go look at trees. Are there any your recognize from our tree walks? Choose two trees in particular and spend 15 minutes with each tree.  Observe. Write down all the observations you make of the tree so that someone else could go find that tree based on your description.

Pick a couple of plants, using the botany handout to try to identify whether they are:

  • Opposite, alternate or whorled, or are there just basal leaves
  • Simple or compound leaves
  • Leaves entire, toothed, lobed
  • If there are flowers:
    • are they regular or irregular
    • how many “parts” (eg. petals or sepals) do they have?
    • can you spot the petals, sepals, stamen and pistil?
    • is the flower single or in a head? If a head, do you think it’s a spike, a raceme, a panacle, a corymb, an umbel, a cyme?

Bonus resources:

When We Talk About Cultural Appropriation, We’re Missing The Point by Ijeoma Oluo
https://medium.com/the-establishment/when-we-talk-about-cultural-appropriation-were-missing-the-point-abe853ff3376

Past Homework Assignments from Bygone Years

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