Wild Cherries – Intro to Herbal Medicine Homework

For: October • September • August • July • June • May • April

Check back on this page for monthly homework assignments for our 2025 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 October

Racial Justice

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)

Writing Prompts to use if you’ve been accused of white fragility, spiritual bypass or white privilege, by Leesa Renee Hall (12 pages)

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 have earth based practices and plant connections and medicines held you this year?
  • 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 values and anti racist etc values?
  • What feelings do you notice in thinking about these questions? (Or what feelings came up from the readings/recordings?)

End-of-Year Presentation

Work on your project/presentation! If you haven’t picked or pinned down your project, try to come to something this week. Start doing research, experimenting, writing, or whatever! Put in a couple of hours before the next class, so you end up with lots of time to play the plants and your project! 😍️🪴️😻️

For September

Ableism & Disability Justice

And if you haven’t heard about the spoon theory:

BONUS

EXTRA BONUS!

Ableism Reflection Questions

  • In Sick Woman Theory, Hedva says this:

What is so destructive about this conception of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care and support, in this configuration, are only required some-times. When sickness is temporary, care and support are not normal.

Here’s an exercise: Go to the mirror, look yourself in the face, and say out loud, “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily”

Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time. What would happen if we decided to say the opposite?

→ Do this exercise. How does it feel? Take a moment to sit with the reaction in your body, put words to it, write it down. Then return to the mirror and speak the opposite, and record your observation.

  • What are some things people learned about accessibility during the early years of the COVID pandemic? How can those practices and ways of thinking be expanded?
  • How can herbal medicine make health care more accessible?

Garden Activity

  • Sit with the garden, witness and be witnessed by the plants.  How does this feel?  Water and weed!  Harvest calendula and make the tincture.  (The tincture is in the shed by the sitting area. The key for the shed is stored in the lockbox on the refrigerated trailer, and the code to get into that lockbox is posted on our Discord. It’s the smallest key in the lockbox. The tincture is on the first shelf on the left.)

Plants ID & Botany

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

End-of-Year Presentation

If you haven’t picked one yet, you just gotta choose your end-of-year presentation by the next class! Please send us your ideas for feedback!

For August

Gender-Expansive Health Care

Herbal Hormone Supplements Can Change the Meaning of Trans Embodiment by Clarence Harlan Orsi (11 pages)

How the Nazi’s destroyed the most advanced transgender and queer health clinic of it’s day: The Godfather of Gays from Queer Story Podcast, Episode 2 (audio – 31 minutes)
(Or deep dive on this history with the Making Gay History podcast‘s 12-part series)

Queering Nature tour of the Museum für Naturkunde by Kes Otter Leife (10 stations, approx. 53 minutes) – At least listen to Part 2

Bonus Content

Finding our Way Podcast, S2 E8: Breaking Binaries and Intersex Justice with Sean Saifa Wall (audio – 45 minutes)

Whipping Girl Chapter 7 – Pathological Science – Debunking Sexological and Sociological Models of Transgenderism by Julia Serano (30 pages) *We note this article comes across as a little dated, but the history is important

Before We Were Trans – Introduction: ‘I had a gown on in a lark’: what is trans history? by Kit Heyam (11 pages)

Reflection Questions

  • What stories or ideas do you have about plants and sexuality and gender? Where do these stories come from? How do these ideas affect your understanding of your own gender?
  • What feelings do you have about sexuality and gender in our relationship with plants?
  • Everyone engages in some kind of “gender-affirming care” or another. What are some practices of gender-affirming care you engage in? What role can (or do) plants and herbal medicine play in this care?
  • What parts of the homework landed with a particular impact? What questions were raised?

Medicine-Making

Do a plant sip with your flower essence from class. (Maybe recruit some friends or family to do it with you!)

Sit with a plant that’s catching your eye, try to connect with their energy. If it feels right, make a flower essence.

End-of-Year Project

Come up with a couple possible ideas for your end-of-year project. Daydream about them in the morning when you wake up, before you drift off to sleep, with a cup of tea, in the woods. Do a little exploring to see what digging into some of these ideas might be like — a little research, a little journaling, a little planning. If you have topics or project ideas you feel pretty keen on, send us a little description of what you’re imagining.

Tending the Garden

Keep tending the garden and making medicines! Send report-backs and pix when you visit so everyone can see how our babies are!

Plant ID

Key out 5 new plants in Newcombs. (If you can, take a field trip to a different area — eg. a mountain, a bog, a meadow or a coastal area.)

For July

Patriarchal Medicine

The Racist and Sexist History of Keeping Birth Control Side Effects Secret by Bethy Squires (8 pages)
Alternately, a past student made an audio recording of this piece for us – 12 minutes

The following two writings on the history of the American Medical Association and how it strategically destroyed women’s roles in healthcare and healing. The first writing is very Eurocentric and doesn’t include a comprehensive history around practitioners and healers of color in the USA. We’ve included the article about race and the AMA to add some parts of that history, but haven’t found a comprehensive resource covering both. The brief history that the Witches, Midwives, Nurses covers of the destruction of lay healers and witches in Europe, can also be traced into any culture around the globe that was colonized by Europeans — one of the first tactics in colonization is to destroy healers and their knowledge.

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”

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

Where did all the granny midwives go? (4 minute video)

Reflection Questions and Ritual

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?

BONUS CONTENT

The American Medical Association and Race by Robert B. Baker, PhD (10 pages)Mary Coley’s 1953 film All My Babies- A Midwifes Own Story (54 minute video)

Tend to the Garden

weed, water, spend time with the plants, harvest as needed and make communal medicines. We’ll go over more notes about making medicine as the plants get bigger, so look out for that tutorial

Digestion

Continue to think about an herb or formula for yourself. Maybe make it and try it out!

Energetics

Make a body map- at least twice this month make a body map- where is your body experiencing heat/cold/damp/dry/constriction/looseygoosey?  Do you see patterns?  Do you see changes?  Can you affect changes?

Plant ID

Key out 5 new plants in Newcombs

For June

Plant Connections and Community Care

  • Connect with oats and motherwort medicine (or another nervine that we mentioned in class that you feel a connection with) this month.  Make a tea or take the tincture 1-2 times a day.  How does it feel?  Are there short term or long term changes?
  • Put a loved one in a foot soak.  How does this act of community care feel?
  • Tend the garden 1-2 times this month (water, weed, pick up trash, hang out at the garden and observe/just be there)
  • Key out 5 plants

Video/Audio – Fatphobia

  • Maintenance Phase, The Body Mass Index (audio – 69 min) – Apple Podcasts, Spotify
  • The Roxanne Gay Agenda, Best of Hear to Slay: The Fat Tax, w/ Sabrina Strings and Sonya Renee Taylor (audio – 78 min) – TuneIn
    • ** NOTE— You may have to find the episode by name at this link – scroll down and click SEE MORE **
  • Or if you need a shorter listen, Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body is Not an Apology ~ Radical Alchemy (video – 22 min)

We also like….

  • This American Life, Episode 589: Tell Me I’m Fat (audio – 67 min)
    • (We feel the interviews in this episode are really meaningful, but we apologize for subjecting you to Ira Glass’ commentary, which we find unbearable.)

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

Make wild cherry tea, tincture or syrup this month.  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?  Try drinking it 4-8 times.

Bonus: spend time with wild cherry trees in the woods.

Plants and Botany

Go look at trees, choose two trees 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. 

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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