Class Length

4 hours 38 minutes

Class Description

This is a four-hour intensive (with short breaks, as the group needs) on Friday morning before the main festivities begin. This is one of the few one overviews of phytochemistry you will find, and it will be led in a way that is engaging and memorable, to help us sustain our endurance and interest in this very exciting, and foundational, but formerly difficult to access topic: Phytochemistry for Herbalists. In our phytochemistry intensive we will most likely work progressively from the safest, gentlest, and most common types of medicinal constituents of plants to the notable, harrowing, and handle-with-care alkaloids of the low-dose botanicals. The takeaways will include the how and why of medicinal properties of plants, for example the polyphenols and polysaccharides- the benevolent ones, to aromatics and terpenes, which can be entirely subtle and gentle, or profound, bossy, or even psychoactive. We will spend ample time on constituents that are a little bit frisky; triterpenoids, saponins, alkamides, and other prickly constituents, and many ways in which herbal constituents get under our skin and tell our body to pay attention! This is where we get into botanical immune stimulants, movers, and influencers, in leaf form, or bud, seed, root, or spike. Heather will also highly emphasize the how and why of the heroic medicines, such as medicinal plants characterized by alkaloids. These are the potentially poisonous stand-outs in the competition to not be eaten. But wait. Some are life saving, or grant temporary euphoria, or any number of medicinal tricks. We will talk about some of these for real use and others for the thrill of it.

About the Teacher

Heather Irvine has been working on bringing together herbalism and chemistry for the last ten or more years. Initially, this was an effort to help herbalists 'up their game' so to speak in communicating with health professionals, and also to help health professionals and herbalist's clients recognize that herbs do work on a physical level in ways that we do understand. It was also a personal pursuit. Today more herb learners, researchers, and practitioners than ever recognize that nearly every aspect of botanical medicine can be explained by constituents in plants that communicate with our bodies, and make our physiology go 'zing!'.Heather learned at the Northeast School of Botanical Medicine, Cornell University in the College of Life Sciences, and the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, and while working in a busy naturopathic clinic, and in conversations with customers and clients. She has nearly as many hours as any making herbal preparations, having engaged in a busy and profitable one-lady herbal product business for ten years. She is semi-retired from squashing and schlepping plants and now teaches every day, year round, and in quiet sprints, when the work is done, she is drafting a one of a kind book. Heather has been developing audio lessons about medicinal plants "Sound Wise About Medicinal Plants" which can also be found here: www.learnmedicinalplants.com