Essentials Of Herbalism
Take your health into your own hands with the power of herbal wisdom.
Learn time-tested herbal practices to treat everyday ailments, prevent illness naturally, and turn your kitchen into a healing apothecary near Asheville, NC.
Learn directly from Author CoreyPine Shane and the BRSHM teaching team
Just imagine…
You are sitting in the shade of tulip poplars, inhaling the sweet scent of mountain mint as it brushes your arm.
In the kitchen classroom, elderberry steam curls from a simmering syrup you’ve made with your own hands. Your new herb nerd friends are laughing nearby.
You tuck a small jar into your basket alongside a vinegar extract and a calendula salve that smells like bees.
As you walk along a mossy trail behind the school, your field guide tucked in your bag, you spot plantain by your boot and yarrow peeking from the grass. You stop to taste, smell, feel.
You to recognize them – not as words in a book, but as beings you know.
The forest no longer feels like “nature” out there but rather, your home. A place where your new teachers – the plants – live.
You are so excited and ready to continue your journey in herbalism and know that you have the power to heal with the abundance all around you.
This class is the next step on your herbal journey if you want to…
Feel like you’re not powerless in caring for your health – and are ready to take your healing into your own hands
Stop waiting until you’re sick to cure an illness – and practice preventive medicine
Swap the adrenal draining coffee for healing herbal teas
Use food as medicine
To see the green world around you as friend, food, and healer – and feel at home in it.
Learn real tools to treat everyday health issues
Anything like your dreams?
Then this program is for you.
Here you will get the knowledge, confidence, and connection to make herbal medicine part of your everyday life.
Discover Everyday Herbal Wisdom
This in-person practical class offers a strong introduction to the culturally rich world of traditional, folk, and kitchen herbal medicine combined with modern insights, directly engaging you with the medicine.
You’ll learn how to care for your health naturally – starting in your own kitchen with plants you can find in your backyard.
You will join us each weekend for engaging lectures, hands-on medicine making and food preparation, as well as plant walks in herb gardens and the richly diverse local forests right outside of Asheville.
In our final class you will be a part of our “Medicine Show,” where each student presents a handmade product using class-taught techniques. You’ll experience everyone’s unique herbal passion and take home a creation from each classmate! The perfect start to your herbal apothecary.
Upon graduation, you’ll know how to identify and harvest wild plants, cook with them, make a wide variety of herbal preparations, and address many common ailments.
This course is perfect for supporting your family’s well-being and lays essential groundwork for further study in the herbal field.
Testimonials
You will learn how to:
Take care of yourself and your family for common health concerns
Make tonic remedies
Prevent illness and promote health
Use food and kitchen remedies as everyday medicine
Work with common issues such as stomachaches, colds, pain, insomnia, and more
Choose the best herb for any situation
Use a field guide to identify wild plants
Sustainable practice and ethical plant harvesting
Pick the best tools for wildcrafting, and build muscle memory with using them
Make herbal preparations including teas, tinctures, oils, salves, alcohol-free extracts, elixirs, poultices, vinegars, syrups, and more
(By the end of class, you’ll have your own small apothecary!)Determine herb actions through flavor
Use herbs for first aid
About aromatherapy and the use of essential oils
This class is rooted in place-based learning and folk herbalism with a clinical flare.
Held in one of the most bio-diverse temperate rainforests, the land offers a rich diversity of natural plants for wildcrafting. You will also get to learn about our cultivated friends in our medicinal herb garden.
In this class we teach Western herbalism through a clinical lens with a practical, hands-on approach that offers you an experience that can’t be had online or in other programs.
We balance science and soul and tradition with real-world clinical experience.
We teach that the herbal medicine path is not just about information, but transformation. Students learn to reconnect with the earth and their own intuition, and tried-and-true healing methods that work.
Here you will learn to heartfully connect with nature, the collective, and yourself through an embodied awareness of body and ecology.
You not only learn to identify, harvest, and use the abundance of plants that grow all around us but also feel empowered to care for yourself and your communities using Earth’s natural medicine.
A lot changed in my life after attending! I feel so much more connected to my surroundings, including my own backyard, nearby parks, even when on vacation in Greece - recognizing plants wherever you go is very comforting and fun! And I've definitely included herbs into my everyday life.
I would absolutely recommend the program to others. The Essentials of Herbal Medicine class was such a life-changing experience.
Nicole Pyne, EHP class of 2025
What we need more than ever in these times is holistic herbalism.
In a world increasingly mediated by screens, this class invites you to slow down, get your hands dirty, and connect directly with the land.
You’ll smell, taste, and touch the herbs. You’ll feel the pulse of the forest. You’ll learn in real time with real plants.
This kind of deep, embodied learning just doesn’t happen online. At Blue Ridge, we believe that herbal wisdom is best transmitted in person – through shared stories, the feeling of seasonal shifts, and the power of presence.
This is more than a class – it is an invitation to your reawakening.
And right now, more than ever, we need community-rooted wellness and Earth-based education.
Investing in this program is investing in your resilience, your connection, and your capacity to care – for yourself, your loved ones, and the world.
Dates + Details
Total Hours: 115
We meet rain or shine. Lectures and medicine making are mostly outdoors and under covered spaces. Plant walks take place in the field!
We meet every weekend for 8 months (the third weekend of each month)
Saturday: 10 AM – 5 PM
Sunday: 10 AM – 5 PM
2026 Weekend Dates
April 18 & 19
May 16 & 17
June 20 & 21
July 18 & 19
August 15 & 16
September 19 & 20
October 17 & 18
November 14 & 15 (second weekend!)
Make-up weekend: November 21 & 22 (only if needed)
Note: The make-up weekend is the weekend before Thanksgiving.
**Please block out the weekend of November 21 & 22 in case of weather cancellations.
Investment
Application Deadline: April 1, 2026 (Apply early! Spots fill quickly)
$100 application fee (Nonrefundable and not applied to tuition)
$550 deposit (Nonrefundable and goes toward tuition)
$2,499 due February 15, 2026
Early Bird Discount: $2,299 if paid by January 1, 2026
Equity Seats // $2,069 (10% off) off tuition to all BIPOC students. Email JJ.BRSHM@gmail.com to inquire.
Work-Trade Options: Limited opportunities available. Reach out for details.
CLASS SIZE LIMITED TO 20 STUDENTS
Class size is intentionally small to facilitate deep connection and individualized learning.
Refund Policy
If you withdraw:
2+ weeks before class starts → Full refund minus deposit
Within 2 weeks of start date → 50% refund
After first weekend → No refund
The forest is calling you.
The medicine has always been within reach.
Now is the time to remember.
If you’re ready to reclaim your place in the natural world and feel the deep joy of tending to your own well-being with herbal medicine,
Join us.