The Community Medicine Cabinet

Friendly reminder: Our next Herb Walk at Berkeley Aquatic Park. Join Madalyn of Madalyn Berg | The Community Medicine Cabinet and Violet of witchcraftapothecary a week from today.

August 16th at 11 am.
As usual, we’ll have tea and trail snacks waiting for you.

About the Walks: Get to know medicinal plants and botany in an ecological context. We see bringing people into the parks as growing into our relationship with and belonging to land- through devotional practices of observation, listening, and tending with humility and respect for original peoples.

About Us: Violet (she/they)and Madalyn (they/she/elle/ella) are Blue Otter School alumnae, plant lovers, and friends. We’re both practicing clinical herbalists who share a commitment to guiding herbal practice towards an ethical, ancestrally enriching herbal medicine tradition for the benefit of our ecological and human communities.

More info (including access info) on the registration page in our bios. As usual, the walks are NOTAFOLF (no one turned away for lack of funds), but please let us know you’re coming ahead of time.

Highly recommend swinging by the UC Berkeley botanical gardens with your herb friends!

Summer Siesta

We’ll be closed for the next few months to new clients. We hope to open back up our books in the fall.

In the meantime, we are excited to focus on returning clients, rest, and continuing education. We have an herb walk with happening in July, and I keep feeling like offering spontaneous intro level herbalism in my backyard so we’ll see if that happens. Blame it on the mimosa and catnip.

If you’d like to get on the list to be notified when our books open back up, you can find the link on our website. It is already live, but we’ll be adding some practitioners locally and online that you could work with if you don’t want to wait.

Casual reminder that working with plants as medicine can look a lot of different ways… We had goats born to a mom who didn’t want to take care of them a few weeks ago. And when they were a day old, one of them started having trouble oxygenating. His tongue was bright red, which is a sign of hypoxia, and when I used his stethoscope to listen to his lungs, he was wheezing, although to be honest, he was wheezing so loudly that you could hear it clapping with your ears. I referenced Juliet Baracali Levi’s farm and stable book and adopted her suggestion for adult respiratory infections and goats to bed them with rosemary. I put four drops of rosemary and four drops of eucalyptus essential oil on a cotton ball and put both goats in the box and within 30 minutes the baby goat was no longer wheezing. We repeated it a couple times and by the next day, he was oxygenating a lot better and by the following day, he was fine. He’s a little smaller than the other goat now but he’s got lots of energy and has a good appetite and three weeks later I feel like this was a successful herbal intervention. Thought it was too cute enough not to share.

It’s not too late to sign up for our Herb Walk at Rock City Wind Caves on Mt Diablo. Join Madalyn of and Violet of a week from today.

February 8 at 11am.
As usual, we’ll have tea and trail snacks waiting for you.

Feb 19 at 6pm we have our first herb dive. Let’s go a little deeper and learn more about a few of the plants we saw. Herb walk attendance not required!

About the Walks: Get to know medicinal plants and botany in an ecological context. We see bringing people into the parks as growing into our relationship with and belonging to land- through devotional practices of observation, listening, and tending with humility and respect for original peoples. And yes, we’ll have yummy snacks.

About Us: Violet (she/they)and Madalyn (she/they/ella/elle) are alumnae, plant lovers, and friends. We’re both practicing clinical herbalists who share a commitment to guiding herbal practice towards an ethical, ancestrally enriching herbal medicine tradition for the benefit of our ecological and human communities.

More info (including access info) on the registration page in our bios. As usual, the walks are notaflof ( no one turned away for lack of funds). If you want to bring a cash donation or show up at no cost, just let either of us know.

This year I spent summer solstice in the Atlanta botanical gardens with friends old and new. I felt lucky to be there with such beautiful humans and plants. And for us to be there with the explicit purpose of coming together to talk about health equity.

One of the more maddening parts of this job is witnessing our medical system fail people repeatedly and predictably. But one of the most enlivening is watching the ways herbs can offer profound support, and enthusiastically show up.

It’s an honor to do this work here and with .bus. It’s an honor to hear your stories and make medicine. My hope for this return of the light is for exactly that- hope. May we hold onto it in trying times. Let’s keep going together.

Happy Solstice 🌚 🌞 🎭

Ok- well almost a wrap! One walk to go on the 28th!!

Thank you to everyone who showed up. We look worried to continuing to walk together. Thank you for your curiosity, enthusiasm, and all the good questions, observations and shares. This has been such a fun offering and we’re excited to continue to greet plants in place with respect.

Next year we hope to return to many of the same spots at different times of year to see the plants in other part of their life cycles. After introducing everyone to pedicularis during its dormant season, im especially looking forward to the reintroduction we’ll be making in February.

I’m especially grateful to Violet for being a steadfast partner in this walk series and always making it more fun, more educational, and bringing structure that kept us improving our work all year.

If you’ve been wanting to join us, please sign up for our last walk of the year! We’d love to have you.