Racemes of Delight: Wild Cherries Herbal Studies Year 2

Connect with the juiciness of the plant world!

* We are now accepting applications for our new
Racemes of Delight Year 2 Herbal Studies Program! *
Exclusively for graduates of the Wild Cherries Herbal Studies Program

Our 2025 Wild Cherries: Racemes of Delight is a three-season, 80-hour herbal intensive exploring health, resilience and the plant world. The program will offer you a chance to follow-up on the plant connections we’ve built together in previous years, expanding on our understanding of energetics, formulation, body systems, botany and field work. As always, our approach is based on a foundation of social justice and decolonization.

Our Y2: Racemes of Delight curriculum focuses on intermediate herbal skills involving case studies and plant sips, and dives more deeply into physiology and anatomy and new medicine making techniques while caring for yourself and loved ones.

Tending the student herb garden, 2019 Wild Cherries

2025 Schedule

Racemes of Delight is a hybrid program — every month, we’ll spend one Sunday together in person (either indoor or outdoors depending on the weather) from 11am-4pm) and one Monday evening together on zoom (from 6-9pm).

The dates for the 2025 program are:

March: 3/24 (zoom) & 3/30 (in person)
April: 4/21 (zoom) & 4/27 (in person)
May: 5/12 (zoom) & 5/18 (in person)
June: 6/23 (zoom) & 6/29 (in person)
July: Sleepover Weekend! 7/19-20 (in person)
August: 8/18 (zoom) & 8/24 (in person)
September: 9/15 (zoom) & 9/21 (in person)
October: 10/6 (zoom) & 10/12 (in person)
November: 11/2 (Y1 presentations and Y2 medicine show – in person)

2024 Wild Cherries gleeful with an astragalus root from the student garden!
2024 Wild Cherries gleeful with an astragalus root from the student garden!

Teachers

The Wild Cherries Herbal Studies Program is led by Michelle Soto, Jocelyn Kirkwood, and Vilde Chaya Fenster-Ehrlich. We love creating sweet, honest, plant-oriented spaces to help us all grow our connections to the botanical world, and have been teaching and caring for our community with herbs since the aughts. Read more about us.

Your stylish local herb teachers, Vilde, Jocelyn and Michelle, in their natural habitat.

Cost

Tuition is $1000. Students should plan for some additional costs, including gas, books, and some medicine-making materials.

We offer some scholarship positions for people of color, indigenous people, and trans/non-binary folks. In our work as white herbalists, we want to address the patterns of colonization and white supremacy in our herbal practices, and to help bolster the many forms of resistance to the systems and structures of oppression we live under. This includes trying to make this course more accessible to people of color and trans folks.

We also offer a few work-trade positions, to allow folks to offset part of the cost of tuition. Payment plans are also available.

Wild Cherries are some of the first creatures to emerge in the woods, before even the trees have opened their buds.
Wild Cherries are some of the first creatures to emerge in the woods, before even the trees have opened their buds.

COVID Safety

As we make it through the pandemic, we take our class safety seriously and continue to revise our safety measures as appropriate. Through 2024, we’ve held most classes outdoors, with an option to connect via Zoom where possible. All participants rapid test before class; and masked in indoor spaces. We don’t know what measures we’ll take in 2025, but we will always be following the guidance of experts and be responsive to the needs of our students.

Wild Cherries and Racemes students sitting in a rushing rocky river on the class sleepover weekend.
Cherries need to keep their roots cool in the summer.

Questions?

Contact us for additional information!
contact@wildcherries.org • (615) 804-0064

2024 Wild Cherries making medicine from a bumper crop of anise hyssop and tulsi at the Garfield Community Farm
2024 Wild Cherries making medicine from a bumper crop of anise hyssop and tulsi at the Garfield Community Farm