Willow Bend Environmental Education Center, in collaboration with the Forager’s Path School of Botanical Studies, is hosting its annual all-day herb event featuring expert-led workshops, hands-on learning, and informative plant walks. Participants will enjoy a full day of learning about the natural resources around us while connecting with local experts, herbalists, and plant enthusiasts.

The event runs from 9 AM to 3 PM, and day-pass attendees will choose from nine workshops across three sessions. Cost: $65 for Willow Bend members, $80 for the public

Festival Schedule

Upon registration, participants will choose three workshops featuring a mix of indoor and outdoor learning experiences. Sign up early, as workshops will close once they reach capacity. Please visit the bottom of this page for presenter bios.

Session 1 (9:30 - 11:00 AM)

Plants and Hualapai Basketry: Reflections on the Hualapai Ethnobotany Youth Project of the Grand Canyon with Jorigine Paya and Carrie Calisay Cannon

The ethnobotanical story of the Hualapai Tribe begins with the plant knowledge the people have inherited from their great grandparents who lived entirely off the land. Hualapai grandchildren live in a completely different modern world. A world of cell phones, text messages, and AI content. But the Hualapai Ethnobotany Youth Project brings attention back to the plants, the land, and age old Hualapai traditions. The information presented will share about the project through the lens of basketry examining the crucial role that plant resource acquisition has played in Hualapai culture, knowledge fine-tuned and perfected over millennia.

Create Your Own Ethnobotanical Garden with Susan Lamb

The Ethnobotanical Garden at Willow Bend features plants grown for medicine, seasoning, and ceremonies by many Southwestern cultures. Susan Lamb will offer advice about designing, planting, and caring for your own garden of beneficial plants.

Plant Walk with Brian Hornbeck

Join Brian Hornbeck for a guided walk through the Willow Bend Gardens and explore the many plants growing throughout the space and their herbal properties. Learn about plant identification, herbal uses, and the relationship between people and plants during this interactive outdoor walk.

Session 2 (11:30 AM - 1 PM)

Sensory Wisdom Awareness Plant Walk with Darcey Blue

Use the five senses to meet, explore, and connect with bioregional plant medicines during this interactive plant walk. We’ll learn what taste, smell, texture, and visual cues can teach us directly about plant medicines. While it’s always useful and wise to have a good identification and materia medica resource on hand, we can also use our innate senses to learn more directly about a plant’s life force and how it interacts with human life force on both an energetic and physical level.

Cooling Herbs for Summer’s Heat with Ashley Doyle

While every herb has unique properties, Flagstaff’s summers always bring heat. This class will focus on herbs that offer cooling energetics for the body during the season’s long, sun-filled days. The session will highlight botanical blends for a variety of applications to ease the blaze of summer and soothe the soul. Participants can expect to taste and experience several herbs with cooling properties, and will also blend a tea to take home

Relational Plant Chemistry with Maureen (Mo) Judith

This workshop explores the concept of synergy and phytochemistry as something lived and relational. Instead of reducing herbs to “this herb does that” we’ll look at phytochemistry as communication between plant and body, where many compounds create layered, shifting responses that depend on who you are, your state, and the plant itself. Through grounded examples, we’ll make the language of chemistry more accessible and meaningful, so you can feel how herbal actions arise from relationships rather than isolated effects.

Session 3 (1:30 - 3 PM)

Plant Walk with Amara Stack

Amara Stack will lead a plant walk, guiding folks to sit, journal, and commune with the native medicinal flora of Flagstaff.

Snakeweed (Gutierrezia sarothrae) for Life’s Aches & Pains with Darcey Blue

Join bioregional herbalist Darcey Blue to learn about one of the most common and versatile plant allies of the Southwest, long beloved by abuelitos. Snakeweed is a sustainable and abundant answer to many of life’s aches and pains, and an excellent substitute for the more sensitive Arnica montana. Learn how to identify, harvest, process, and use this common Southwestern plant in poultices, compresses, liniments, oils, salves, and baths for injuries, arthritis, inflammation, and more.

Adventures with Beans with Fritz
Discover how three local women entered the world of dry bean farming, a crop that was once the most profitable agricultural product in the Flagstaff region. Three Sisters Bean Farm specializes in cultivating bean varieties originating from local Indigenous cultures while practicing regenerative farming techniques on a small one-acre farm in Doney Park. Explore the fascinating origins of the many bean varieties first cultivated in the Americas. Learn how they are grown and why these nutritional wonders remain important to modern diets, farming, and gardening practices.

Meet the Presenters

Darcey Blue

Darcey Blue, based in Flagstaff, AZ, is a plant whisperer, herbalist, ceremonialist, and wilderness guide with over 20 years of experience. She's studied under various mentors including Charles Kane, Rosemary Gladstar, and Paul Bergner, and has learned extensively from direct interactions with plant spirits and the Earth.

Her journey into herbalism began at a young age in the hills of Utah, where her first tea from wildcrafted yarrow and Sagebrush healed her.

She runs a clinical practice, offers apprenticeships, teaches live classes and workshops, and provides online courses and consultations.

Darcey focuses on wildcrafting and growing her own medicinal plants, offering handmade herbal remedies through her online apothecary. She works with clients of all ages and backgrounds, emphasizing a deep connection to nature and a commitment to healing through ceremony and rewilding.

For information on her offerings and upcoming events, visit www.sacredwildness.org.

Carrie Calisay Cannon

Cannon is an Ethnobotanist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and also of Oglala Lakota, and German ancestry. She has a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Resource Management. If you wish to connect with Carrie you will need a fast horse, by weekday she fills her days as a fulltime Ethnobotanist with the Hualapai Indian Tribe of the Grand Canyon of Arizona where she has worked the last 21 years on promoting the practice of Hualapai ethnobotanical knowledge as a lived tradition; by weekend she is a lapidary and silversmith artist who enjoys chasing the beautiful as she creates Native southwestern turquoise jewelry.

Ashley Doyle (she/her)

Ashley Doyle has heart in her role as a Community Herbalist. She strives to motivate empowerment for self with a DIY (Do It Yourself) lifestyle. She offers workshops and plant walks, creates a wellness zine, “The Underground Good Witch Watch”, can be seen vending at local markets, and founded Cinderfly Apothecary. She crafts quality herbal products for culinary flare or topical care. Her background education is in Nutrition and Dietetics and started formally with Herbalism studies in 2019 with the Forager’s Path and has since been immersed in numerous classes and courses with instructors domestic and abroad. She is adamant to the continued education for this artful science that is an endless learning trail. She dedicates time foraging, wildcrafting, and gardening, which naturally combine into what she loves and devotes energy towards. Immersed in the Flagstaff community since 2007, her soul flutters to strengthen people’s desire to learn and apply an herbal outlook to living.

Fritz

Born and raised in the farmland of rural Pennsylvania I grew up surrounded by small Pennsylvania Dutch family farms and was inspired by organic growing practices of the nearby Rodale Institute. My youth was filled with the pleasures of gardening and a love of playing in the dirt. Though that youthful passion was put on hold while spending an enormous chunk of my adult life working as a river guide in the Grand Canyon, after my daughter, Willa, was born in 1995 and full-time guiding was no longer an option I began to start dabbling with gardening once again. Following the road of return to my youthful passion has brought me back full circle to a life invested in community gardening.

Brian Hornbeck

Brian Hornbeck has been working with Herbal Medicine for the last 35 years, wildcrafting, formulating, and creating herbal remedies to help many people find balance. His background includes knowledge of traditional Western herbs and Chinese herbs as well as an extensive study of Indigenous uses of herbs in traditional medicine.

Brian was the founder of The School of Mother Earth, "Escuela de la Madre Tierra" in Tijuana, where he shared knowledge of herbs and other healing modalities.  The School also had a busy clinic where Brian and his students treated many people for 15+ years.

Now residing in Sedona, Arizona, Brian continues to teach as well as sharing his ”Tera Alchemy” line of herbal products at gatherings and markets throughout the Southwest. Find Brian and Tera Alchemy at teraalchemy.com, on instagram @teraalchemy, and on Facebook as Brian Hornbeck and Tera Alchemy Lab.

Maureen (Mo) Judith

Raised closely to the natural world, Maureen (Mo) Judith was shaped by the quiet intelligence of ecosystems and wilderness from an early age. She became a life-long student of nature and an advocate for the rights of nature and the more than human world. She began to study herbalism in her teenage years which led her to travel the world at 18 years old in pursuit of broadening her understanding of life and those who inhabited this earth. Drawn not only to local ecologies but also the ways life expresses itself across the globe. She spent several years traveling and hitchhiking around the world, seeking to learn from the earth and those who still spoke her language. Today she runs Aura La Voura out of Flagstaff, Arizona- A project, laboratory and brand dedicated to alchemical herbalism, spagyrics and right-relationship with the earth. Their work scratches the surface of a kind of research that bridges wisdom and soul with modern science and chemistry. She currently donates a portion of her profits to foundations dedicated to reforestation and coral rejuvenation.  Website and Instagram: www.auralavoura.com // @auralavoura

Susan Lamb (she/her)

Susan Lamb and other garden volunteers care for the Habitat Gardens around the Willow Bend Environmental Education Center. A former district naturalist at the Grand Canyon,

Susan loves sharing the loveliness and life cycles of the plants and animals of these gardens, which have become an oasis of tranquility for the community. Website: http://www.susanlamb.net/

Jorigine Paya

A member of the Hualapai Tribe, Jorigine Paya has been actively working with Hualapai tribal youth in cultural heritage preservation, language revitalization, and traditional arts and crafts. She also teaches singing and dancing. She has been employed with the Peach Springs Elementary School District for 35 years. Upon her retirement at the school she began working for the Hualapai Department of Cultural Resources as a language program manager where she also participates as an elder instructor of the Hualapai Ethnobotany Youth Project. Jorigine is also a title holder for Elder-Pai and Pai Woman for the Yuman-Pai Affiliated Tribes where she represents her community.

Amara Stack (she/her)

Amara grew up in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, spending every minute outside with the magical and harsh environment of the desert southwest. She studied at Northern Arizona University, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Biology with an emphasis in botany in 2018, and has been studying herbal medicine ever since. Her botanical adventures led her to a permaculture farm internship in the Andean Mountains of Peru, where she studied farming, herbal medicine, cultural ceremonies, and community outreach alongside generational farmers and healers.

Her passion for herbal medicine includes tending medicinal herbs, both cultivated and wild, making potent creations to share with her community, teaching at local herbal events, and working for a large herbalism online school called The Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine, where she can share her knowledge and wisdom about the plants and their wonderful gifts. Amara’s business is  Khuya Remedies and her Instagram is @khuyaremedies.