Upcoming Classes
Team Offsite
Team building comes secondary as we explore our place within the natural world. Alexandra is your team guide to the magical realm of plant medicine as you get to know yourselves, each other, and the environment outside your doorstep in a wildly new way.
The natural environment of the Peninsula abounds with inspiration and deep rejuvenation for those who wander its trails.
Whether you and your team seek to get to know the plants growing in your neighborhood regional park or you yearn to learn to make wild herbal medicine, Alexandra will tailor the experience to the needs and fantasies of your team. Plants seen are commonly growing wild and in gardens all around the Bay Area, so students will become familiar with plants they likely see on a daily or weekly basis.
For those yearning for a taste of the wild, the walk will conclude with a raw-ice cream social, where students will get to taste test a handful of wild botanical-infused ice creams made by Alexandra with the plants that we will have learned about on the walk.
Classes for 5-25 people
Location: South Bay & Santa Cruz
Cost: $85/person for 5-9 people; $95/person for wild ice cream social
$65/person 10+ person; $75/person for wild ice cream social
Email: alexandraevanshudson @ gmail . com to schedule.
Private Lessons for Individuals
Do you yearn to develop your relationship with the plants and the greater ecology in which you live? Whether you seek an introduction to the plants growing in your backyard or the park near your house, a cooking class for your family, or a discussion on herbal medicine, I am delighted to explore the fold with you.
Location: Parks around the South Bay & Santa Cruz, CA; additional tribute applies if to greater bay area
Cost: $300 for 2.5-3 hour walk in Santa Cruz or South Bay; travel tribute applies if out of one of these areas
Email: alexandraevanshudson @ gmail . com to schedule.
Wild Food Walks with ForageSF
Join Alexandra Thursdays around the Bay Area to explore the medicinal & culinary virtues of the wild and feral plants growing all around us. Class will gather at favorite sites around the East Bay, Peninsula, and SF and wander as we get to know these potent and delicious plants that grow from the hills to the ravines and through the neighborhoods in between.
Discussions explore
plant identification and caution regarding look-alikes
medicinal properties & medicine making technique
culinary virtues and recipes to incorporate plants into daily cuisine
harvesting & processing techniques
wildcrafting ethics
folklore and traditional use of plant materials
Walks are open and will inspire plant lovers of all backgrounds and skill levels, from the novice to the professional chef, herbalist, and ecologist.
Dates & Time:
February 9 2-5pm Palo Alto
February 25 2-5pm Santa Cruz
March 8 2-5pm Palo Alto
March 22 2-5pm Santa Cruz
March 30 6-9am (Seaweed) Santa Cruz North Coast
April 5 3-6pm Palo Alto
April 19 3-6pm Santa Cruz
April 27 6-9am (Seaweed) Santa Cruz North Coast
May 25 6-9am (Seaweed) Santa Cruz North Coast
Past Classes
Forager’s Feast // Summertime Edition
This 4 part seasonal series shows you how to develop a nutritive relationship and bake, roast, saute, ferment and preserve with the edible landscape that grows all around us. For four weekends over the course of the year, you’ll learn to identify, properly harvest, and cook with the wild edibles and medicinals of the Bay Area.
Class focuses on food preparation with harvested bounty: learn to identify, properly harvest, and cook with the wild edibles and medicinals of the Bay Area. Chosen recipes will illustrate extraction and food preservation techniques so you can develop the confidence to incorporate these plants into delicious daily meals.
Some of Spring’s greens and flowers that cleanse and energize our systems after a winter of rich food include Miner’s/Indian lettuce, Oxalis, Chickweed, Nettles, Spring onions, Watercress, Mallow, Milk thistle, Nasturtium, Wild radish, Wild geranium, Arugula, Chamomile, Dock, Fir and Pine tips, Milky Oats, Hawthorn blossoms, and Pine pollen, among others.
In the springtime class, we explore the brilliant vibrancy of springtime with herbal allies to help us arise from slumber and meet the spring with vigor. Recipes explored include:
Vinegar infusion
Herbal pesto
Spring green ferments
Herbal gomasio
Springtime mead
And more
The class as offered with Berkeley Herbal Center is a two day event with the first day in the field, learning to ID and harvest local, seasonal edibles and medicinals. Tickets available below.
Time: 10:00 a.m. -1 p.m. Saturday & Sunday
Introduction to Western Herbalism
In this four part series we build a framework to work with medicinal herbs and incorporate them into our every day lives. We explore major body systems and corresponding plants to help fortify the body and correct chronic and acute disease. We examine the role of food and lifestyle as medicine, in addition to herbal medicines, to ensure the holistic well being of the person.
The weekly class is a mixture of lecture, discussion, and hands-on food and medicine making. Midway through the month, students will gather for a wild food and medicine walk to learn about local plant ID, harvest, and preservation.
By the end of the four weeks, students leave the class prepared to start their own basic home apothecary and wild foods pantry.
This class is best for those with no-to-introductory level knowledge of plant medicine.
Connection with the plants is our ancestral birthright; being able to work with them intelligently for ones individual and collective healing is a study and an art. Join Alexandra in this springtime Introduction to Herbalism class to begin your journey with plant medicine; the discussions and activities here will ignite your inspiration, awaken you evermore to the world around and within you, and equip you with the tools to begin the path of a lifetime.
Class held weekly over Zoom every Thursday of June 2022, 6-8pm.
Redwood Medicine & the Wild Mind
Follow the gentle call of the wild and come immerse in the landscape of your medicine. Camp in the Santa Cruz mountains, to reconnect to nature. Take a break from cell phones and computer technology and reawaken your natural mind.
In the peak of summer’s high heat, step into the timeless fineness of the redwoods with herbalist Alexandra Hudson and her guest educators for a week of forest medicine. Together we will quiet down and integrate with the plants and their greater ecosystem. From Sunday to Friday we will get to know the plants of the redwood forest through plant walks, medicine harvest & making, plant songs and lore, wild foods demos and tastings, plant communication meditations & journeywork and dreamwork interpretation.
The time together will be full and rich with learning and students are encouraged to wander lightly on the land and to come with questions for the trees.
Accommodations on the land are intentionally rustic. Students will camp and provide their own shelter & meals, space to cook and clean is available for students to use. We will have stoves and pots and pans for cooking in.
Cost covers land use, and teaching. Bring your own camping gear and food.
Location: Santa Cruz mountains
Date: august 8-13
Springtime Candy Making with Wild Medicinals with Forage SF
Spring’s exuberant bounty is upon us! Join forager-herbalist chef Alexandra Hudson as she alchemizes fine, melt-in-your-mouth sweets with Springtime’s bounty of wild medicinals. Together we will learn to ID a handful of seasonal plants and prepare treats that feature their medicine. Candies include: bay nut truffles, sweet dreams marshmallows, lollipops for lung health in fire season, & immune-boosting gummies. Students will get to know the tastes of the plants used in the recipes and consider flavor balancing techniques to make candies that are not only medicinal but delicious. Alexandra will review different methods of medicine extraction to ensure potency of effect, as well as preservation and presentation methods to turn the candies into meaningful gifts.
Samples will abound and students will leave with a little goodie bag of treats.
Location: Secret location in Oakland (will be e-mailed a week before the event).
Date: May 11, 2021 // 2-5pm
Kitchen Alchemy: Medicinal Herbs as Food & Food as Medicine
Since antiquity people have cooked with medicinal herbs to help their bodies run at an optimal level and be immune to the diseases of the time. This seasonally-based series will focus on herbs that can help bodies tonify, adapt, and feel deeply nourished throughout the year.
We will develop culinary skills to nourish self, friends, and family as we explore basic extraction techniques and methods of incorporating medicinal herbs into our daily foods. Recipes explored will appeal to children, adults wishing to perform at their best, and discerning foodies ready to elevate the flavors and medicinal potency of their kitchen game.
The class starts with the Autumn session and meets quarterly through the seasons. It is heavy on the learning-by-doing. Students will walk away with liquid-infusions in the process, a few samplers of the food items we make in class, and a solid launch point from which to continue the exploration of integrating with the seasons via food and herbal medicine.
SPRINGTIME Ah! The brilliant vibrancy of springtime; this potent time of rebirth, flowering, and pollination. Now that we are properly nourished on many levels from our wintertime nutrifying, let us work with herbal allies to help us arise from slumber and step into the majestic force of the springtime. In this time, liver-supporting plants are our best allies! Together we will explore patterns of imbalance that present in the spring and herbs allies to help remedy this and keep us on track. Recipes explored include vinegar infusion, herbal pesto, spring green salads, herbal seed sprinkles, and springtime beer.
SUMMER Harvest season is underway and nourishing the heart is key in this time of making hay while the sun is out. This is the time when the fields and our projects flower and come into fruit, and is a powerful time to work with plants to help us maintain dynamic balance in this most outward of seasons. We sing the song of summer with aphrodisiac honey-infusions, food dehydration techniques, fermented seed bread, fermented hot sauces, and wine/spirit infusions. It’s a lot to cover, but that’s summer!
Location: berkeley Herbal Center
date: February 17th, 2019, May 19th, 2019 // 2-6pm
Courting the Muse: Herbal Wisdom and Practical Magic
In the seasonally-informed series Courting the Muse, we develop skills for making medicinal art with our plants. Over the seasons we explore the herbal medicine through the arts - from the fine arts to the practical daily rituals of body products and medicinal foods. Life is art and this series is a primer to exploring the many brilliant traditionally-informed ways plant medicine can express itself in our lives.
What does it look like to live in dynamic, beautiful relationship with ourselves, each other, and our planet? In these wild times in which our world is in such swift evolution, we community herbalists rise as allies for our people to connect with ancient ways of earthly healing. We get to know the plants in ways that go beyond the functional and venture into the profound-creative; in this place, the plants can speak through us and our art in ways that are evocative and nourishing on many levels.
And oh, how ever do our medicinal plants provide the most profoundly fertile muses for whatever project or process we wish to undertake. Together, we deepen our relationship with the plants as we bring them into every aspect of our lives in a deeply lovely way.
Location: berkeley Herbal Center in Berkeley & Pleasant hill, CA
Dates: Summer – July 9, 16, 30, August 6, 13 || 6-9pm
Autumn – September 24, October 1, 8, 15, 22 || 6-9pm
Herbs for Love and Romance
What is love? The ancient Greeks recognized that there are over seven kinds of love; we enrich our relationship with our hearts as we explore the many ways love expresses itself. We explore herbal allies to support the Queen of the self -the heart- and practice techniques to enhance intimacy with the worlds within and around us.
location: berkeley Herbal Center
Wildfire Herbalist’s Toolkit: Cultivating Lung and Full-Body Health in Fire Season
Smoke from the Butte County wildfires is unlike that from mere burning wood - it contains the toxic particulate matter of volatilized structures, cars, industrial, and unprocessed nuclear waste. Grief abounds and questions of fundamental security arise as this beloved land and all it holds burns to a devastated char. We are entering an age of rapid evolution in which we must be nimble in mind, body, spirit, and lifestyle so that we may work with this new landscape. What comes after the burn? How can we cultivate resilient bodies within and throughout a presently brittle ecosystem?
In this two hour holistic intensive, we band together to engage with the microcosm of our bodies as our learning grounds. We call on the elements and work with herbal allies, foods, and lifestyle practices to bring ourselves into a lush dynamic equilibrium -- from this place we can engage with the world as highly present, healthy, vital beings. Together we will make a lung-support syrup, practice herbal steams, and review best practices for maintaining systemic health. We discuss tissue states and body systems and explore ways to optimize their toxin-ridding capacities. We explore what it could look like to have health-rich relationship with fire, water, air, and earth, and examine parallels between solutions for our individual bodies and that of our greater planetary body. We open space for grief to release and transmute.
location: berkeley Herbal Center with live-video over Facebook
Snacks for Vitality
Come explore recipes for nutrient-dense snacks, including kale and veggie chips, probiotic crackers, wildcrafted juices and smoothies, herb-infused energy balls and bars, and chocolate nut butter. In this hands-on class, we make nutrient-dense snacks , from kale chips and crackers to energy balls and pemmican. We work with nutrient-dense ingredients such as kraut, bone broth, wild-harvested foods, and medicinal herbs to create optimally revitalizing snacks. Some key concepts discussed will include food dehydration, juicing techniques, and bone broth preparation and utilization. Alexandra will demonstrate preparation and preservation techniques, including dehydration and juicing, bone broth preparation, medicinal herb identification and sourcing from the best farms in California.
Students will sample snacks in class and go home with a recipe booklet.