Plant Immersions

About This Event

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Instructor: Irena Stathis
Saturday, November 3
10:00am – 12:00pm
$25 Arboretum members / $35 non-members (Includes Arboretum Admission)
Questions? Please call the Education Department at 626.821.4623

Plants hold within them a kind of intelligence that is directly connected to the Sun and the Earth and all that touches our human lives. Historically people have always had a relationship with the plants that goes beyond simply using them for food, medicine and resources. We can recognize this ancestral knowledge through our senses, for example upon smelling a plant specific memories, sensations in the body, feelings and even new ideas may appear.  As we begin to understand how humans have evolved along side plants, we can open to the possibility of a new way of relating to them.

In this class, we will focus on a single plant or group of related plants. We will sit with the plants and learn about their healing properties and folkloric history. Participants will get to know the plants through direct experience by touch, taste, smell, observation and intuition. There will also be several forms of extracts of the plant to sample. Everyone goes home with a fresh cutting and tools to cultivate a deeper relationship to the plants as healers.

Irena Cora Stathis is a Certified Herbalist, wildcrafter, gardener and medicine maker. In 2010 she founded a small-batch Apothecary, Abalone Herbals (www.facebook.com/abaloneherbals @abalonerherbals), where she handcrafts botanical beauty products, hydrosols, herbal teas, extracts, essences and balms. As a native Californian, Irena primarily focuses on the indigenous and naturalized plants of her local terroir and others that are well cultivated in our Southern California Mediterranean climate.  She has been studying the art of Herbal Medicine since 2005; her teachers include Candis Cantin, Matthew Wood, David Hoffman and Nunutsi Sage Otterson.

When she is not tending her gardens, distilling or crafting in the Apothecary she can be found teaching classes or exploring the local mountains. She specializes in women’s health, self-care, natural beauty and preventative wellness drawing from a diverse background of indigenous American traditions, Western Herbalism, Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine.  Through her work with the herbs she seeks to understand ever more the nature and relationship of plants as medicines, healers, and wisdom keepers and how this ‘plant-knowledge’ deepens and enlivens humanity and its environs.