Building Your Home Apothecary

The course includes 15–20 hours of work per month:

• We meet in person one Sunday and one Thursday per month.
• 3–6 hours of garden or apothecary work time per month, outside of class
• 2–3 hours of homework time per month, outside of class

We ask you to take a moment now and consider your capacity to make the time commitment to Building Your Home Apothecary, as this class is a commitment of 15–20 hours per month. Every year, we have 4x as many applicants as we have spots. To that end, we have high expectations for class attendance. We ask that you miss no more than 1 Sunday and 1 Thursday evening.

• Growing Herbs: We plant and tend an apothecary garden together through a full growing season. We start seeds in March and plant out the garden in early spring. We learn about tending the garden, and each student works a monthly garden shift, harvesting herbs all season long. In the fall, we dig roots, save seeds, and put the garden to bed. We learn about the medicine growing all around us at Bartram’s Garden on plant walk lessons, such as Tree Medicine and Ethical Wildcrafting.

• Using Herbs: We talk about how to use most of the herbs growing in our garden, as well as covering herbal actions beyond the range of our garden. Students will be introduced to 10–15 foundational Materia Medica herbs, including their actions, identification, growing, harvesting, and preparation techniques, indications and contraindications, and energetics. Through homework exercises, students will further relationships with herbs through embodied personal research.

• Making Medicine: Using plants grown in our garden, students learn to make tinctures, teas, and infused oils using the folk method.  Students walk away from class with a full bundle of medicine to stock their home apothecary and continue their herbalism journey!

• Herbalism in Context: Small group discussions about herbalism in a community context; today, historically, and future. Class lessons and discussions draw readily from instructors’ cultural backgrounds, experiential knowledge, and knowledge of folklore, historic use of plants, and astrological associations.

• Guest Teachers: Learn from occasional guest lecturers and growers in Philly. Previous lectures have included: Remedies of Black Mississippians of the Delta, Soil Science & Container Gardening, Land Sovereignty in Philadelphia, and Herbs for Post-Partum Healing.

• Community Building: This class is a community project. Working alongside each other, we care for the garden, grow medicine, and set intentions and dreams into every bottle we make together. Students get to know each other outside of class in paired or group garden shifts, cultivating plants and intimate connections.

• Tuition: Tuition for the 2026 9-month course is $1,000. Please note: full tuition payment or selected payment plan option is due at the start of class. All medicine-making materials and gardening hand tools for use in class are provided (students are welcome to bring their own additional tools).

• Scholarships: We offer scholarship payment tiers to people of color with financial need. We do this to address the whitewashing of herbalism; we do this to address the stolen healing practices from people of color by white folks; we do this to address systemic inequalities that affect income. The scholarship offers a 20% scholarship tuition cost of $800, or a 40% scholarship tuition cost of $600.

• Payment Plans: Payment plans are available for all students, with quarterly and monthly payment options. All payment plans run through the duration of class, March–October, and tuition payment must be paid in full by the end of class in November.

Bartram’s Garden is a 50-acre botanic garden and public park, situated on multiple large, sloping hills, with both paved and unpaved pathways. In most classes, we move between our classrooms near the Historic House, our garden site down the hill by Sankofa Community Farm, and for strolling plant walks across the garden grounds.

Please let us know in your application if you have any questions around physical or mobility capacity, or anticipate needing any support.

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we will take the following precautions:

• Masking indoors and social distancing outside. Masks will be available in class.
• If you have been exposed to COVID-19 or have symptoms, we will ask you to stay home until you test negative.
• If you are otherwise ill with any contagious viruses or illness, we ask that you stay home until you have recovered.

Maebh Aguilar is a plant tender, artist, farmer, gardener, herbalist, writer, and seed saver. Their work orbits themes like migration, anti-imperialism, ancestral reconnection, place-based ecology, and the dissolution of state borders. They are Ecuadorian and Irish, from an immigrant family. They were born, raised, and live in Philadelphia, where they work as Seed Collection Manager at Truelove Seeds.

Hailing from Brooklyn, New York,  Mercelyne Latortue spent her childhood in Haiti, which seeded her passion for food, culture and the revolutionary spirit of the Haitian people. Since graduating from Temple University with a BS in Public Health, she threaded her passion into extensive experiences in the fields of nutrition education, culinary arts, and community partnerships. In her free time, you can find her out in her garden, reading a good book, catching up with her friends and family, or working on her marinade (epis) business.

Dominique Matti is a writer, a mother, a medicine maker, and a gardener. Through creative practice, spirituality, tending the land and listening, she ritually strives to situate herself in the long story. Her work centers Black mysticism, ancestral inheritance, care and recovery.