Celtic

Plantlore

Rebellion, Resilience & Reciprocity

Discover how plants have historically aided communities in times of turmoil & regrowth and how this kinship can strengthen our resilience today

9-Week Online Course
30th July - 24th September, 2026
Live Sessions at 10:30am PDT / 6:30pm BST

JOIN NOW

At a time of environmental and social upheaval, many of us feel a pull to reconnect: to our ancestors, to the land, and to the plants that have always grown alongside us.

HONOURING

New & Old Growth

This course is for those who know that there’s vital medicine to be found off the beaten track.

Celtic Plantlore gathers a remarkable circle of herbalists, storytellers & visionaries to help us follow our pull to reconnect with land and lore.

Together, we’ll explore folk medicine stories & songs, herbal traditions born from political struggle, and the long relationship between people and the green world, both historical and present-day.

We’ll look at how plants have carried communities through hard times and helped them grow again.

Save
My Spot

Featuring

Amanda
Edmiston

Eileen
Budd

Hanna
Leigh

Jennifer
Reid

Keith Robertson &
Nicola Dee Kelly

Lucy
O'Hagan

Maya
McNeil

Miwa
Nagato-Apthorp

Nicole
Rose

Scott
Richardson-Read

William
Milliken

Teachers have been featured in

hl-logos-elephant
hl-logos-herald
hl-logos-huff
hl-logos-wwb
hl-logos-bv
TheWire
The Bookseller
Sunnyside Expeditions
2
1
3
4
6
5
7

Gathering our Resilience

The arts of oral storytelling, song, and hands-on skill learning are ancient and resilient, near impossible to fully erase or silence, like many of our good medicine weeds.

By way of the hedge, at the edge of the mind, and from deep within the heart – we will dive in, together, to find inspiration for embodied presence within hard times.

RETURNING TO

The Vitality of Land & Lore

This season is an invitation to grow our ecological literacy & imaginal muscles, and to let that change how we live.

To know the plants around us is to begin reading the language of the land – noticing the histories still living in the hedgerows, remembering how to greet our more-than-human kin, and reacquainting ourselves with familiar weeds as old sources of food and medicine.

Over 9 weeks, wisdom keepers, educators, and folklorists from Scotland, Ireland and England, alongside descendants living in Turtle Island, will guide us on the vibrant green path.

Through old songs and stories, we’ll encounter ancestral relationships with the plants of these lands, while also learning from present-day herbalists working in alliance with the green world for social change.

Save
My Spot

What You'll Receive

Over 9 weeks we will deepen our relationships with the green world through:

9 × 2-Hour Live Weekly Classes

Join our guest teachers each week for inspiring personal stories, cultural & ecologic teachings.

2 × 90-Minute Live Bonus Sessions

We gather for 2 bonus sessions in our 9 weeks together to sing & celebrate the green world.

Bundle of Stories & Songs

Gather a litany of stories, lore, & myths plus songs, ditties & chants as we journey this path.

Online
Community Space

Access to a private community space to share what is moving for you through the 9 weeks.

Course
Recordings

You'll have access to the course content for 1 year on our private course & community platform.

Who This Course Is For

Whether you are already steeped in herbalism, or are freshly green to the plant path, we welcome you.

  • Those seeking the cultural, historical, and mythic roots of plant traditions in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England
  • Herbalists & healers who want to weave animistic & ecological wisdom into their work
  • Activists, grievers and Earth lovers seeking resilience and belonging in times of upheaval and renewal
  • Story lovers and history lovers drawn to folklore, ritual, and folk knowledge
  • Community builders and mutual aid practitioners tending local resilience and reciprocal ways of living
Join
Us Here

A New Season

Our first season of Celtic Plantlore offered an overview of ecological wisdom, animist perspectives and Celtic herbalism. This second season carries its own focus with specialized nutrients for these times of environmental and social upheaval & renewal. It stands fully on its own and you’re warmly welcome whether or not you joined us last year.

Celtic Plantlore is not primarily an herbal medicine making course. Rather, it is a journey through story & song that invites us to widen our lens and explore the margins and hedges of our relationship with the plant world.

Our 3 guiding themes this season are:

Rebellion – refusing to accept or normalize what harms human dignity, ecological wellbeing, cultural tradition, or our freedom to create together.

Resilience – recognizing how deeply we need one another, and honoring that interdependence through collective stewardship and shared resources.

Reciprocity – giving back to the living cycles that sustain us, through mutual care, collaboration, and contribution.

Program Overview

This course runs for 9 weeks from 30th July to 24th September.

Every Thursday, we have a live class with a guest teacher. We will have 2 live bonus sessions on Wednesdays, as outlined below.

All live sessions commence at 10:30am PDT (Los Angeles) / 1:30pm EDT (New York) / 6:30pm BST (London).

Thursday, 30th July

WEEK 1 

Routes of our Roots: Herbal Folklore

with Amanda Edmiston

Stories are an integral part of all our lives, they also often connect deeply to place and can help us listen to the land we live with and the voices of the people and plants that have lived there before us. In our opening session,  Amanda will be inviting us to explore how stories of plants and place can offer us a gentle, graceful path of rebellion, a means of guiding us and learning from the whispered wisdom contained in memories of plants and the way we work with them. The way plants grow throughout our stories and folklore helps us build a community that extends to the natural world and can gift us the resilience and knowledge we need to move through a changing world.

Thursday, 6th August

WEEK 2

More Than Human

with Eileen Budd

In our folklore the trees can dance, a lonesome bog plant was once a young woman in search of gold, crab apple was an adventurous young man and heather roots were alive with snakes. In our stories our native plants and trees, who were once human are now so much more.

In this session, Eileen Budd will share these fascinating animist stories with you and discuss some of the deeper meanings they hold.

Thursday, 13th August

WEEK 3

Labour Herbstory & Plant Ballads of Rebellion

with Jennifer Reid

What do plants have to do with the advancement of workers’ rights? More than we might imagine. In this class, Jennifer Reid will weave together song, story, and the radical folk history of England’s industrial north. We’ll join the Chartists, early campaigners for voting rights, as they gather on the moors to sing and hear speakers. We’ll learn how plants passed wisdom onto women amidst gender violence, and follow the wheatsheaf of Rochdale through the enduring call for both bread and roses.

The seeds of revolution have long been planted in the land and its lore, if only we look. As one Victorian mill-worker poet put it, “Look under the leaves if you want to find any nuts!”

Wednesday, 19th August

WEEK 4 – BONUS SESSION

Plant Songs for Vim & Vigor

with Hanna Leigh

This is a fun and lively opportunity to explore your voice as a tool for praising the plants, as well as singing the messages that they offer you. Come and create your own plant songs, through an embodied & imaginative vocal practice (even if you have never written a song in your life, or don’t consider yourself a “singer”).

Thursday, 20th August

WEEK 4

Resistance is Fertile

with Keith Robertson & Nicola Dee Kelly

As traditional herbalists of Scotland and Wales, with decades of study and listening to the plants and herbs, we will share reliable research in how the societally prestigious Celtic Druids drew from the ‘book’ of Nature. How can we as modern humans emulate the achievements of the Celtic Druids? This class will reveal some of our journey so far into this crucial work. As plant-based food system educators, we believe practicing mutual ways of everyday health in a predominantly ill society is a radical act in itself. We will discuss approachable ways of cultivating our own food and medicine, and enacting what we value most as Celtic identity, which is a living moral code of cyclical rather than extractive engagement with the Earth. 

*name inspired by the Rockaway Park Project in Bristol, UK

Thursday, 27th August

WEEK 5

Ethnobotany & Disappearing Traditional Knowledge

with William Milliken

This class will explain about the importance of collecting traditional knowledge of plant uses including edible, medicinal or spiritual plants, from Celtic countries or from Amazonian Indigenous communities.  In many cases this knowledge was traditionally passed down orally, from one generation to the next, and at risk of being lost forever. William will explain about his personal experience in collecting that knowledge, through ethnobotanical research, including discussions with local Hebridean peoples and Indigenous shamans. And how his research has gone from initially collecting information, to now preserving that knowledge for the future generations

Thursday, 3rd September

WEEK 6

Corp mar Chré: Body as Earth

with Lucy O’Hagan

How do eating disorders emerge from colonialism? And how can eating wildly from the land, and coming back to our ancestral foodways, compost the harmful systems which purge, extract and deprive the land and our cultures? In this deeply personal, political and relational exploration, Lucy will share the ways in which eating wild from the land of Ireland, a place where food has been weaponised and stripped of its sacredness, has shaped their understandings of eating disorder recovery, language reclamation and the futures of food sovereignty. We will be discussing behaviours related to Bulimia such as food restriction, bingeing, purging as well as body dysmorphia, anti-fatness, racism and transphobia. We will also be discussing the on-going violence of colonialism in Ireland and across the world.

Thursday, 10th September

WEEK 7

Remedies for Resilience

with Nicole Rose

Class description to be announced soon.

Wednesday, 16th September

WEEK 8 – BONUS SESSION

Songs from under the Hawthorn Tree

with Miwa Nagato-Apthorp

Join us for a special in home concert with celebreted Scottish Borders folk artist and songsmith, Miwa Nagato-Apthorp. Miwa will weave us through a garden of her original timeless works, singing and sharing backstory. We will explore our long and complex relation with the steadfast Hawthorn tree, she will bring voice to the agrarian women working the Southern Scottish landscape, and will share a tale of a final resting place far across the sea for an island man, amidst other island dwellers. Bring your tea and settle in for an enchanting performance.

Thursday, 17th September

WEEK 8

Dùthchas and the Radical Memory of the Land

with Scott Richardson-Read

This workshop explores plants not only as remedies, but as part of the living memory of people, place and community. Through Scottish plantlore, Dùthchas, hospitality, agrarian custom and older ideas of interdependence, we will look at how plants have helped people survive, resist, care for one another and stay in relationship with the land during difficult times.

Together, we will explore what these old stories and practices might still offer us now, not as easy answers, but as invitations into deeper responsibility, reciprocity and repair..

Thursday, 24th September

WEEK 9

Closing Community Call

with Maya McNeil

We will close our nine weeks together through a facilitated conversation and mutual reflection on cherished aha moments, musings, personal processes, and any unanswered questions or curiosities we’ve collected throughout the course. This will also be a time for sharing inspired ideas and visions, and making community connections as we weave forward into the continuum of our lives and our offerings.

Meet the Teachers

Amanda Edmiston

Amanda is a writer, storyteller and creative practitioner with a background in herbal medicine and comes from a long line of storytellers, writers, artists and plant people, Amanda has been working around the world creating workshops and performance pieces as Botanica Fabula for nearly 20 years. Originally from Aberdeen she is based in Scotland and Northumbria, her work connects deeply with the land she lives with and travels around, connecting and sharing stories and remedies with the plants and people she encounters. Her work is interlaced with memories, folklore and history, which draws not only on her own journey, but holds elements of her heritage and stories passed on from her storytelling family. For more about Amanda and her work see her website: www.botanicafabula.co.uk or follow her stories on social media Substack, Facebook and Instagram.

Eileen Budd

I am a Scottish author, artist and storyteller with TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland) Scottish Book Trust and BBC Stories in Scots.  Raised in Perthshire in a family with a strong tradition of maintaining oral storytelling practices, I specialise in traditional Scottish folklore, folk objects, folk beliefs, origin stories and ancient Scottish legends.  I am archivist for my village’s community archive; orchardist for my village’s community community orchard and I run our community’s Ceilidh House supporting local events and artists.

Before devoting my life to sharing stories I spent over 20 years working with national museums, including National Museums Scotland and V&A London. 
Compelled to maintain my family’s storytelling tradition and use all I learned from working in museums, I now travel all over Scotland sharing the stories via my Travelling Folk Museum, using song, illustration and historic object handling to help bring Scottish tales from history and folklore to life for audiences of all ages. 

Hanna Leigh

Hanna Leigh is a Singer-Songwriter, Voice Doula, Weaver, and Devotee of this precious, living Earth. She was raised in California (Chumash territory) though in recent years has spent extensive time residing on ancestral lands in the Celtic isles. Her people migrated to the U.S. several generations ago from England, Scotland, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.

This organization, Weaving Remembrance, was birthed through her own passion to reclaim ancestral wisdom and grow in intimate reciprocity with this miraculous earth that sustains us.

Jennifer Reid

Jennifer Reid (IG: @jenniferballadss) performs 19th Century street song and Industrial Revolution work song in the Lancashire dialect. And clog dances. And has a few punk projects on the go. She works like a cart horse and goes like the clappers.

Keith Robertson & Nicola Dee Kelly

Keith Robertson MSc (Herbal Medicine) FNIMH joined the UK National Institute of Medical Herbalists in 1990 and served as a Council Member and on their Accreditation board for many years. His previous degree was in Psychology. He co-founded Scottish School of Herbal Medicine in 1992 and has been teaching his particular energetic approach since then. He was awarded a Fellowship of the Institute for his services to Herbal education. The School established a world first with its MSc and the associated and highly regarded 4-year BSc Hons degree based in Glasgow which he ran for 18 years. The School stepped back out of formal academia in 2010 and moved from the city to the Isle of Arran to offer experiential learning through an Apprenticeship in listening to plants; with an associated intensive course on Celtic Herbal Medicine and an international Correspondence Course at access level.

Nicola Dee Kelly Bsc MNIMH is a Welsh Medical Herbalist with deep Celtic roots. She considers herself a Plant Powered Human. Her inspiration and intuition is fuelled by living immersed in the elemental world of Isle of Arran, on the west coast of Scotland. Here, she is a tutor for the distance courses, and co-hosts in person Celtic Herbal Medicine Retreats with Keith Robertson and Danny O’Rawe. Nicola’s life acquired wisdom blends with her intuition and compassion, creating alchemy to guide others to reconnect with themselves, ancestral wisdom and the Natural World, with all it can offer to sustain us.

Lucy O'Hagan

Lucy Ní hAodhagáin/O’Hagan (They/She) is the founder of Wild Awake Ireland, an organisation which seeks to rekindle cultural and ecological resilience through the restoration of ancestral lifeways in Ireland. Lucy works in the fecund liminal zones between the cultural, ecological and spiritual, weaving together ancient wisdom with the dream of decolonial futures. Born in Béal Feirste, Lucy now makes home beneath the watchful gaze of An Mhucais mountain in the Donegal Gaeltacht, all the while deepening their love of the Gaelic language by harvesting seaweed from the rocks, following the tracks of deer, and gathering ancestral foods and medicine through the seasons. Lucy is also the co-editor of Airmid’s Journal, a bi-annual journal of foraging, folklore, myths, culture and remedies and a passionate committee member of Bród na Gaeltachta, Ireland’s first Gaeltacht pride festival.

Maya McNeil

Hello, my name is Maya Johanna McNeil (they/her) I am a queer Scottish-American singer, songwriter, poet, healing arts practitioner, and filmmaker born in Huichin/Oakland, California. I was raised by rose people and the children of immigrant gardeners. I have been tended by plants all of my life, and cherish their patience with me as I continually learn from them and their stewards of many nations. I endeavor for the healing of my family of all relations, and the bridgework I believe in: Reweaving cultural connection to animate landscapes, actively grieving diasporic, colonizing/colonized traumas, and freeing the imagination, so we may repair and honor the future ahead, the ancestry behind us, and the time that is now.

Miwa Nagato-Apthorp

“A visceral new voice in Scottish Folk”

Miwa Nagato-Apthorp is a Singer-Songwriter based in Hawick in the Scottish Borders. Her songwriting practice draws on folk traditions to explore multicultural understandings of history, climate, gender and home. She has performed at John McCusker’s Southside of the Tracks, Celtic Connections, Edinburgh Tradfest and opened for Eddi Reader and Rachael Sermanni. Miwa was recently Musician in Residence at Alchemy Film & Arts and Connecting Threads where she developed new music exploring lesser-known histories and perspectives of the Scottish Borders and beyond. Her debut EP, Noren, was released in March 2025 and she was awarded Best Acoustic at the Scottish Alternative Music Awards.

Nicole Rose

Nicole Rose (she/her) is based in the Westcountry of England and runs the project, “The Solidarity Apothecary”. My lineages are English, Welsh and Irish. I have been studying herbal medicine for over 15 years. I completed a four-year clinical training with The Plant Medicine School in Ireland to develop my skills as a practitioner and am committed to continuous learning.

As a herbalist, I focus on supporting people experiencing state violence. This includes prisoners, ex prisoners and their families, refugees and asylum seekers, organisers and defendants experiencing repression and more.

Scott Richardson-Read

Scott Richardson-Read (Cailleach’s Herbarium) is a queer working-class writer, activist, counsellor, folklorist, and alternative cultural historian with a deep connection to Scotland’s folk heritage. As the creator of Cailleach’s Herbarium, a platform dedicated to reviving and preserving Scottish folk traditions, Scott has spent years researching and sharing the stories, practices, and beliefs that define the working-class and animistic roots of Scottish culture. His work reflects a blend of deep archival exploration, oral history, and personal experience in the landscapes of Scotland.

With a background steeped in human rights, ecology, activism, and traditions, Scott’s writing and events bridge the past and present, offering fresh insights into the enduring significance of folk belief. Throughout his decades-long journey, he has continued to advocate for the preservation of Scotland’s sacred sites and cultural heritage.

Scott is the author of two books, The Tales of the Taibhsear (2018) (and an associated album) and released this year, Mill Dust and Dreaming Bread – Exploring Scottish Folk Belief and Folk Magic (2025).

William Milliken

My role is the development and leadership of a research programme focused on the application of plants to human livelihoods including health, food security and the restoration of natural capital. This has included recording traditional knowledge and folklore among Celtic peoples in Scotland and Ireland, as well as working in tropical countries. These have included projects, in collaboration with local and Indigenous peoples, training younger generations to record threatened traditional knowledge from older knowledge-holders. Fieldwork overseas has primarily focussed on the Brazilian Amazon, but have also conducted ethnobotany research, biodiversity assessment and training in Mozambique, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Indonesia, New Guinea, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.

Register Here

EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT ENDS IN...

Countdown Expired!

One-Time Payment

$345
$ 295 ≈ £220
  • 9 × 2 Hour LIVE Workshops with our Guest Teachers
  • 2 LIVE Bonus Sessions
  • Discover plantlore of the Celtic isles with expert guides
  • Connect in our private community space
  • Unlimited access to course content for 1 year
CHOOSE ONE-PAY

3 Monthly Payments

$115
$ 99 x 3 ≈ £74 x 3
  • 9 × 2 Hour LIVE Workshops with our Guest Teachers
  • 2 LIVE Bonus Sessions
  • Discover plantlore of the Celtic isles with expert guides
  • Connect in our private community space
  • Unlimited access to course content for 1 year
CHOOSE 3-PAY
Popular

5 Monthly Payments

$69
$ 59 x 5 ≈ £44 x 5
  • 9 × 2 Hour LIVE Workshops with our Guest Teachers
  • 2 LIVE Bonus Sessions
  • Discover plantlore of the Celtic isles with expert guides
  • Connect in our private community space
  • Unlimited access to course content for 1 year
CHOOSE 5-PAY

Please note that prices listed in GBP (£) are approximate and will be adjusted based on the exchange rate at the time of purchase.

If our lowest payment plan is a significant financial barrier for you, please email us at support@weavingremembrance.org and briefly share about your need & what is inspiring you to join this course.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. Anyone who is called to this course is welcome to join! There is medicine here for all, whether you have worked with plants for many years, or are just curious to learn more about connecting with them.

This offering is happening online through Zoom, with teachers joining us from several different countries.

Yes, the calls will be recorded and uploaded to our course & community platform. We strongly reccomend you keep up each week with the class recordings if you can’t attend live.

No. The nature of the content delivery is that you purchase the entire course.

You will have access to the recordings for one year from the start date of the course.

No. Due to the delivery of course content, all sales are final.