Wild Heart Herb House
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Wild Heart Herb House

join us for wild heart herb fest!

New Bedford, MA / Wampanoag Nation

Saturday Sept 26, 2026 from 10-4 (rain date Sunday Sept 27)

Spend the day exploring the intersection of herbalism, ecology, art, and cultural tradition at the beautiful Haskell Gardens.

Participate in hands-on workshops, plant identification walks, and creative practices led by local herbalists, artists, + educators.

This is a community centered experience where learning unfolds through connection to plants, to place, to yourself, and to one another.

I’M SO THERE! sliding scale $1-90 WITH SUGGESTED PRICE OF $45- click “change amount” to adjust AT CHECKOUT
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A experiential day to reconnect with the plants, the land, and each other through hands-on learning, creative practice, and shared tradition.

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Our Shared Values + Mission

Wild Heart Herb Fest is rooted in the belief that access to cultural knowledge, creative expression, and connection to the natural world should be available to all. We are committed to accessibility, inclusivity, and community care, offering sliding scale pricing, free programming, and accommodations to support diverse needs.

We honor herbalism as both a cultural tradition and a living practice, shaped by many lineages and communities. Through hands-on learning, artistic expression, and ecological education, we aim to foster connection, belonging, and community resilience—strengthening our capacity to care for ourselves, one another, and the land.

Wild Heart Herb Fest is rooted in the land, guided by tradition, and brought to life through art, science, and community!

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2026 HERB FEST SCHEDULE:

Thanks for your patience as the schedule comes together!

10:00 - Opening Circle

10:30 - 11:30 - Class One

  • Hot Tinctures - Mary Blue

  • Herbs for Babies and Children - Keri - lawn

11:30 - 12 - Break

12 - 1 - Class Two

  • Herbs for Babies and Children - Keri - lawn

  • The Body is an Oracle - Abigail Rose Clarke

1 - 2 - Picnic Lunch in the Gardens

2 - 3 - Class Three

  • Fermented Food as Medicine - Christin - wild heart

3 - 3:45 - Community Connection Time

3:45 - Closing Circle

  • Herbal Mixology - Aliya - ANYTIME

  • Land-based Embodiment Practice & Care Circle - Emily - spiral

  • The People’s Apothecary Zine Build - Zulay - wild heart

  • Plant Allies: What They Are & How To Find Yours - Amelia - ANYTIME

  • Edible + Medicinal Plant Walk - Maggie - meet at wild heart

  • Smoke Medicine + Smudge Bundles - Nico - lawn

 

 IMPORTANT INFO FOR ATTENDEES:

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When you arrive for the day, please check in at Wild Heart Herb House. You may begin to arrive at 9:30 to pick up a schedule, pour yourself a cup of tea, and get ready for the day!

This is a grassroots, no/low tech community event so there are some things that you need to bring:

  • a full water bottle

  • a mug or jar for tea

  • a towel, yoga mat, blanket, chair, something to sit on outdoors

  • something to add to our community alter like a plant from your garden, stone, shell, something that you made (optional and you can take it back home with you)

  • LUNCH! There will be no food vendors on site but you can order a pre-made with so much love Herb Fest Lunch Box made by Michele! Order yours here! You may also pack yourself a lunch or maybe do a little potluck with your friends that are attending! Lunch break is an hour and there are limited local food options nearby.

  • a notebook (we have some for sale at Wild Heart) + writing utensil to capture the inspiration you'll be receiving

Street Parking is available on Shawmut Ave and Loftus St bordering Haskell Gardens and on Sutton St and Townsend St which are smaller side streets across Shawmut Ave from Wild Heart Herb House. There are no meters or time restrictions. Handicapped parking is available right on site.

We want this day to feel welcoming and accessible to all! If you need any assistance or accommodations, please email wild.heart.herb.house@gmail.com and we will do everything possible to ensure you have a safe, easeful, and enjoyable day at Wild Heart Herb Fest! ASL interpretation available upon request. The event is wheelchair accessible, with accessible paths, parking, and restrooms.

This is a day to connect with community and make new friends! Introduce yourself to someone new, say hello to our vendors + healing practitioners, chat with a teacher after class. Everyone is excited to meet you! I know this can be intimidating and if you need some support, come find Nico, Michele, or Amelia. We will be happy to introduce you to someone that would be thrilled to get to know you!

 
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2026 LINEUP COMING SOON!

 2025 WILD HEART HERB FEST TEACHERS BELOW

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Mary Blue - Farmacy Herbs - Providence, RI

Hot Tincture Method

Many of you know Mary as a teacher, mentor, and prominent figure in our local herbalism community. Mary founded Farmacy Herbs 20 years ago and has been practicing herbalism since the 1990's. Mary has taught herbalism and farming at various local businesses, hospitals, events, universities, high schools, nursing homes, elementary schools, conferences, and for special interest groups and non-profits, locally and around the world.

Join Mary as she discusses her new hot tintcure method for making potent medicinal herbal extractions. In the Hot Tincture Method, the water part and alcohol part are extracted separately. The water part gets heated / decocted, and the alcohol is blended and cold extracted. Yes like a double extraction mushroom tincture.. but for EVERY tincture!

You do not want to miss this opportunity to learn from a herbal legend with a heart of gold and hear what I'm sure will be heartwarming + hilarious stories!

 
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Aliya Johnson - La Bohème Noir Co

Herbal Mixology

Aliya has had holistic wellness knowledge from a young age and aims to provide unique and fulfilling experiences to those she comes in contact with. Aliya is a self proclaimed “retired bartender” who has sought out ways to marry her love of bartending with her passion of wellbeing and healing for what she believes is a more enjoyable cocktail experience.

Join Aliya as she shows you how to incorporate herbs into mocktails and low abv (alcohol by volume) delicious cocktails. Discover the magic of identifying different herbs and understanding their flavor profiles. Learn how to infuse them into alcohol or non-alcoholic bases such as teas, syrups, or tonics. These drinks can be enjoyed at home, with friends and family, or added into any bar’s cocktail menu.

 
 

Amelia Andrade - Nourish with Amelia

Plant Allies: What They Are & How To Find Yours

Amelia is a folk herbalist with a passion for nourishing the sacred and wild relationship between people and plants. She draws from her year's spent apprenticing and studying under teachers of The Wise Woman Tradition of Healing, Nutritional Therapy, Restorative Yoga and Meditation Practices & the Earth herself. Guided by muses and curiosities in life, Amelia creates spaces that blend both the practical and the mystical so that you can experience the deliciousness of being both deeply grounded and wildly expansive as you remember and reclaim the sacred wisdom that is alive in you.

Are you ready to meet your next plant bestie? Gather for a chat about how to deepen relationship with the wisdom of the natural world. Explore how meeting a plant somatically and spiritually through language, meditation and intentional presence awakens within us a remembrance that the plants are our ancient and vibrant teachers.

 
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Abigail Rose Clarke - author + oracle deck creator

The Body is an Oracle

Abigail Rose Clarke is the author of the international bestseller Returning Home to Our Bodies: Reimagining the Relationship Between Our Bodies and the World and The Body Oracle Deck: 80 Invitations for Rediscovering Enchantment With Your Body and the Living World. A distinguished somatic educator and facilitator with a rich background in movement studies and embodied healing practices, her work centers on reconnecting individuals to their bodily wisdom as a means to foster personal and collective transformation.

The body is an oracle, full of magic and wisdom. Learning our own physiology as embodied poetry opens us to this magic we carry within us, in our own cells and tissues. In this workshop, you'll be guided into a somatic meditation that opens you to the potency of your own body as an oracle. We will be using The Body Oracle Deck, my own newly published deck.

Wild Heart Herb House is an important part of this deck's origin story, and it is an honor to bring it back here in its full and colorful glory. Brightly soulful and deeply rooted, The Body Oracle Deck is a somatic invitation to awe and wonder, a homecoming to nature and the body, and an antidote to despair.

 
 

Nico Lebreux - Wild Heart Herb House

Smoke Medicine + Smudge Bundles

For those of you who I am just becoming acquainted with, here is a little more info about me! I am a mom, community herbalist, earth centered entrepreneur, and self care advocate who specializes in teaching people how to deeply connect with all parts of themselves and the living world around them through simple techniques that are available to all. I hold space for my community to strengthen intuition, commune with the earth, and connect with source energy whatever that looks like and feels like for them. No expectations, no judgement, all are welcome!

Learn about smoke medicine and how to incorporate this powerful practice into your every day. We will also make smudge bundles with locally foraged herbs that you can take home!

It will be a true honor to sit with you at Haskell Gardens and share my radical self care plant medicine knowledge + experiences!

 
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Keri Cusson DeFusco - Perinatal Keri

Herbs for Babies + Children

Keri is a mom of two, home herbalist, yoga teacher, and mental health therapist. Throughout her adulthood, herbs have played a huge role in her self care and now her entire family’s wellbeing as well.

Herbs are for everyone, especially babies and children! Learn ways to incorporate herbs into your family's daily life with herbal medicines, healing foods and topical potions. Leave with more wisdom - recipes, resources and more.

 
 
 

Emily Lapolice

Land-based Embodiment Practice & Care Circle

Join Emily in a choice-based movement practice grounded in land, ritual, and plant medicine, accessible to all bodies. Rooted in Native practices and teachings gifted to Emily from Indigenous elders and relatives (Tsimshian, Lakota, and Cherokee to name a few), this sacred pause will invite inquiry and engagement with the land of our own bodies in a way that centers relationship, reciprocity and curiosity, while honoring our unique and collective experiences of this moment.

Emily Lapolice is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW), Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga-Facilitator (TCTSY-F), author, educator, and faculty member at the Center for Trauma and Embodiment in Boston, MA. She has been a psychotherapist for 20 years, specializing in complex and intergenerational trauma, perinatal mental health, and evidence culture-based embodiment practices. Emily holds ancestral lineage with the Mi’kmaq and Huron-Wendat First Nations Tribes of Eastern Canada, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and holds great reverence to the teachings and ways of being that have been gifted to her.

 
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Christin Ritz

Fermented Food as Medicine

Christin has been fermenting food for 2 decades, and some of her ferments have been alive for almost as long! A student of the non-credo macrobiotic philosophy, Christin believes in learning through lived experience. After many years of studying the energy of food and natural health, she created her Eating with the Elements online course about the energetics of food and the changing seasons. She also teaches classes and workshops on crystals and nine star ki astrology. Get to know her on instagram @thatritzylife

If you are attending Herbfest, you probably already see the medicinal plants around you as part of your more-than-human community. But what about the life you can't see? Fermented food is teeming with life! And yes, they actually live in communities! Learn about fermentation, why it happens, and how you can incorporate this incredible part of nature into your own eating habits for better health!

 
 

Maggie Hatzpanian - Maggie’s Healing Path

Edible + Medicinal Plant Walk

Introducing Maggie, a generous, nurturing, and incredibly caring human being. Maggie has been on a healing plant path for 20+ years, studying with many teachers, in many healing traditions. As an Herbalist she knows that always and forever, the plants themselves are the true teachers and guides for her healing and the healing she share with others

Stroll along the wild edges of Haskell Gardens with Maggie and identify edible and medicinal plants. We share our region and ecosystem with a variety of edible and medicincal plants. Learn how to identify these plants during this interactive and informative class. For the edible plants that are discovered, recipes will be shared, so you can discover how to consume on your own. Questions are highly encouraged and hearing your uses and recipes we see are most welcomed!

 
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Zulay Holland - Zu’s Wurld

The Peoples Apothecary: Zine Build

Zu is an interdisciplinary artist and lover of people and medicine. Their work in centered on exploring the healing possibilities of self and community expression though community art events and workshops around zine making.

In this class we will be looking at the medicine and wisdom that we all carry with us, and creating a collective zine to share with our communities. There is also the option to create a personal zine to take home! Each participant will get a digital file of the zine and a copy to keep.

 

 WILD HEART HERB FEST PRICING + TICKETS:

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This is a community event that we want to be accessible to all, so there is a sliding scale admission of $0-90 for the day, with a suggested price of $45. This money goes directly to the organizing of the event and funding other free/low price events at Wild Heart.

The link below will allow you to register for $1.00 and up. To attend for free, email wild.heart.herb.house@gmail.com.

click here to sign up for wild heart herb fest!

When you click the above link you will see the price set to our suggested admission amount of $45, but you can click the "change amount" button under the price and event description to adjust to a different price that you are effortlessly able to pay!

Tickets to Wild Heart Herb Fest are NON-REFUNDABLE but they ARE TRANSFERABLE so if you can’t make it after you purchase a ticket, you can send a friend in your stead!

In the unlikely event that Herb Fest gets cancelled all together the money you paid for your ticket can be used as store credit at Wild Heart Herb House.

Please also note that access to the gardens, vendors, healing practitioners is free! (vendors + practitioners will charge their own rates for products and services.) Your purchased ticket to Wild Heart Herb Fest includes admission to all classes and workshops.

 

 2026 LINEUP COMING SOON!

2025 WILD HEART HERB FEST PRACTITIONERS + ARTISANS:

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Michele Marcus Dew - Solidago Collaborative

Rest Nest + Sensory Garden Sessions

A bodywork experience to slow down in deep presence with yourself, with the land, and the seasons. This 25 minute treatment is guided by plant kin to ease the whole being into a restorative space of deep rest and connection. We will be utilizing plant-infused oils, warm stones, dried florals to bathe the body in sound, fresh flowers for body brushing, and botanical cordials to awaken taste. All while lying on a cozy mat in the gardens immersed and held by nature! Book your Rest Nest experience here!

Michele Marcus-Dew (she/they) is an herbalist, gardener, artist, mother, and kitchen witch of Jewish Eastern European diasporic lineage, currently planted and finding their way on Wampanoag Land, also known as New Bedford, MA. She moves and yearns in devotion to the plants and more-than-human world as a way of re-membering, and can often be found thumbing through one of her many emotional support bookstacks.

 
 

Cristy O’Brien - Elements Learning Collaborative

Nature Art Making in the Gardens

Cristy is the Co Founder of Elements Learning Collaborative, a local, holistic, nature based educational non-profit, educator, and nature enthusiast with a mission to bring holistic nature based education to our southcoast community. She is also a woman, mother, life long learner and educator. I’m inspired, wowed, and grounded by the natural world.

At Herb Fest Cristy will be guiding participants through Open-Ended Nature Inspired Process Art. Enjoy art materials, tools & wild flowers for Herb Fest visitors to sit and enjoy shadow sketching, water colors, and more. Ground and balance through play and exploration with plants & water color.

 
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Lauren Fiske - Moonpath Wellness

Thai Bodywork

Amidst the magic of Wild Heart Herb Fest, gift yourself a moment of deep care with a 20-minute Holistic Thai Bodywork Mini-Session en plein air with emerging bodyworker and brain health advocate Lauren Fiske, MSc, RYT.

Surrounded by nature, these sessions weave together rhythmic stretching, acupressure, and energy line work to melt tension, improve flexibility, and help you land gently back in your body.

Sign up day of, or email lauren@moonpathwellness.com to learn more—your nervous system will thank you!

 
 

Ashleigh Marie - A Fearless World

Original Poetry Art + Signed Books

Ashleigh Marie, is a New England based artist, writer, poet, mother, entrepreneur, small business owner, and healing practitioner. Ashleigh has a deep love for art, music, nature and community. Her first book, Where The Woods Meet The Sea, is an anthology of her original poetry that captures the depths of emotions through her growth and healing journey. Nature themes and their teachings through the seasons are interwoven throughout her writing. Ashleigh has been sharing her original poetry art in community since 2023 at local artisan markets, festivals, spoken poetry events, and is currently working on her second book!

At Herb Fest Ashleigh will be offering her original typewriter poetry art framed in various sizes (some hand painted), hand painted reminder magnets, and signed copies of her original poetry anthology Where The Woods Meet The Sea.

 
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Faeth Diver - The Faerest Realm

Upcycled Faerie Fashion and Adornments

Your local faerie godmother and stitch witch here, offering one-of-a-kind wearable creations to help you express your full self! Discover lovingly reclaimed second-hand gems transformed with plant dye and cut into playful silhouettes fit for dragons and unicorns...

The Faerest Realm offers handcrafted goods and enchanted experiences inspired by the Fae and the forest, from plant-dyed silks and shimmering potions to woodland rituals and seasonal gatherings. Each creation is a portal, inviting you to remember your magic + deepen relationship with the kingdom of Nature.

 
 

Melanie Houghton - Flower Mood

Local Herbal Remedies

Flower Mood is a seasonally inspired apothecary created in rhythm with nature, created by herbalist Melanie Houghton. Organically grown herbs are sourced at their peak from local farms, gardens, and sustainably minded companies. Everything is intentionally made in Massachusetts.

At Herb Fest Melanie will be offering plant-based elixirs, tea, and body care products such as salves, oils, body butter.

 
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Maggie Hatzpanian - Maggie’s Healing Path

Herbal Apothecary Products

Maggie is a RI based Herbalist and product maker. Being an herbal educator, having a background in nursing, combined with recent training in yoga and mediation are the things that keep Maggie happy and healthy. Maggie’s Healing Path was created to share all of these pieces with customers, students and clients.

During the Wild Heart Herb Fest Maggie will be teaching an Edible + Medicinal Plant Walk class along the along the wild edges of Haskell Gardens. She will also be offering hand-made herbal apothecary items such as teas, skin care, massage products and more. Adaptogen & ImmuneSupport Electuaries are my newest & very popular addition to my apothecary!

 
 

Crystal Pacheco - Crystals Holistic Garden

Local Herbal Remedies

Hi! I’m Crystal and I craft herbal remedies from the herbs in my garden and herbs found in our local surrounding area. My wish for you is that you find safety and ease in my offerings for your every day life. I would love to talk about how herbs can help you not only feel good, but to help you thrive in your day to day. Come say hi!

At Herb Fest I will be offering herbal remedies from the herbs in my garden including tinctures, salves, and oils. I’ll also have house plants, smudge sticks, limited crystals, and random herbal bath and body items.

 
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