By Agy Merkel
People do not usually learn plants in one clean, official way. Most of us gather knowledge in layers. A book leads to a question. A question leads to a field guide. A field guide leads to a garden, or a walk, or a late-night search for answers when something in the body feels off and we want to understand why. Formal programs can offer structure, but they rarely account for the way knowledge actually settles into the body, which happens through repetition, context, and lived experience.
Herbal learning has always lived in these overlapping spaces. It moves through kitchens, through conversations, through apprenticeships, through personal experimentation, and through the slow process of noticing what plants do over time. In recent years, digital spaces have become another place where this kind of layered learning happens—not as a replacement for relationship with land or plants, but as an extension of the conversations that have always shaped herbal knowledge. In these spaces, people ask questions publicly, test ideas against both research and experience, and build understanding gradually, in community.
I write from the perspective of someone who facilitates one such space: a Substack publication called The Buffalo Herbalist, where nearly seven thousand readers engage with herbal education that bridges traditional practice and modern research. My background includes medical training in Poland and a graduate degree in herbal medicine, and my teaching aims to make plant chemistry, physiology, and traditional use accessible to people who may not have clinical training but who want to understand how herbs actually work in the body. What I have observed in this community offers a useful lens for thinking about how contemporary herbalists come into relationship with plants and with each other.
How Learning Unfolds in Open Digital Spaces
People rarely arrive with tidy, textbook questions. They come with lab results that do not make sense to them, symptoms that have lingered longer than expected, or a feeling that something in their body is off even when nothing obvious shows up on paper. They are not usually looking for a list of herbs. They are looking for understanding.
What unfolds from there tends to look less like instruction and more like collective reasoning. A question invites context. Context invites physiology. Physiology invites discussion of preparation, dosage, safety, and individual variability. Readers contribute their own experiences, sometimes confirming what research suggests, sometimes complicating it. Over time, the archive of these exchanges begins to function less like a series of posts and more like a layered body of knowledge shaped by participation.
This process mirrors how plant knowledge has historically accumulated. Familiarity with a plant grows not from a single encounter but from returning to it in different seasons, different bodies, and different contexts. Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) offers a good example. When I published a detailed article on the plant, covering its chemistry, its mechanisms of action, and the clinical research behind its use, the comment section became its own form of education. Readers shared how the herb had worked for them or had not. Some described unexpected responses. Others asked about timing, form, or whether it was appropriate alongside their medications. One person raised a question about thyroid stimulation that led to a longer thread about individual variability and the importance of context before supplementation. What began as a single article became a conversation that held far more nuance than any one text could contain on its own.
This is how understanding deepens in digital spaces. The plant becomes familiar not because it was memorized but because it was revisited from multiple angles, through research, through personal experience, and through the kind of careful questioning that emerges when people feel safe enough to say what they do not yet understand. Digital spaces, when used this way, support that slow accumulation rather than replace it.
Why This Model Fits Herbalism
Herbal medicine does not lend itself easily to single-source authority. Preparation changes chemistry. Dosage shifts effect. Individual physiology shapes response. Climate, soil, and timing influence potency. Because of this, herbal knowledge has always required a form of learning that stays flexible and attentive rather than fixed.
When learning unfolds through ongoing dialogue rather than proclamation, there is room to hold both evidence and uncertainty. That flexibility reflects the nature of herbal medicine more faithfully than a fixed curriculum alone can. Clinical research offers valuable guidance, yet it rarely captures the full range of how herbs are used in lived practice. Conversation allows the space between research and experience to be explored rather than ignored.
There is also an accessibility component that matters here. Formal herbal education can be transformative, yet it remains financially and geographically out of reach for many people. Comprehensive programs may cost thousands of dollars. Apprenticeships require proximity. Intensive workshops assume flexibility of schedule that not everyone has. Digital spaces allow individuals to participate in plant learning alongside their existing responsibilities, in their own regions, and at their own pace. This does not replace hands-on experience with plants or land. It creates an entry point that can eventually lead people toward deeper ecological relationship rather than away from it.
For a field rooted in observation, adaptation, and relational knowledge, learning environments that remain open-ended may offer a closer match to the nature of the work itself. Herbal practice depends less on memorizing lists of indications and more on recognizing relationships between systems, patterns, and plant actions. When learning unfolds through repeated exposure and dialogue, those relationships become easier to see. The process trains observation rather than rote recall.
Community, Access, and Who Gets to Learn
One of the more unexpected outcomes of open digital herbal education is the type of community it tends to attract. When learning is not tied to certification, hierarchy, or formal lineage, the atmosphere shifts. People participate out of curiosity, care, and lived need rather than professional obligation. Questions come from parents trying to support their children, from people navigating chronic illnesses, from practitioners in adjacent fields, and from those who simply want to understand the plants growing around them.
This does not diminish the value of formal herbal programs or apprenticeship-based learning. Hands-on study, mentorship, and clinical training offer depth that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Yet when access to herbal knowledge is framed primarily through certification or lineage, the field can unintentionally narrow itself. Cost, geography, and social networks begin to determine who feels permitted to learn, rather than curiosity or relationship to plants.
In many regions, herbal certification carries no formal regulatory weight. What it often represents is a form of cultural legitimacy. While this can help maintain standards, it can also create an atmosphere where knowledge is treated as something conferred rather than cultivated. People may feel that unless they trained under the right teacher or completed the right program, their learning is somehow incomplete.
Open educational spaces tend to soften this boundary. They allow people to enter the conversation at different points in their lives, with different goals, and with different relationships to plants. Some will go on to pursue formal training. Others will deepen their learning through gardening, reading, or community practice. Still others will carry a more informed awareness of plant medicine into their daily lives. All of these pathways have value. Herbal knowledge has historically survived because it was shared widely, not because it was restricted. When educational spaces make room for multiple entry points, they help restore the sense that plant learning belongs to communities rather than credentials.
Ethics and Responsibilities
Open learning environments bring real opportunities, yet they also carry responsibilities. When herbal information circulates widely and quickly, the context that traditionally surrounded plant knowledge can thin out. A preparation appropriate for one person may not suit another. A dose that appears gentle in isolation may interact with medications or underlying conditions in ways that are not obvious at first glance. Without careful framing, shared knowledge can easily be mistaken for universal guidance.
For those facilitating these spaces, the role shifts from instructor to steward. Information needs to be presented with enough depth to support understanding, but also with enough humility to acknowledge limits. Citations, safety notes, and clear explanations of variability become part of the teaching itself. Rather than offering fixed answers, the goal becomes helping people learn how to ask better questions about plants, bodies, and context.
There is also the question of lineage and attribution. Much of herbal knowledge originates in specific cultural and ecological traditions. When teaching in public spaces, it becomes important to name those roots when possible and to avoid presenting inherited practices as newly discovered insights. Ethical transmission involves recognizing that plant knowledge is rarely individual property. It is something carried forward through many hands.
Finally, there is a responsibility to encourage relationship rather than consumption. Digital learning can make herbs feel like products rather than living organisms embedded in ecosystems. Good teaching can help counter this by emphasizing sourcing, sustainability, and the environmental realities that shape plant medicine. When learners understand that herbs exist within landscapes rather than on shelves, their relationship to plants tends to deepen. Digital spaces do not eliminate these responsibilities. If anything, they make them more visible. Teaching in public invites accountability, which can strengthen the integrity of herbal education when approached thoughtfully.
Widening the Circle
Herbal knowledge has never belonged to a single pathway. It has always moved through people, through landscapes, through moments of need and curiosity. Some learn through teachers, some through books, some through gardens, and many through a combination that only makes sense in hindsight. What matters is not the format through which learning begins, but whether it deepens relationship over time.
Digital spaces are one more place where that relationship can take root. They do not replace land, mentorship, or hands-on practice. They widen the circle of who feels welcome to begin. They make space for people who may never pursue certification yet still carry plant knowledge into their families, their communities, and their daily lives. They allow learning to remain something shared rather than guarded, something cultivated rather than conferred. And in doing so, they reconnect herbal education with its oldest impulse: the passing of knowledge through whoever is willing to pay attention.
If herbalism continues to endure, it will likely do so the way it always has through people paying attention, asking questions, and passing what they learn forward. The mediums may change, but the impulse remains the same. Plants invite relationship. Learning follows wherever that invitation is taken seriously.
Agy is an herbal educator, writer, and researcher trained in both conventional medicine and herbal practice. She holds an MD and an MSc in Herbal Medicine, and her work focuses on bridging physiology, clinical reasoning, and plant medicine. She writes a widely read herbal education publication where she explores contemporary pathways of learning, safety, and community-based herbal practice. She is based in Buffalo, New York.
