Jack in the Green Weeds Lab: Intro to Community Herbalism

About

Gathering in a lush garden in St Leonards to enjoy some rest and respite from the busy festivities of May Day and Jack In The Green, this event will be a chance to replenish our energy and tap back into our embodied experiences. The day will contain: lounging on inflatable beds in the garden; a herbal explorations game offered by Gravy; Mayla giving a short talk about the history of May Day, Jack In The Green, labour & land; a Beltane ritual; sharing food; and practicing being in symbiotic community with each other.

There will be delicious herbal drinks, and vegetable soup. Feel welcome to bring food offerings for us to share together too; if you are bringing food, please also make a label indicating the ingredients.

We believe that the way we secure our future as marginalised folk is to look after each other and ourselves to the best of our ability, getting wildly resourceful & reclaiming abilities + know-how that the machine of colonial capitalism has been severing us from for generations. Let's make some magic together!

This event is a fundraiser for the recovery of a POC queer migrant student from abuse, and some of the proceeds will also go towards Mayla's train tickets (as they recently moved to Sheffield and are travelling back here for this event!) as well as the materials for putting on the event. We welcome you to recognise your own capacity to be a conduit of wealth right now, and offer support accordingly - buying tickets is a vital form of financial mutual aid that these sessions facilitate.

Friends and collaborators Gravy, Ash & Mayla invite you into a garden for an afternoon of exploration. We will be practicing collective care within the hours of this lab, beginning & consolidating the mycelial networks of us that extend outside of this garden in time & place - building strong, resilient networks of community where we make & share medicines & strategies to look after ourselves and each other.
all depths / qualities / kinds of prior knowledge welcome. This will be a forgetting-, confused- and not-knowing- friendly space! kids welcome, please take responsibility for the ones you bring :) Please do *not* bring dogs, as a dog lives here and doesn't get on with other dogs!
Please COVID test beforehand, and do not attend if you have any viral symptoms. We will have some LFTs that we will require you to complete if you haven't independently tested negative in the past day.

Access info: there are a total of 10 steps [4,5,1] down into the main part of the garden and then a fairly steep grassy slope down to where we'll be.
The toilet in the house is available to be used, which is down the first 4 steps from street level (and 6 steps up from the top of the garden).
The vast majority of the day will be spent in the bottom of the garden where it's flat and quite sheltered from the wind, and we can bring back samples of any plants we look at on the upper levels! If you have any specific access questions please contact us at 07752875073 or maylawestward@pm.me.

Arrival from 12:30, starting at 1pm - if the COVID tests at the front of the house are unattended and you are yet to recently test negative, please administer one yourself and wait the full 15-30 minutes to see the result