Native Plant Inspirations
Experience the healing power of the forest and explore the world of native plants through touch, smell and taste. Learn how to ethically harvest wild food and medicine plants yourself and make herbal remedies to take home.
Foraged Tea Materials Learning Circle next to Grandmother Cedar Forest Bathing Salve-making Planting Oregon Grape
Program Overview
Availability
Year round
Location(s)
Millard Learning Centre
Recommended Grades
Grades K-12
Curriculum Links
- First People’s traditional ecological knowledge, sustainable cultivation practices and use of native plants for food and medicine
- Applied Plant Science field skills and ecological restoration
- Sustainable food systems (Permaculture and Agroforestry) and Climate Change
UN Sustainable Development Goals
- 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production
- 13 – Climate Action
- 15 – Life on Land
Program Highlights
People-Plant Relationships
Grow an awareness of how you use plants in your daily life and compare and contrast this with others’ experiences. Help care for native plants traditionally used by Coast Salish peoples within the Nuts’a’maat Forage Forest by lending a hand with weeding, pruning and seed collection. Learn about traditional Coast Salish uses of plants such as Western Red Cedar, Camas, and Soapberry (X’Pey, speenhw, Sxuesum – Hul’qumi’num) through an interactive search & find game in the Forage Forest.
Forest Bathing
Experience the healing power of nature as we practice sit spots, sound mapping and breathing together. These simple nature-based awareness practices will help you tune into your class’s emotions and soothe daily anxieties.
Sensory-Based Native Plant Identification
Use your sight, smell, touch and taste senses to identify edible and medicinal wild, native plants. Take home a nature journal where you record all your observations.
Foraged Teas and Salves
Learn the basics of ethical and sustainable foraging. Harvest wild native plants like Douglas-fir and Yerba Buena and make your very own forest tea or a topical herbal healing ointment (salve).
Take Home Materials
For continued learning at home, each participant will receive a nature journal and a sample of the dried herbal forest tea or a native plant salve they made throughout the day.
Prices
Costs per group for day and overnight programs
FAQs
How to get here, what to bring, how to prepare
Bursaries
We can offer financial help to groups in need
Register
Are you ready to book your program?
To finish off this special day, we harvested Douglas Fir shoots, Yerba Buena and trailing blackberry leaves to make hot tea. We even made some tea ourselves to bring home. This was a highlight for many of the students. When we sat in a circle at the end of the program, many of the kids said they wanted to continue learning about native plants and their properties and we did! Five days after [our camp with the Conservancy], we hosted a tea gathering for local elders. The children and youth were able to harvest many of the plants they had learned about with the Galiano Conservancy Association and shared their benefits with the elders.
– Carmen, SOS Children’s Village Leader
From this field trip I learned about edible native plant species and how to harvest them respectfully. I didn’t know so many plants were edible!
– Megan, Age 14
