Wild Herb Academy is an online school of botany, wild herbalism, and plant medicine founded by botanist and herbalist April Punsalan, who has been studying herbalism since 1997 and spent years working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service, protecting rare and endangered plant species before founding the school. After 15+ years as a botanist, she realized that there is infinite medicine with little human connection. Her work today focuses on native regional medicine, teaching students a framework for learning the plants of their own bioregion by relying on direct sensory observation and herbal energetics rather than memorized materia medica, helping students embody what they learn.
Our curriculum includes medical botany, wild plant identification, foraging, and medicine making, and draws on Ayurvedic herbal energetics alongside Western botanical science to help students understand plant actions and constitution, not just isolated properties. We help herbalists and plant lovers move beyond memorizing herb properties and relying on jars of dried plant material to develop direct, working knowledge of the living medicine in their own landscape — reading plant family patterns and ecological relationships to understand medicinal use in context. Many Medical Botany graduates go on to teach and form herbal businesses
Wild Herb Academy has two main offerings: The Wild Herb Academy Membership that includes a plant portal of 60+ wild herbs, and our signature Medical Botany course.