What it means & How to become an Herbalist

Herbalists in Our Community

Who are we? Who are we really? There may be some romantic idea in your head about what being an herbalist means. Maybe you see an old woman living on the edge of the woods, long white hair, her animals following her, her basket full. Maybe you see someone sitting in a lab, brewing tinctures, adding herbs to a pot. Perhaps you see a wise scholar sitting behind ancient texts written in lost languages.

These are but a few of the dreamy notions that can become an herbalist. In these modern times we fill many roles and it is important for you to find your specific niche as you take on the very serious and well respected title: HERBALIST

SO who are we?

People of all kinds can be herbalists. This is just a short list of professions where you can integrate your herbal practice, creating a unique, diverse, and holistic offering in the world.

Advocates, Aromatherapists, Apothecary Owners, Bar Tenders, Biologists, Botanists, Brand Owners, Brand Representatives, Chefs, Chemists, Chiropractors, Clinicians, Community Herbalists, Conservationists, Diviners, Ecologists, Estheticians, Ethnobotanists, Ethnomycologists, Family Herbalists, Farmers, Formulators, Gardeners, Landscape Designers, Life Coaches, Marketing & Sales, Massage Therapists, Medical Doctors, Medicine Makers, Mixologists, Mycologists, Naturopaths, Nurses, Permaculturists, Personal Trainers, Researchers, Shamans/Witches, Teachers, Veterinarians, Writers, Yoga Teachers.

An Herbalism practice is as diverse as a meadow. There is no one way to practice or to bring plants to people’s lives. What it does take is a creative motivation and some training in order to practice in a way that is within your scope of expertise and legal framework for your bioregion.

How to get started

There are infinite ways to learn herbalism. I found my first class looking at an announcement board in Whole Foods. There was a woman in my neighborhood offering a six month course that met every other week. We did plant walks and had some lectures, as well as a very basic foundational medicine making class. By that time I had already been reading various books and taking herbs myself based on my personal needs. Reading and studying from books is a great way to learn on your own. Some of my favorite books for getting started:

The Herbal Lore of Wise Women and Wortcunners, Wolf Storl
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask, Mary Siisip Geniusz
Planetary Herbology, Michael Tierra
Vitalism, Matthew Wood
The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner

And a regional field guide for your own bioregion, whatever exists for where you live

In your community it is a good idea to check out local community event boards for plant foraging and walks. This is a great way to get to know your bioregion and connect with the living systems right around you. You definitely want to have a plant and tree field guide for your area, as well as gathering resources to learn about the local flora, fauna, insects, soil conditions, water shed, and the stories of the original peoples.

A natural step is taking a formal class or training.

There are so many amazing teachers out there. The key is to find the one whose ethos you feel aligned with, and whose teaching style feels right to you, and which course timeline fits your own schedule.

There are in person classes, which typically open you up to a more embodied experience, though I will say, my long formal training was all lecture. At the time, it worked for me, because I wasn’t so far out of university that I was still accustomed to sitting in class and listening. That can work for some people. And on the other hand, a fully hands-on class will be lacking in the critical philosophy and application reasoning that is needed for understanding the reason for why we are doing what we are.

The limitation of in person trainings are location, time and cost. At the time, I was lucky to have a woman in my neighborhood offering a class, and when I did longer, formal studies, I was able to commute an hour each way for two years. Many herbalism classes require travel and accommodation. This may or may not fit into your budget and timeline. Often classes, trainings and retreats have to give more than 50% of their entire tuition to a center for hospitality, that is, meals and accommodations. Then with fees, materials, and marketing, the teacher is left with just around 10% of the tuition cost. And that isnt a bad thing, because there are so many beautiful places to study and amazing people stewarding land projects and community. So when you chose an in person training or retreat, look at the whole picture of not just the teacher, but where they are hosting it and who those people are. 

Online studies are a great way to learn herbalism. Especially when there is a majority live component. When the course is 100% evergreen, meaning pre-recorded that you can watch on your own time, the completion rate is typically very low. In these cases we only have ourselves to be accountable to, which means, we can justify why we can’t make it, give it the time, or why we will get to it later. When we have to show up live, we have another layer of accountability, to our teacher and to our fellow students. And even then, the completion rate is pretty low. But the biggest benefit of being live online is that you often get direct access to the teacher. I always suggest going for smaller classes of 40 or less people. When we join mass enrollment courses with hundreds of students, you will not have direct access to the faculty, all your questions will often be fielded by assistants, and you will lack a one on one relationship with your teacher.

What is important is that you are honest with yourself in terms of how much time you can really dedicate to the study, and to know that there are very few certificates that mean anything beyond a completion of hours.

Certification in herbalism has variable meanings depending on where you are studying and practicing. And below you can see an outline of where herbalism is accredited or not.

About the hours

What we say in the herbalist community is that to become an Herbalist with a capital H, meaning someone who holds themselves to a higher standard of accountability in practice, rather than an herbalist who works with plants in their own home and life, you need around 5000 hours of study and practice.

That number gets thrown around a lot, and it is worth knowing where the formal standards actually sit, because they are lower. The American Herbalists Guild, which is the closest thing we have to a professional standard in the United States, asks for roughly 800 hours of herbal education plus 400 hours of clinical practice with at least 80 to 100 individual clients over a minimum of two years, in order to apply for Registered Herbalist status. And RH is peer review, not a license. So the community standard of 5000 hours is not a credential requirement, but a cultural one. It is us saying to each other that the paperwork minimum is not the same thing as being ready.

5000 hours may feel daunting. That is seven months of 24/7 study and practice with literally no sleep. And of course we can’t do that, we need to live and rest. It was about ten years into my practice and study when I finally felt confident to start working with people. In that time, I had been attending conferences, took a 500 hour, 2 year course, was constantly reading, and was working in the wellness industry as a brand rep and on the sales floor of health food stores in the supplement departments.

Your practice will take time to emerge, and your study will take you various places and come in waves of excited immersion and months of not even looking at a book or plants. And when we take classes, we can count each of those as hours toward our goal. So when facilitators and classes offer a certificate, it is not a certificate that awards you access to a career, but one that you can add to your portfolio of hours.

The path to mastery, and I use this word for lack of a better one in this context, always takes years of deep dedication, whether expressed through cultural traditions, scientific data, or historic systems. In Japan, the cultural concept of the Takumi, the master craftsman, is spoken of as a lifelong devotion of roughly 20 to 25 years to achieve true refinement in a trade. Europe’s traditional guild system historically required an apprentice to undergo about seven years of strict, daily labor under a master’s watch before they could advance to working independently.

About the famous 10,000 hour rule.

This was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, and it has been repeated so many times that it now functions as folk wisdom. It came from research by a psychologist named Anders Ericsson, who studied violinists at a music academy in Berlin. Though, Ericsson spent the rest of his career saying Gladwell got it wrong. His words were that there never was a 10,000 hour rule, and that the number came from a series of misinterpretations. What he found was that the strongest students had accumulated roughly that many hours by their early twenties.

In 2014 a team led by Brooke Macnamara ran a meta-analysis across 88 studies asking how much of the difference between people is actually explained by practice hours. The answer was 26% for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. Meaning that in professional fields, which is what we are, hours logged explained almost nothing about who was good at the work. Ericsson pushed back hard on how they defined practice, and that argument is still going. But nobody in it claims that hours alone make the practitioner.

I bring this up because I think the research is telling us what the plants already told us. Putting in the hours doesn’t mean growth or broader systemic and holistic understanding. Nor does it speak to the value of practice in the field, and the acceleration that happens when we merge study with hands-on learning.

If you want a rough orientation for what hours can look like, this is how people generally talk about it, and I offer it as a shape and not as dogma:

• 500 hours gets you to a solid intermediate level where you can start to confidently assess and assist clients with the admission of student in practice.
• 1000 to 2000 hours often marks professional competency, is a strong foundation for your professional practice.
• 5000 hours puts you in an advanced tier, capable of handling complex cases
• 10,000 and beyond is associated with a level of mastery that can feel confident in teaching, and mentoring, as well as continued field practice.

Practice proves you wrong and makes you ask more questions. It shows us nuance and difference in plants, people, and ecosystems. This is also where it is so important to work with a teacher, mentor, or coach. They help you see your strengths and weak points or limitations, and they are there to share with you their years of service and field practice. The most important thing in working with a teacher is that they should never be your only one, and they should honor their own fallacy. No one is perfect, and if they are trying to position themselves as the know all and end all, RUN. This is guruism at its absolute worst, and where mastery becomes a dynamic of power over another in the service of ego.

It is also important to know that repetition of a trade and doing the grunt work matters. That means sometimes we sit there for hours scraping and scrubbing bottles. We get mold in our infusions and lose whole batches. We miss the harvest because we had to work or were caught up in other life events. And we can push those hours ahead through intense focus and modern study tools.

Can I be an herbalist

In many places there is no certified training for becoming an herbalist. This is limited to just a handful of countries and in many places the practice is in the grey zone. And that is ok. Herbalism is inherently a decentralized community, practice and profession. It was power over systems of oppression that systematically tried to erase both women and indigenous peoples, and with that, our relationship with plants and with the land as a living, giving part of the greater cosmovision. So when the state attempts to oppress further and regulate herbalism as a practice, they essentially took a sacred, and yes scientific, practice of the people, and made it sterile and purely clinical. And I am a proponent of clinical herbalism, this is an important option for humans to have in health care, and there are some amazing clinicians out there with excellent practices.

Here is where things actually stand around the world, as of 2026.

State license specific to herbal medicine

• Ghana is the cleanest example for Western-style clinical herbalism. KNUST runs a four-year BSc in Herbal Medicine, graduates do a supervised internship and sit a qualifying exam, and are then licensed by the Traditional Medicine Practice Council under the Ministry of Health as Medical Herbalists. Roughly 55 government hospitals have herbal units staffed by them.
• South Africa registers Phytotherapy as a statutory allied health profession under the AHPCSA. The qualifying route is three years of basic medical sciences plus a two-year specialisation, offered at the University of the Western Cape. Registration is compulsory, not voluntary.
• India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan license through the AYUSH systems. Only holders of a BAMS or BUMS degree can obtain a licence as a Registered Ayurvedic or Unani Medical Practitioner, with registration through state boards. Siddha, the BSMS, works the same way. Entry is through NEET, the same medical entrance exam as MBBS.
• China, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam license TCM and Korean Medicine doctors through parallel medical degree tracks with full diagnostic and prescribing authority.
• Australia regulates Chinese herbal medicine but not Western herbalism. Registration is through Ahpra in one or more of three divisions: acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and Chinese herbal dispensing, with protected titles.
• Canada is provincial and TCM-only, in British Columbia and Ontario. In BC, the standalone TCM college was folded into the new College of Complementary Health Professionals of BC on June 28, 2024, as part of a province-wide restructuring that merged eleven health colleges into two. TCM practitioners and acupuncturists are still regulated, just under a bigger roof now. Ontario’s college survived a 2022 attempt to dissolve it, when the government reversed course, and CTCMPAO is still operating.
• Germany licenses the Heilpraktiker, which is the widest-scope non-physician route in Europe. Only licensed medical professionals or registered Heilpraktiker may practise any form of medicine including CAM, and Heilpraktiker training itself is unregulated but candidates must pass an exam before a health authority. The license is general rather than herb-specific, so phytotherapy sits inside it.
• Switzerland has an analogous federal diploma in naturopathy with a Traditional European Naturopathy stream.

Accredited degrees, no license

• Ireland has the Irish Register of Herbalists, which sets a core curriculum: minimum four years part-time or three years full-time, with specified minimum hours per module. It is the only all-Ireland body, covering all 32 counties and open to all herbal traditions.
• New Zealand is state-accredited, one institution only. South Pacific College of Natural Medicine is NZQA accredited to offer the Bachelor of Natural Medicine and a Level 4 certificate, with degree graduates able to practise as naturopaths and medical herbalists. NZAMH confirms this bluntly: SPCNM is the only college currently operating in New Zealand that it recognises. Its standard is at least three years full-time, plus 30 CPD hours annually and a current first aid certificate.
• In the United States, no state licenses herbalists as such. The three credentialed workarounds are ND licensure (26 jurisdictions, comprising 23 states plus DC, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, requiring an accredited four-year school and the NPLEX), L.Ac. with NCCAOM Chinese Herbology certification, or a non-licensing graduate degree from Bastyr or from Notre Dame of Maryland University. Maryland University of Integrative Health, which everyone in this field knew by name, was absorbed into Notre Dame of Maryland University, and MUIH’s own accreditation formally ceased in January 2026. The MS in Clinical Herbal Medicine survived the merger and now lives inside NDMU’s School of Integrative Health. Same faculty, different letterhead. AHG Registered Herbalist status remains peer review, not a license.
• In the UK, degrees exist but the profession is unregulated. There is no statutory regulation system for herbal practitioners. The 2011 commitment to bring HCPC oversight was never enacted, and by 2015 the government position was that an evidence-based case for statutory regulation had not been made. The university infrastructure has largely collapsed: UCLan, UEL, Westminster, Middlesex, Napier and the Scottish School of Herbal Medicine are all closed to new applications. But the training did not disappear, it relocated. NIMH currently accredits independent programmes including Betonica’s four-year practitioner training and the BSc in Clinical Herbalism at Lincoln College, which is validated by the Open University. So the route is still there, it just runs outside the universities now.

The rest of the world, well. You get to be a pirate. And I am all for that, because eff the State. But being a pirate has its own code, and that is what the next section is about.

What it means to be in practice

Many people are hobby herbalists, or family herbalists, and that is great. We want people practicing herbalism in the home as a way of caring for their families and connecting to the ecosystem.

Community Herbalism is often answering questions by text or phone call. Receiving weird photos and offering suggestions. It’s having a working apothecary for folks to stop by and get their medicines, it’s bandaging wounds, poulticing rashes, and showing people around their yards. It’s usually free, sometimes bartered, almost always available.

Clinical Herbalism is spending hours on someone’s case. Digging through their physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and cultural history. Helping them to untangle the roots of why they feel distressed, imbalanced or dis-eased. It’s helping them create sustainable and accessible protocols with diet, lifestyle, supplements, herbal and myco formulas. It’s hours of preparation, and decades of study and practice. This is paid work, what enables the community work to be available.

You can be in practice. What is important is to know your legal limits. As herbalists we are not allowed to diagnose or prescribe. We can assess and suggest. We can do intakes and take a look at lab work. We help people understand their supplement regime and dietary program. We formulate herbs and help people understand how they will affect their bodies.

Working as an herbalist means you have natural counseling skills, an ability to actively listen, critically think, hold deep empathy as well as healthy boundaries. We may be triggered by a client. Does that affect how we are able to help them? Sometimes. But that is where we learn how to be discerning.

One of the most important aspects of practicing as an herbalist is knowing your limits, or what we call your scope. This is knowing what we have the ability to handle or help with and what we don’t. When we push beyond our scope of practice we actually hurt the whole community of herbalists by making people question our integrity. One person can hurt the collective and sow the seeds of distrust. This is why it is important for younger herbalists, while excited by their practice, to not parrot claims, push ideologies, or try to stake their new found insights as mastery.

So as we operate in the grey zone, being impeccable with your words and actions is critical to the survival of our community.

The unglamorous part nobody tells you about

If you are going to see people, there is a stack of practical infrastructure that has nothing to do with plants and everything to do with staying in practice long enough to be useful. This is the part that gets skipped in almost every herbal training, and it is the part that protects both you and your client.

Liability insurance. Professional and general liability coverage exists for herbalists and is not expensive relative to what it protects. Get it before you see your first paying client, not after something goes sideways. Check what your specific policy actually covers in your country, because coverage for herbal practice varies widely and some policies exclude the thing you actually do.

A client agreement and informed consent. In writing, signed, before the first session. It should say plainly what you do and do not do, that you do not diagnose or prescribe, that you are not a replacement for medical care, that the client is responsible for telling their doctor what they are taking, and what your cancellation and payment terms are. This is not distrust, it is clarity. Most conflicts come from mismatched expectations, and a good agreement prevents most of them before they start.

Record keeping. Intake forms, session notes, formulas dispensed with dates and dosages, any changes over time. Keep them secure and keep them consistent. If a client has a reaction, your notes are the difference between knowing what happened and guessing. They are also how you learn, because your own records over five years will teach you things no book will.

Referral relationships. Find at least one MD, ND, midwife, or therapist you trust and can send people to. Knowing your scope is meaningless if you have nowhere to send someone when they exceed it. And when you refer well, you build the credibility of every herbalist in your area.

Know your local rules. Titles, product labeling, and what you can legally sell versus give away vary enormously by country and even by state or province. Look it up for where you actually live and practice, not where your teacher lives.

Making herbalism your livelihood

If you are working, which most of us are, you may be wondering how you can integrate herbalism into your current job or how you can work as an herbalist. Take a look at the above list of professions and see if you are already doing any of those or if you are interested in any of them.

It is important to remember that there is nothing wrong with charging for your services. Herbalism should not be something we give away for free because people think it is something we all own. The latter is true, and the ones who have given their time, energy, heart, soul and finances to learning and practicing as an herbalist should also reap the rewards, be they financial, social, material, or spiritual. We all have bills to pay, and herbalists are not an exception to this. If you want qualified people helping you, they need to be able to focus on that work, and not working other jobs to support their families and lifestyles.

When we decide we want to make herbalism our livelihood, we can make the choice of working with someone else or for ourselves. If we decide to work for ourselves we have to take a risk, and while that risk can be very scary at the beginning of your practice it is also extremely rewarding. Entrepreneurship means we hustle, sometimes we focus hard on one aspect of our practice, oftentimes we have multiple points of focus.

For me, I see clients one-on-one in a clinical practice, answer questions, dispense herbs, have people come to my house and make house calls as a community herbalist, read tarot and mentor, teach and produce events for myself and for other schools, write blogs and monographs for myself and other projects, and I represent a few different local brands in Costa Rica. Permaculture teaches us that when we rely on one input, whether it is water, electricity, food, relations or work, we create a less resilient system for ourselves. So it is important to have a main focus to your work, but also to consider multiple streams of income.

Benefits and limitations of working as an herbalist

I feel one of the biggest benefits of working as an herbalist is the empowerment. I started studying and working with plants because I was being failed by the allopathic medical system. When I began learning about the power of plants my whole world expanded and focused. The plants are the ones who taught me how to connect deeply with the world soul, they have given me the gift of curiosity, and most of all they have given me a way to participate in the world in a meaningful way.

I will also say that the biggest benefit of being an herbalist is the people who are in this practice and lifestyle. There are some truly amazing humans out there who are dedicated to being in service to the world and to life. And while there can be ego, we are humans after all and that is what makes us distinct, the majority of herbalists are lovely, humble, curious, playful, intelligent, and compassionate. That not only warms my heart, it vitalizes me fully.

One of the biggest limitations I experience is the necessity of social media in the current day for finding business. Yes, in my community practice there are plenty of people, but being frank, it is a lot of free work. People texting questions and me replying without charging a fee. And I am ok with that when it is within its occasional limits. These are often folks who will come and buy medicine from my apothecary, who will take classes when I offer them, and will call me for paid house calls.

But because of the nature of where I live and how I live, even local class sizes are very limited and not enough. Much of my student base and clientele are international, and social media is necessary for reaching them. I hate the idea of having to produce content that feeds the dopamine rush and fights with an algorithm in order to be seen. I love long form, as you so well know if you are reading up til this point. I like to share story. I am a writer, it is my art and passion.

and so…

I encourage you to follow your green path, to come walk this Good Medicine Road with me and the beautiful community walking along with us. We need you, the world needs you, life needs you to be in practice, to be sharing your gift of being a translator for the non human world. I hope to one day see you in class, share a tea, or go botanizing.