The Michigan School of Botanical Medicine is the herbal school of Bloodroot Herb Shop in southeast Michigan: a community-rooted mutual aid framework for herbal education, taught in person in Dexter and Ypsilanti by clinical herbalist Alex Crofoot, and grounded in the belief that healing is relational, collective, and deeply personal.
We hold a clear-eyed accountability: much of what is called “Western herbalism” carries knowledge shaped and preserved by Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, whose contributions have too often been stolen and exploited for profit. We teach from within that history, not around it. And still: every culture, every region, every one of us descends from people who carried plant medicine as survival, medicine, ceremony, and care, only a few generations back.
We are evidence-based. We believe herbalism and allopathic medicine don’t have to compete for legitimacy — they can be bridged, each strengthening the other. Herbalism, to us, is not “alternative medicine.” It’s a parallel care infrastructure: one that can exist alongside pharmaceuticals and modern healthcare to expand autonomy, access, and collective wellbeing.
Our current programs cover plant safety and identification, ethical wildcrafting, materia medica, clinical assessments, ethics, anatomy and physiology, and medicine-making — the foundation of clinical herbalism. Looking ahead, our goal is to build out hands-on clinical training and a community herbal clinic that our students can train directly into, grounded in traditional apprenticeship models — so the next generation of clinical herbalists in southeast Michigan learns by serving the same community they’ll go on to care for.
Many of us feel disconnected — from our bodies, our communities, and our own capacity to heal. We believe the antidote is connection: to ourselves, to each other, to the plants, and to the knowledge our ancestors carried.
We envision a Michigan — and a world — where the skills to tend a wound, calm a nervous system, or support a birth aren’t locked behind credentials and cost, but held in common, the way they always were.
Herbalism is not one path but many: there is no single way to become a herbalist, no finish line to cross. It is winding, lifelong, and shaped by whoever walks it and walks alongside you. Our vision is a growing web of people across southeast Michigan and beyond who carry these skills forward — not as a credential to hold over others, but as capacity to share. Empowered people building empowered communities, one plant, one skill, one act of care at a time.
Herbal Foundations is the core curriculum of Michigan School of Botanical Medicine — built for anyone who wants a working relationship with plant medicine, not a passing interest. Taught in person in the heated and cooled schoolroom on the land in Dexter, the program takes an evidence-based approach: body systems, clinical practice, and case studies, session by session. Six weekends, May through October; $1,200; 22 seats; enrollment opens late February 2027.
Over six seasonal weekends on the land in Dexter, Michigan, you’ll harvest and identify plants from your local ecosystem, make teas, tinctures, oils, salves, vinegars, and honeys from scratch, and leave with a real medicine chest — preparations you made yourself, with your own hands, from plants you can name.
An examination of herbalism, history, and power — how plants have been used in contexts of control, resistance, and survival. Written from the perspective of a clinical herbalist with over a decade of practice.
Coming soon
The Michigan School of Botanical Medicine is taught by Alex Crofoot, clinical and community herbalist, full-spectrum doula and founder of Bloodroot Herb Shop in Ypsilanti. She has practiced clinical and community herbalism for more than a decade. Her training includes the Northeast School of Botanical Medicine Intensive Program (2013), the Lindera Herbal Intensive with Jim McDonald (2014) and DONA Birth Doula Training through the Center for the Childbearing Year in Ann Arbor (2014). She co-founded Black Locust Gardens, a 30-acre organic medicinal herb farm, after moving to Michigan in 2014, and has served as a coordinator of the Great Lakes Herb Faire in Chelsea, Michigan, for more than eight years.
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