Darcy Williamson is an herbalist, author, and educator from the Rocky Mountains in Idaho. She is the founder of From the Forest, an herbal products and education business whose mission is to provide education on identifying, sustainable harvesting, formulating, and using medicinal plants found throughout the Rocky Mountains. Darcy is the author of Healing Plants of the Rocky Mountains & The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook.

In this interview, Darcy shares her unique perspective on sustainable harvesting, the key to knowing what herbs are safe to harvest, and gives us an incredibly rare look into some of her favorite Rocky Mountain healing herbs, such as willow, chokecherry, avens, lomatium, arrowleaf balsamroot, western mugwort, and Brown’s Peony. Darcy also runs an herbal apprenticeship program like no other I’ve ever heard of. It helps her offer herbal remedies that few other, if any, websites offer. My favorite part was when she shares how she knows when a tree is ready to harvest.