A Message to Our Northwest Herbal Fair Family
Over the past four years, the Northwest Herbal Fair has been a truly momentous and inspiring journey of co-creation. Together, we’ve built a vibrant and loving herbal community—learning, sharing, dancing, and celebrating the gifts of nature as a family.
As we look ahead, we are filled with excitement for future gatherings, especially the 30th Anniversary Reunion Weekend, tentatively scheduled for August 2026 at the beautiful Lake Leland Amphitheater. This special milestone will be an opportunity to welcome back friends and family from all 30 years of Herbal Fair history.
For now, however, we’ve decided to take a pause in 2025 to give our core production team the spaciousness to recenter, tend to their personal lives, and thoughtfully build the vision for 2026.
We are deeply grateful to everyone who has made the Northwest Herbal Fair possible—attendees, teachers, performers, vendors, volunteers, and all the hands and hearts that came together to create something truly magical. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. While we take this year off, we encourage you to stay connected through our website and email list for updates about the 2026 event and other projects from Friends of the Tree Society and the Peace Through Music Foundation.
In the coming months, we will launch a GoFundMe campaign to help support our production team, repay debt from the 2023 Herbal Fair, and lay a strong foundation for the future. We look forward to celebrating with you again soon and can’t wait to co-create the next chapter of this beautiful community together.
Thank You For The Best Herb Fair EVER!
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Thank You For The Best Herb Fair EVER! 〰️
Thank You For Coming! The Herb Fair has concluded for 2024. Please check back soon for info on 2025.
We are still counting attendees, but it’s likely that over 600 + people attended this year, making it by far the largest EVER. Thank you so much to attendees, vendors, presenters, and staff. We couldn’t have done it without everyone!
🎟️ REGISTER 📍DIRECTIONS ✋PRESENTERS 🌿 VENDORS 🔎 FAQ 📆 SCHEDULE
Watch this Podcast with co-founder Michael Pilarski explaining the value of the Northwest Herbal Fair, offering remedy recipes, and much more:
2024 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Paul Chiyokten Wagner
Keynote: Heal the water, heal the land, heal community and heal ourselves.
An award-winning Coast Salish flutist and storyteller who brings us to a magical land filled with supernatural beings, mermaids, leprechauns and marauding ogresses. Chiyokten is a W̱SÁNEĆ Nation tribal member and founder of Protectors of the Salish Sea. As an educator and keeper of Coast Salish traditional understandings, he works to bring wellness to the hearts of the children and this world through ancient wisdom and knowledge as well as bold, prayerful indigenous led direct action.
Chiyokten’s songs were received in dreams with visions of wellness for the Tree People, Animal People and Human People. A prophetic return to holistic indigenous wellness, one human family coming together once again to uphold our sacred relationships to all life around us, to holistically heal ourselves in order to holistically heal this world.
Dr. Nancy Turner, Ethnobotanist
Nancy Turner is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in Environmental Studies, University of Victoria. She is an ethnobotanist who has worked with Indigenous elders and cultural specialists in western Canada for over 50 years, learning about traditional knowledge of plants and environments. She has authored or co-authored/co-edited over 30 books and over 150 book chapters and papers, and has received a number of awards for her work, including Order of Canada, Order of British Columbia, and fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada, as well as honorary degrees from four BC universities.
A love letter to herbalists
Let me count the ways that I love you. I love you because you are primary caretakers of people’s health. Because you carry on the millennia-old traditions of healing. Herbs were the first medicines and they still work today. You are the current editions of the shaman, medicine-women and medicine-men of the past. You are tradition carriers. You serve the people.
Most of the herbalists I know ply their trade out of love for people. You truly care about others and want to help them. Love is why I grow herbs for people, for herbalists and for the herbal trade. Herbs are my main income and money is an incentive for me, but underlying it is love. Love for herbalists, love for people, love for plants and love for this beautiful planet.
I love the plants I grow, wildcraft and work with.
Love for the herbalists is why I organize the Northwest Herbal Fair and other herb gatherings. I have organized hundreds of herbal events, large and small. I do it as a service to the herbalists and through them to the community in general. Putting on gatherings is a lot of work, stress and risk of financial loss. I certainly don’t do it for the money. Most often I break even and sometimes lose money. I try to keep admission costs low, but there are a lot of expenses to cover.
I have met thousands of herbalists over the years through putting on herbal events, trainings and as clients of my herb business. Many of you have become friends. That is one facet of the Northwest Herbal Fair. It is a reunion of hundreds of herbal friends.
Weaving the network that serves us all. There is no substitute for getting together in person, shaking hands, hugging and looking into each other eyes and reading body language. Zoom, phone calls and social media help us to communicate but getting together in person is the best of all. It feeds our spirit. Feeds our hearts. I offer the Northwest Herbal Fair to you as a gift, as a service, out of love.
Please join us if you can—August 16-18, 2024 near Quilcene WA on the Olympic Peninsula!
A friend of the herbalists,
Michael Pilarski, Winter Solstice 2023
Co-Founder & Lead Coordinator | 15th Northwest Herbal Fair
From Michael “Skeeter” Pilarski
