The Story of Wild Folk Apothecary
Our mission is to help people to reconnect with nature and their natural selves through the rituals of healing, connection, spirit, ceremony, and self-love, and by bringing the wild back into the hearts of all those who use our products. Everything at Wild Folk Apothecary is handmade with love by Bernadette, and all creations are infused with her deep connection to the otherworld.
We don't just make beautiful, wild things, we sing about them too, as The Wild Folk. Some of our songs are about the beings we communed with to create our products, always in deep reverence and respect for the wild and for the otherworld.
Our events are mostly held in rural Suffolk, we offer foraging and wild medicine walks, run open mic nights, wild medicine making and nature resonance medicine workshops, forage, feast & folk events in the woods, and songwriting workshops.
Bernadette Smart (now Ashcroft) founded Wild Folk Apothecary in 2022 as a coming together of her work with nature, wild plants, foraging, herbs, plant consciousness, human-nature connection, and healing. The first visions and dreamings of the apothecary were shown to her during a journey within the sacred space of her Way of Life apprenticeship. Bernadette is a folk herbalist, folk singer, forager and foraging teacher, nature resonance guide, and a walker on the path of the Bean Feasa (translated from the Irish as woman of knowledge or wise-woman) who has completed a traditional apprenticeship under the Fear and Bean Feasa, Alex Duffy and Nikki Darrell. She holds an MA in human-nature connection from University College Cork, and qualifications in herbalism, holistic massage, yoga teaching, nutrition, and nature healing, amongst other things. Bernadette spent over fifteen years living, working, and studying in Ireland before returning to her ancestral homelands of rural Suffolk in 2019. She is passionate about keeping the folk traditions of these ancient and sacred lands in our collective awareness through both her healing and nature work, and her creativity through song, writing, and ritual, and in the making of the offerings in Wild Folk Apothecary. For more about Bernadette and her work, see here.
Nigel Ashcroft founded The Wild Folk with Bernadette in 2022, alongside Wild Folk Apothecary. The vision was to bring together the strands of story, music, wildness, creativity, and the folk music tradition as expression of the wisdom, connection, expression, and healing held within both land and song. Nigel spent many years travelling the world with his guitar, but has found a rootedness in Suffolk that he has never before known. Nigel works as a professional musician and songwriter. An experienced composer, traveller and street-performer, he has spent the last twenty years taking his music live into the bars, restaurants, clubs, homes, and streets on four continents, from London to Melbourne, Bangkok to New Orleans, and countless places in between. As a writer of songs he is prolific, crossing genres, working with artists to develop original repertoire, writing both instinctively and to project briefs. As a creative and musical director he is able to draw the best out of performers, whether that be in theatre, songwriting workshops or collaborations. For more about Nigel and his music, see his website.
