Announcing a New Workshop !!

2009-07-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

Ila Hatter, Herbalist
with a bunch of ramps.

See Ila's bio below.

Smoky Mountain Workshops Presents

A Weekend in the Woods

With Renowned Herbalist and Wildcrafter

Ila Hatter “The Lady of the Forest”

For a Workshop on

“Using Native Plants for Health and Wellness”

Learn to correctly identify Useful Native Plants
Learn their Health and Nutritional Values
Learn to Prepare what you have Gathered and to Make
Lotions, Teas, and Syrups for Health and Wellness.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday
August 14, 15, and 16, 2009

Gatlinburg, Tennessee

in the heart of the beautiful Great Smoky Mountains

For City and Country Dwellers alike!

If you are serious about wanting to learn to gather Native Plants and to improve your life by utilizing their natural healing qualities then this is your opportunity! Workshops with Ila are lively fun experiences in Nature where you can learn much to improve your wellbeing with wild medicinals. Learn the correct way to gather these plants, to thank the Earth for her contribution to your life, and meet new friends. Attend one; you will want to come back again!

For Registration and Housing Information Contact:

smoky.mountain.workshops@gmail.com

Tuition for the weekend is $125.00, Housing not included.

See the information about housing discounts below.

Deadline for Registration is August 7, 2009

you may pay by check or register online. To send us a check include your legibly printed address (as in US Post Office), your email address and/or a phone number where we may reach you in case of glitches. Naturally your privacy is our utmost concern and none of this information will be sold or passed on to a third party. Mail to:

Smoky Mountain Workshops

200 Caton Road

Sevierville, Tennessee 37862

To Register Online at our Secure website follow this link to our sister site:

Smoky Mountain Designer Crafts featuring some of the

finer crafts and crafts people in the Smoky Mountain Region.

http://www.smokymountaindesignercrafts.com/

and look for the Smoky Mountain Workshop link on the left.

We will be happy to accept your credit or debit card or Paypal.

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Workshop Itinerary

If you are coming in from out of town plan to be checked into your housing by 3 p.m. Friday afternoon.

Foxhill Galleries at 669 Glades Road in the Arts and Crafts Community outside of Gatlinburg has graciously allowed us to use their facilities as a meeting ground for our Workshop. A map of the community will be included in the information mailed to you.

If you fly in for the workshop and need transportation from your housing to the workshop please contact us, there will be some rides available.

Friday, August 14, 2009 - 4 till 7 p.m. – Check in and receive your information packet. Meet Ila and your workshop companions and enjoy a ‘Wine and Nibbles’ mixer on the deck of the lovely new Foxhill Gallery on a hillside looking down into the quaint and fascinating Arts and Crafts Community outside of Gatlinburg. An informative media show of Ila’s will be running at the gallery during the evening for those who want to take a look.

*After the check in and mixer if you are still looking for dinner we can recommend several wonderful restaurants close by.*

Saturday, August 15, 2009 - 9 a.m. – We will all gather at the Gallery for coffee, tea and coffeecake while we get organized and loaded into vehicles and then on to the woods!
We will spend the day in several locations learning the correct ways to identify and gather several different useful plants. We will break for a box lunch at the Cosby Campground at the north end of the Park and hopefully do some mushroom identification with a surprise guest! After lunch we will gather our plants and take them back to make lotion for poison ivy and a syrup helpful during flu season. All participants will make their own to take home with them.
When we get through with our potions and lotions in the afternoon you will be free for the evening to explore the crafts community and Gatlinburg. You will find information about things to do and see in your registration packet.

Sunday morning, August 16, 2009 -9:30 am. - We will gather with Ila at Foxhill Gallery for coffee, tea, and pastries and to learn from local Herbalist, Megan Jones of Taproot Teas. Megan is a student of the renowned Rosemary Gladstar and the Clayton School of Natural Healing. We will sample various blends and design our own personal teas for wellness (and taste!)

After we finish blending our teas it will be time to say goodbye and head for home. We hope your souvenirs will include New Skills, New Friends and Fond Memories!

*Please* make sure you bring comfortable clothing for hiking that is appropriate to the weather. Since the Smokies tend to get a lot of rain you might consider including a poncho. Most importantly you will need good hiking shoes or sneakers. This won’t be very strenuous walking but we will cover some ground. Other good additions might be a bug repellant, sunblock, a camera to document your plants and a small notebook or pad to keep track of your notes. (Ila dispenses quite a bit of information during a workshop and if you are like me, you don’t want to miss anything.)

Housing Information

For those of you wishing housing during the workshop, we have made arrangements for a discount with one of the nicer local motels in Pigeon Forge. The Willowbrook Lodge has agreed to give a room discount when you present your paid tuition receipt.

We also have two group cabins in Gatlinburg that will give a discount with your paid tuition receipt. Each of these cabins sleeps four. They are in a beautiful setting, with a hot tub and within walking distance of downtown. This might be just the thing for a group of friends wishing to come together.

For those of you wishing to camp, we can recommend some convenient campgrounds in the area, just let us know.

You will also find other recommended motels and cabin rental companies in your registration info.

Travel Information

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Gatlinburg area. It is located in East Tennessee a little southeast of Knoxville and is the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

If you are coming from the west take I-40 to Exit 407. When you exit you will essentially be on the Parkway (Highway 441) that runs thru Sevierville, to Pigeon Forge and on into Gatlinburg and ultimately into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (The distance from the exit to Gatlinburg proper is 12 miles.)

If you are coming from the East on I-40 you may exit at the Foothills Parkway Exit and follow Highway 321 south directly into Gatlinburg.

For those of you wishing to fly in, the closest airport is in Knoxville. There will be transportation available for your trips from and to the airport. There is a fee for this service. Please contact us as soon as you have your flight info so that we may make arrangements. The trip from the airport to Gatlinburg takes almost an hour.

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A Bit About 'The Lady of the Forest'

Ila Hatter

Ila Hatter was born into a family of resourceful people. Her mother and grandmother, she remembers, “were big believers in home remedies,” and her parents had used their knowledge of the resources offered by nature to help get through the hard times of two world wars and the Depression. “My mother was a crack shot at shooting turtles in the Louisiana bayous and jackrabbits in New Mexico,” she remembers, “to put food on the table during the Depression.”

During her Texas childhood, Hatter’s family taught her how to hunt and fish, and to make use or the pantry and pharmacopoeia found in common wild plants. Throughout her adult life she continued to forage for such information, and wherever she lived, from Georgia to Spain, she learned everything she could about native plants and their uses. She came to live first in Georgia and studied with Marie Mellinger of Foxfire fame, and then moved to the Great Smokies more than twenty years ago. Since then she has dedicated herself to discovering and preserving the plant lore of her adopted home. Living in Gatlinburg, and then in the Snowbird Cherokee Indian Community in North Carolina, she learned a great deal from elderly friends and neighbors, both white and Cherokee, including North Carolina Heritage Award winner Amanda Swimmer. “Grandma Swimmer” appears with Ila in “Mountain Kitchen”, a video funded and sanctioned by the Great Smoky Mtn. Association. It was filmed at the historic 75 yr. old John C. Campbell Folk School, and shows foraging and preparation of natural recipes and remedies.

Hatter, a renowned Naturalist expert on wildcrafting, teaches and lectures in several states, including field classes in the Great Smoky Mountains for the University of Tenn. and the Native Plant Conference of Western Carolina University. She has appeared on A& E, TurnerSouth, and hosted many public television programs about wild foods and medicinals. CBS even consulted her on natural medicines during the production of the TV series, “Christy”, which was set in the Smokies. During the time that Eric Rudolph was a fugitive and believed to be hiding in the Nantahala Forest, Hatter was interviewed by CNN, NBC, Asheville Citizen Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and other news media to explain why it was indeed plausible that Rudolph might survive in the wilderness.

Ila has also been featured in “Our State” magazine and the UNC-TV series, and was a selected Speaker at the Grove Park Inn for the “Best of Our State” 2006 celebration.Most recently, Hatter and her husband and partner, Jerry Coleman have produced a series of educational videos: “Wild Edibles and Medicinals of Southern Appalachia”, shown at the Smithsonian “Folklife Festival”. In them, Hatter offers a rich blend of botanical, medicinal, historical, and folkloric information, drawing on her own knowledge as well as the expertise of community elders. She produced a wild foods cookbook, “Roadside Rambles”, with over 390 recipes, and brought to light a missing manuscript on Cherokee Ethnobotany-now published by the Great Smoky Mtn. Association, as “Plants of the Cherokee”

Over the years “Miss Ila” has been a Speaker/Instructor for Universities, Herb Societies, Garden Clubs, Audubon Societies, the Forest Service, Medical Groups, Home Schools, Environmental Institutes, Elderhostels, and others.Ila has learned the art of wildcrafting in the most traditional way – from her family, from friends and from neighbors. She “reckons” she must have inherited her passion for plantlore from her ancestor- Pocahontas, whose people were known as “bark-eaters”. Now she is recognized near and far as “The Lady of the Forest” - an expert teacher and tradition-bearer of the lore of the Great Smokies. With hands-on familiarity and a storehouse of knowledge, Ila offers folklore, medicinal facts, native wisdom, and fun anecdotes that will entertain and inform all backyard botanists, and “history buffs” whatever their age or background.

Megan Jones, of Taproot Teas

Megan Jones is a practicing herbalist who has been working with and studying herbs for nearly a decade. She is an assistant to local herbalist Cynthia Johnston at MoonMaid Botanicals in East Tennessee, assisting in the harvesting and production of herbal creams and salves, has her Family Herbalist Certificate from Clayton College of Natural Health, creates her own medicinal and herbal tea blends, leads medicinal herb walks and recently completed an intensive 8-month apprenticeship at Sage Mountain Retreat Center & Botanical Sanctuary with Rosemary Gladstar. Currently, Megan is working towards her Master Herbalist Certificate.

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For Registration and Housing Information Contact:

Smoky.Mountain.Workshops@gmail.com

Tuition for the weekend is $125.00,
you may pay by check or register online. To send us a check include your legibly printed address (as in US Post Office), your email address and/or a phone number where we may reach you in case of glitches. Naturally your privacy is our utmost concern and none of this information will be sold or passed on to a third party.

To Register Online at our Secure website follow this link to our sister site:
Smoky Mountain Designer Crafts featuring some of the
finer crafts and crafts people in the Smoky Mountain Region.

http://www.smokymountaindesignercrafts.com/

scroll down and look for the Smoky Mountain Workshop link on the left.
We will be happy to accept your credit or debit card or Paypal.
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2009-05-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome To Smoky Mountain Workshops
Here you will find information on many new workshops that we are planning. Our intent is to provide exciting and educational workshops that will not only teach you something but connect you with new friends with similar interests. Our hope is that you will come away from your time with us, ready to come back for more! Bookmark this space and check back often. We will be listing upcoming workshops and information about our workshop leaders. If you wish to contact us email us at:
smoky.mountain.workshops@gmail.com