The Mid Summer Gathering

Saturday 4th July 2026 · 10.30–14.00 · Shotover Country Park, Oxford

There is a particular quality to September light. Softer than August, still generous, slanting through the trees at an angle that feels almost like permission. The heat has dimmed. The intensity of summer is finally waning. And if you are still enough to notice it, the woodland is beginning to breathe in again.

This is the morning to breathe out.

There is a particular quality to early July. The year is full. The land is generous. And before the summer holidays arrive and everything shifts — before the noise, the juggling, the six weeks of holding it all together — there is this: one quiet Saturday morning in the woodland, with nowhere else to be.

This is that morning.

The Summer Gathering is a gentle half-day walk through Shotover Country Park, led by a qualified medical herbalist. We will move unhurriedly through the landscape together, gathering seasonal herbs at the height of their potency — yarrow (Achillea millefolium), plantain (Plantago major), red clover (Trifolium pratense), cleavers (Galium aparine), and whatever else the land offers on the day.

Nettle seed (Urtica dioica) — one of the great restorativesof the herbal tradition, deeply nourishing to the adrenal glands and nervous system — will come from my own apothecary, harvested at its peak. At the heart of the morning we will pause, brew tea from the flasks, and drink from what we have gathered alongside chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) from my own garden.

You will go home with your harvest wrapped in paper, a set of seasonal field notes to keep, and something harder to name — the particular steadiness that comes from a morning spent moving slowly through a beautiful landscape with no agenda but to be in it.

The holidays are coming. Take this morning first.

£65 per person · £110 for two · Places are intentionally small.

To book, contact Sarah at Oxford Herbal.