Special Plant Project is a private podcast and online community that, over time, builds into a comprehensive audio library of plant knowledge.
Hi there, I’m Robin Harford, bestselling author and a BBC Countryfile recommended foraging teacher.
For the past few years, I’ve been working with several people, experimenting to find the best way to teach plant knowledge online.
And Special Plant Project is the result of those experiments.
Imagine you’re out on a walk. You see a plant. All you need to do is sit with it, turn on the audio lesson and listen to me personally teach you.
Maybe there are some essential features I need to point out. All this is easily done with audio.
The one word the experimental community fed back to me was – immersive.
This style of teaching, using audio, is an immersive experience.
It’s as close to a real in-person private foraging session as you can get.
Each audio lesson focuses on one specific plant and is delivered to your private podcast feed. It works with the most common podcast apps on either an iPhone or Android phone.
Teaching using audio means that when I talk about a plant, you can go outside, find that plant and sit down next to it.
In the show notes of each episode, I include links to multiple botanically correct photos. So you can be as confident as possible in your plant identification.
All photos are by respected expert botanists—no need to guess incorrectly tagged images in a search engine or trust unknown strangers on social media.
The benefit of sitting with the actual plant is you are in the same habitat as the plant.
You’re able to see where it’s growing. You can see what other plants are growing in the same vicinity.
You’re able to feel and sense the environment where it grows. You can look, touch and feel the plant.
Your experience is lived, immersive and embodied.
And you learn far more about the plant this way than anything a video could teach you.
So learning becomes dynamic, fluid and flexible, rather than passively sitting and watching a video.
Why look at a plant video when you can be sitting in front of the real thing?
Another benefit of joining the Special Plant Project is the monthly community discussions via zoom.
You can ask me any questions, as I’m here to help you become a safe, confident and knowledgeable forager.
There’s also a considerable amount of knowledge within the community itself. So you’ll be able to get help and support from other members.
I look forward to welcoming you into the community.
