For over twelve years, Brian has been Farm Manager and a cheesemaker at P.A. Bowen Farmstead in Brandywine, Maryland — a biodynamic, regeneratively managed dairy farm owned by Sally Fallon Morell, founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation and one of the most influential voices in the traditional and ancestral food movement.

The farm is a living demonstration of what becomes possible when the intelligence of Nature is followed rather than overridden. Heritage-breed pigs clear wooded areas to create silvopasture for the dairy herd. Cows are moved in carefully managed rotations, their grazing timed to the pasture’s recovery and the parasite lifecycle. Heritage chickens follow three days behind the cows — precisely timed to the emergence of fly larvae — scattering manure, consuming insects, and completing the cycle. Every animal on the farm contributes to the health of every other, and the health of the soil beneath them all.The resulting food — raw milk, internationally award-winning cheese, butter, beef, pork, chicken, and eggs — is clean in the deepest sense of the word: no antibiotics, no hormones, no GMOs, no pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. No corn or soy. No shortcuts. Just living animals, living soil, and the patient intelligence of a farmer who understands that healthy food begins with healthy land.

This is not merely agricultural philosophy for Brian. It is the same understanding that underlies his practice of plant medicine: that health is an expression of right relationship between a living organism and its environment, and that the path to healing runs through the intelligence of Nature rather than around it.

Brian’s relationship with medicinal plants predates his formal herbal training by decades. Foraging has been a lifelong practice — identifying, tasting, smelling, and learning from the plants of every bioregion he has inhabited, from the Northern California coast to the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic woodlands of southern Maryland where he now lives and works.

His first formal studies brought him to the foundational texts of Western herbalism — Richo Cech, Rosemary Gladstar, James Green — and to the hands-on work of making tinctures and salves from plants he grew and wildcrafted himself. He found early and lasting success with these preparations, and the plants continued to teach him.

With over twenty years of practice, his understanding has deepened through direct experience, careful observation, and an ever-growing knowledge of the plants of his specific bioregion — their habitat preferences, seasonal rhythms, energetic qualities, and medicinal virtues.

The Vitalist Tradition

In 2024, Brian began formal clinical training with Sajah Popham through the School of Evolutionary Herbalism, completing the Alchemical Herbalism course and continuing as a student in the Vitalist Herbal Practitioner program — a comprehensive clinical training in the art of traditional plant medicine.

The Vitalist tradition understands health not as the absence of symptoms, but as the harmonious expression of the vital force — the innate intelligence that animates and heals every living organism. Where modern medicine asks “what is the diagnosis?”, the Vitalist herbalist asks “what is the pattern?” — seeking the underlying constitutional dynamics, tissue states, and elemental imbalances that give rise to symptoms, rather than simply suppressing those symptoms at the surface.

This approach is both ancient and precise. It draws on the great traditional systems of medicine — Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Western Physiomedicalism and Eclecticism — and synthesizes them through the lens of energetic architecture: the understanding that every person and every plant embodies a unique constellation of Elemental, Planetary, and Alchemical forces that can be read, matched, and worked with to restore balance and support the body’s own innate capacity to heal.

In clinical practice, this means that two people with the same complaint may receive entirely different herbal protocols — because it is not the symptom that is being treated, but the whole person behind it.

The Alchemical Laboratory

Alongside his clinical training, Brian studies spagyric alchemy under Robert A. Bartlett, one of the foremost living masters of practical alchemy and author of Real Alchemy — one of the most widely respected modern texts on laboratory spagyrics.

Spagyrics is the alchemical branch of herbal pharmacy, rooted in the teachings of Paracelsus and refined over centuries by physician-philosophers who understood that a plant’s healing power extends beyond its biochemistry into its energetic and spiritual dimensions. The spagyric process separates the Three Principles of a plant — its Salt (mineral body), Mercury (spirit), and Sulfur (soul) — purifies each individually, and reunites them into a medicine of exceptional wholeness and depth.

Where a standard tincture extracts only a portion of the plant’s intelligence, a spagyric preparation contains the whole of it: the physical constituents concentrated and bioavailable, the mineral salts restored, and the volatile essential oils — the soul of the plant — reintegrated into the final preparation. Nothing is discarded. Everything is purified and reunited.

And then there is the dimension that separates true alchemical pharmacy from even the most carefully made standard preparations: astral timing. Every step of Brian’s laboratory work — harvest, distillation, extraction, calcination, and cohobation — is timed to the planetary day and hour governing that plant’s celestial ruler. A solar plant like St. John’s Wort is harvested and worked on Sunday, at the solar hour. A Venusian plant like Cleavers is gathered and processed under Venus’s influence. The waxing Moon is employed for enriching and exalting; the waning Moon for separation and purification. This is not ceremonial gesture — it is the mechanism by which the subtle archetypal force of the planet is harvested into the medicine itself, impressing its signature upon the preparation at the moments when its influence is most concentrated and refined.

As Robert Bartlett teaches, and as the tradition has always held: without astrological timing, a true alchemical medicine cannot be made. The medicine is prepared in the stars before it ever reaches your hands.

The medicines that emerge from this process are prepared with the care and intention of both a scientist and a sacred practitioner. The laboratory is also a temple. The work is also a form of prayer.

Where Farm and Apothecary Meet

What makes Brian’s practice genuinely unique is not any single element of it — the biodynamic & regenerative farming

background, the foraging knowledge, the clinical herbal training, the alchemical laboratory work — but the way these threads are woven together into a single, coherent understanding of living systems.

He knows that the health of the soil produces the health of the plant produces the health of the animal produces the health of the person. He knows that a plant foraged from vital, biologically active land carries a different quality of medicine than the same plant grown in depleted soil or purchased as an anonymous dried herb. He prepares his salves with EVOO, and lard rendered from heritage pigs raised in the farm’s own woodlands — not as a nostalgic gesture, but because he understands that the quality of the carrier matters as much as the plants it carries.

He is currently contributing to an upcoming book by Sally Fallon Morell on natural remedies, for which he provided information on herbal approaches to supporting vascular health — a recognition of the depth and credibility of his herbal knowledge within one of the most discerning communities in the natural health world.

Working with Brian

Wort Botanicals offers three ways to engage with Brian’s work:

• Handcrafted Preparations — Spagyric tinctures (simple and formulated), herbal salves, flower essences, and topical preparations, all handcrafted in small batches from organically grown or sustainably wildcrafted plants, many foraged from P.A. Bowen Farmstead and the surrounding Maryland bioregion.
• Herbal Wellness Consultations — In-depth, individualized consultations rooted in the Vitalist tradition. Brian works with each client as a whole person — assessing constitution, tissue states, and the energetic patterns underlying their experience of health — and develops a personalized protocol of plant allies suited specifically to them. Bespoke spagyric preparations can be crafted for clients as part of their protocol.
• Farm Education & Consulting — Workshops, intensives, and consulting for those seeking to learn the integrated arts of regenerative farming, home dairying, artisanal cheesemaking, silvopasture, and pasture-raised poultry.

A Note on Philosophy

Brian does not believe that plant medicine and conventional medicine are adversaries. He works in the Hippocratic tradition — first, do no harm — using the mildest effective plant remedies, supporting the body’s own intelligence rather than overriding it, and referring clients to appropriate medical care when the situation calls for it.

He does believe that much of what ails people in the modern world is rooted in a rupture of relationship — with the land, with real food, with the rhythms of the natural world, and with the innate healing intelligence of the body itself. His work, in all its forms, is an attempt to restore those relationships.

The name Wort Botanicals is, in his case, both a family name and a philosophical statement. In the old language, wort simply means a medicinal or culinary plant – something beneficial to the human body. It is the root of St. John’s Wort, liverwort, mugwort, starwort — the humble, practical, Anglo-Saxon acknowledgment that plants are medicine, that they have always been medicine, and that this knowledge belongs to everyone willing to pay attention.

Brian Wort has been paying attention his whole life. He would be honored to help you do the same.

Brian Wort is Farm Manager at P.A. Bowen Farmstead in Brandywine, Maryland. He is a graduate of the Alchemical Herbalism program and continuing student in the Vitalist Herbal Practitioner program at the School of Evolutionary Herbalism under Sajah Popham, and a student of spagyric alchemy under master alchemist Robert A. Bartlett. All spagyric preparations are made under full planetary day and hour timing in accordance with the classical tradition of astral pharmacy.

Herbal wellness consultations are educational in nature and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or replace care from a licensed healthcare provider.