The Apothecary’s Garden | A Herbarium of Forgotten Lore

The forest was never the end of the journey…After a year spent among mushrooms, studying in sketchbooks and wandering the woodland paths of the Forest Forager’s world, I find myself standing at the edge of something new. The trees thinned, the light changed, and the air shifted from damp earth to dust and dried stems.

Beyond the treeline waited a garden. From ruined stone beds to frost-burned mint, rosemary holding on beneath crumbling walls, and jars half-buried in moss. Paper labels, once carefully written by hand in ink, bleached now with the ghost of a word. A place shaped by purpose, then swallowed by time.

It felt less like discovery, more like inheritance…

So 2026 becomes my year inside The Apothecary’s Garden, a quiet, forgotten Victorian clearing on the outer boundary of the forest. I’ll be painting herbs instead of mushrooms, not as tidy kitchen plants, but as withering, weathered fragments of history. Each page will study botanical structure and folklore side by side, forming my own herbarium; a garden pressed into paper, ink, pigment, and memories.

This project isn’t about witchcraft or cosplay romance. It’s about a forgotten place, of decay, of story, and the traces left behind when human hands disappear. It’s the continuation of the same world I’ve been building, from moss, earth, and woodland air…only now stepping into the abandoned apothecary that once sat beside it.

Over the next year I’ll share the journey of this herbarium: research, sketches, finished paintings, lost lore, little failures, discoveries, and probably ink stains everywhere. Some plants will be familiar friends; others, strange poisonous beauties from old medical texts.

If mushrooms taught me to look down at the forest floor, herbs are about to make me look deeper through time.

Welcome to chapter two!

Welcome to The Apothecary’s Garden 🌿

Ripley