The 2025 Plants, Mushrooms and Resistance gathering was an autonomous educational event that took place in Cluj-Napoc, Romania. It was co-organised by a small collective of participants in the previous (the first) year’s gathering in Austria, with comrades in Romania organising the space in which it was hosted (including building two new rooms to sleep everyone!).
The call had gone out mostly via word of mouth networks, with a poster and description of what to expect. People came from different countries across Europe to share their knowledge and passion for plants and mushrooms through a four-day open programme of collective learning.
I arrived to the social centre around midnight on the Tuesday after a whole day of travel and a too-long trek across the city (having failed to navigate the public transport). It felt easeful to arrive and be welcomed to a courtyard overhung with grape vines, with folks chatting in the corners, the last of dinner on the stove, and a fridge full of herbal kombuchas from the local workers’ co op. In one room a few people were screenprinting beautiful T-shirts with artwork for the gathering – I heard the next day that they’d been working ’til 6am!
The space, in the city of Cluj-Napoc, was bought and is shared by a few local collectives as a hub for events and gatherings like this one and as a project space. I was told that it is one of only three in Romania, partly owing to State repression. On the wall was a jobs rota to help out with cooking and cleaning etc. and a timetable for folks to add their own contributions to for the programme.
By the next morning it had started filling up with sessions. Amongst them were: herbal first aid; genital herpes; growing and processing herbs for sleep and stress; herbal care for trans bodies; mental health activism and interpersonal violence; brushing your teeth with trees, and a 6.30 am mushroom walk to a local forest.
The first session that I joined was a skillshare on oxidising and fermenting different kinds of leaves for tea. The person holding the workshop was self-taught and their excitement was infectious. We sat in a circle on the floor smashing leaves between stones and being amazed at the different scent compounds that were released as they began to oxidise, changing their chemistry.
A share-round session about herbal education yielded a huge map of info and resources for individual and collective learning outside of the institutions of vocational herbal education (and a lot of insight on those options/pathways too) and prompted a follow-up session to set up some structures of co-learning before next year’s gathering.
The whole event felt supported by a culture of mutual care that made it hearteningly possible for everyone to co-exist and co-create together for four days in a small city space in the heat of summer. My own contribution (a workshop on ‘folk herbalism past and present’) was gifted with some welcome critique and sparked another presentation on ‘folklore in the Romanian context’. Self-reflective footbath sessions and visits to the local park and growing space/orchard were a chance to reground for a moment from all the learning and stimulation.
I left – as I think many others did – buzzing with a sense of connection across borders to a bunch of lovely radical plant nerds grounding their resistance in earth connection, and with inspiration and motivation to carry on feeding these kinds of spaces.
– leo, June ’25.
Plants, Mushrooms and Resistance will feature as the Project Focus for Issue 4 of Wort.
