bio + services
Greetings, I'm Ash! • Welcome to the digital terrain that holds who I love being & what I love doing in one place. Black Sage Botanicals exists to empower cooperative sovereignty, engaging a direct relationship with & as the living, breathing world.
Ash Ritter is a seaside-born, desert-dwelling ethnobotanist, herbalist, and writer with over 25 years of study in clinical, traditional, academic, and directly-relational terrains. She is a devotee of curiosity, and especially savors the unending study of history & mystery through the woven threads of fungi, people, plants, and planet.
Ash lectures internationally in both academic & rogue spaces- from universities to herbalism and mycology conferences, within reniassance-era castle walls (true story!), and of course, outdoors in the field. In 2025 she was mentioned in High Times Magazine “…her content on the mysterious Amanita muscaria mushroom merits recognition as some of the most thoroughly researched and exhaustively compiled content on the ethnomycology (folk traditions) and chemistry of this psychoactive fungus…"
Her approach places emphasis on plants, fungi, and planet as relations, and is manifested through her practice as fostering engagement with & as the living world, rather than "using" plants as commodity alone.
Ash teaches publicly & privately with a focus on ethnobotany, ethnomycology, and experience-driven herbalism. She has been seeing clients for over a decade, joyfully offers in-depth consultation services, and loves formulating unique, effective tonics from her Sonoran desert apothecary.
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LINEAGE
One-on-one longterm apprenticeships are the cornerstone of her training, with a focus on global entheogens, clinical & folk herbalism, Druid herbalism, Cali-Mexican curanderismo & MacGuyver-style urban & wilderness first aid. Ash also attended acupressure school, permaculture certification training, and sat in workshops with Michael Harner, just to name a few of the adjunct teachings that inform her practice.
Her college thesis (circa 2006) focused on the history of plants & fungi in rites of passage and initiation, and altered states as evolutionary technology. Over the years, Ash’s research has honed in on the ethnobotany of her homelands in the western United States, alongside the entheogenic traditions of her Bohemian & Welsch ancestry.
Ash feels fortunate beyond measure to have shadowed naturopathic Dr. Kenneth Proefrock in his office for 2 years upon her relocation to the Sonoran Desert, and almost went to medical school, until coming to recognize the potency of keeping her practice out of bureaucratic matrices. Previously, she apprenticed with history buff & lineage keeper Charles "Doc" Garcia, worked for several years as an herbal personal chef, was sole apothecarist in a bustling California Bay Area clinical herbal practice in the lineage of the late great herbalist Michael Moore. As a young rapscallion, Ash was auspiciously taken under the wing of the inimitable anthropology professor (and English translator of Christian Rätsch's books) Dr. John Baker. Of elders named and not named, these lineages are most accurately cross-pollinated and expressed through hands, voice, and heart.
In addition to the elders in her life, her most illustrious teachers are the landscapes, plants, and fungi themselves- deserts, mountains, oceans, forests, rivers, and all the rest that rattle the ancestors alive in her bones. Ash is an avid solo traveller, and owes so much of her enrichment to touching old rocks, listening to the echoes of ancient architecture, singing at sacred sites, eating traditional foods, and learning with people & plants wherever she goes.
Ash currently lives in a century-old gnome house in the Sonoran desert, and enjoys tracking deer through the spiny brush, sitting with 200-year-old cacti, and waiting for monsoon season thunderstorms as she writes her first book.
SERVICES
Get to Gnomie • PODCASTS A'PLENTY
Click here for media appearances & free goodies sprinkled about the interwebs
BECOME A PATRON
Explore the BSB private membership page to access writings, educational videos, monthly community livestreams, botanical treat subscriptions, etc!
I am currently writing my first book! Your patronage directly bolsters my ability to prioritize researching, drafting, and editing, as well as maintaining my committment to sliding-scale herbal consultation & apothecary pricing to those in need. Thank you!!!
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