05/26/2026
True story. I prayed for a property with spring water. A few years later, we moved into our little red cottage – nestled in a holler, snug at the base of a mountain. Ice-cold, pristine spring water flows down from above straight into our plumbing. It was a real piece of work, but it was ours, and it gave us the ability to get out of town and put our roots in nature.
My father-in-law was looking for a piece of huntin’ land. This place wasn’t even on the market. My husband Ross was casually speaking with an elderly woman one day at work when she asked him, seemingly out of the blue, “Hey, y’all know anybody who's lookin’ for some huntin’ land?” Not a moment later, my father-in-law pulled into the lot. Ross pointed to him. “Yeah, actually, that man right there is lookin’ for some land.”
It was 60 mountainous acres with two very old and rather dilapidated houses on it, a spring that hadn’t run dry in over a hundred years, and a stony creek running straight through the front yard. Our lease was up on our rental in town in about four months. After having been uprooted too many times, we needed a place to settle and raise our babies. My father-in-law bought that piece of huntin’ land and told us that if we fixed up one of the houses, it could be ours. It would be my husband’s inheritance. We moved in on my 27th birthday – in the spring – and since we hadn’t yet installed the wood stove properly, we simply braved the cold until it let up.
I grew up chronically ill, just up the road from a beautiful herb farm with a shop on site. It was owned by my childhood best friend’s dad, and I spent many days there perusing the shelves, smelling all the aromatic herbs, eating rosemary sugar cookies and little chocolates, and catching toads and other critters among the many varieties of medicinal herbs growing outside. I don’t remember ever feeling very good. Doctor to doctor, three or four surgeries, endless rounds of antibiotics and steroids, and this and that. It wasn’t until I was nineteen and sufficiently fed up that I finally went and had a consultation with a clinical herbalist. I blurted out everything – all my complaints. She looked at my irises and my tongue and asked me a long list of questions. She gave me a strong-tasting tea blend and a few tinctures. It didn’t cost much. I did what she said for a few months, and I became a new person. I experienced healing for the very first time.
With my first baby being born soon after, and with some major stressors, came a bit of a relapse in my illness. I began to study herbs like my life depended on it. It wasn’t just about me anymore – now I wanted to protect my little girl from the system that failed me, and I knew that meant learning how to care for her health as best I could at home. Herbs made perfect sense to me, and the knowledge of herbs made a lot more sense of the wider world around me – of our nationwide health crisis, and of what wholeness really means. I knew that connection to the land was the answer.
My husband and I struggled onward toward our goal of a humble home life way out in the country, until our creekside cottage answered our prayers. Not long after, I opened my little apothecary and began teaching basic home herbal healthcare classes to groups in our local community.
2020 taught us all a hard lesson – the healthcare system as we know it is broken, and we need to cultivate greater self-sufficiency. We need to know how to care for ourselves and those entrusted to us. In a few years, our original group has more than tripled in size, and our little herb business keeps us very busy – stocking over a dozen stores in our region and shipping our handcrafted herbals nationwide.
These days, our work is a family affair. The kids help us gather cleavers and chickweed in the spring, holy basil and goldenrod in the summer, and all kinds of roots in the fall. They know dozens of native plants and many of their uses by heart. While Ross really holds the whole operation together, our little ones carry baskets, and our oldest labels bottles. We want them to know the value of work, but also the joy that comes from doing it together.
Nearly everything we make is either wildcrafted from our hills and hollers or organically grown in our garden. Each herb is harvested at its medicinal peak and prepared by hand in small batches. We track every step – from field to bottle – to ensure potency and purity. It’s a slow process that moves with the seasons. When the harvesting window for each plant is over, that’s it – until next year, of course.
Red Cottage Holistics was never meant to be big business in the corporate sense – it’s a mission to restore something ancient and good. We believe that health begins at home, that God freely offers what we need when we care for Creation rightly, and that healing is as much about relationship as it is about the right remedy. Going forward, our vision is to make the home once again the center of each family’s health – to teach that wellness isn’t something we outsource, but something we cultivate in our own gardens, our kitchens, and our habits of daily life.
Every product we craft and every class we teach is part of that calling – to equip, encourage, and remind others that God’s design for health has always been connection: to Himself, to the land, and to one another.
When I turn on the tap and hear that spring water rushing through the pipes, I’m reminded that every answered prayer carries responsibility. This land has given us more than our little red cottage – it’s given us purpose.
Www.redcottageholistics.com
