Black Cat Botanics: The Origin Story

My kitchen is a collection of murky mason jars, hanging herbs, and withered mushrooms drying beneath the counter. These things I gather from the world around me; I grow them in my garden and forage them from the sprawling Ozark Mountains beyond my home.

Each object has a purpose: they turn to tinctures, balms, lotions, teas, and fragrant perfumes. My products snake into the blood, lungs, and lives of the people I love. They adorn the bodies of my community, are bought and sold and given as gifts. They spark wonder and curiosity.

I am honored to make them.

People often ask me how I got into all this. The truth is that there was never a single lightbulb moment. There was a slow burn, a thousand small sparks of curiosity layered on necessity and pressed into inspiration.

The answer is long, tangled, and a little salt-stained. When I left Texas at 21, I knew I wanted an adventure. I thought I was going away for a season, maybe a year. Instead, I spent eight years moving through continents and countries that became classrooms.

In Ireland, I learned to respect nettles—the sting in your skin transforming into nourishment on your plate. In the Canary Islands, volcanic soil birthed plants with grit: stubborn figs, hardy cacti, and aloe vera thriving against black rock and relentless sun. The landscape looked barren until you realized every crevice held something alive, something useful.

In Morocco, I watched women press olives into golden oil, a process both humble and holy. Olive oil wasn’t just for salads; it was medicine for skin, for wounds, for life itself. In Senegal, hibiscus blossoms became bissap: a drink the color of rubies, both tart and sweet, loaded with vitamin C. In The Gambia, kola nuts passed hand to hand—offered in greeting, chewed for energy, and steeped in history as both stimulant and symbol.

The Western Sahara taught me about scarcity: how plants that grow in sand and salt survive because they know how to hold on. Surinam and Guyana pulled me into rainforests so lush they felt like walking into the lungs of the planet. Every leaf, every bark, had a use.

I spent a year living on a sailboat, where medicine wasn’t philosophy—it was survival. Out there, there was no doctor, no pharmacy, no corner shop. If you got sick, you relied on what you had, what you could make, what you could forage from the sea and shoreline. Sun burned your skin raw. Salt split it open. Ropes bit your palms. A single jar of balm could mean the difference between healing and brutal infection.

The sea stripped plant medicine of all its mysticism and showed it to me in its rawest form: as necessity.

I hopped off the boat in South America and saw that plant medicine is stitched into culture, not separated into categories. I learned about guayusa, the cousin of yerba mate, brewed at dawn to bring energy and sharpen dreams. I was given guava for stomach aches, boldo tea for digestion, and soursop for calming the nerves.

In Peru, coca leaves weren’t drugs—they were lifelines. Chewed in the high Andes, they steadied the heart and lungs, made climbing mountains bearable, and softened altitude’s cruel bite. I saw cat’s claw vine used to soothe inflammation and support the immune system. Maca root was food and medicine in one: a humble tuber that strengthened bodies, boosted fertility, and carried entire communities through cold, thin air.

For me, the world was a library without walls, every plant a page, every healer a teacher. Everywhere I went, I saw the same truth: plants are not luxuries, nor are they decorous. They are partners, woven into survival, nourishment, and story.

I found this knowledge to be at odds with life and culture back in the US and much of Europe. When I returned back home, it seemed there were two schools of thought: either you subscribed to "Western" medicine, or you relied on "herbalism." Pills or plants.

Both extremes make little sense. Western medicine was borne of plants, so discrediting their utility negates almost every single pill you might take. Willow bark gave us aspirin. The rosy periwinkle, a little blue flower, gave us chemotherapy drugs that save children with leukemia. Mushrooms—reishi, lion’s mane, psilocybin—are being studied for immunity, cognition, even mental health.

Coca leaves are the ancestors of both numbing agents used in surgery and a certain infamous soda. Cinchona bark from Bolivia birthed quinine, the great malaria medicine that changed history. None of this is magic. It’s chemistry, dressed in leaves and roots.

Yet relying solely on plants for healing ignores the innovations of the laboratory, where we've isolated plant compounds and enhanced them to create fast-working, effective, lifesaving medications like antibiotics. The line between “traditional” and “scientific” is blurry at best. They are not enemies. They are siblings, and we forgot they were related.

Black Cat Botanics was born out of this refusal to choose sides.

I am not a healer. I don’t claim that word, and I don’t wear it. I am a helper. I make helpful things. Balms, tinctures, syrups, aromatherapy—small companions that can soothe, sometimes prevent the need for expensive doctor visits, or soften the side effects of treatments when medicine is necessary.

I am not a snake-oil salesman. I do not discourage people from pursuing any treatment modality that may work for them. After all, my work isn’t about miracle cures. It’s about making affordable, accessible care that's rooted in science. It’s about remembering that healing can be simple, and that science and story can share the same breath.

So, why the black cat?

Partly because I share my life with one—a sleek, opinionated creature who watches my work with green eyes and an air of judgment. But also because black cats, like plant medicine, have been misunderstood.

They’ve been called unlucky, ominous, dangerous. In reality, they’re simply creatures (adorable ones, I might add) that don’t conform.

Plant medicine has the same reputation—dismissed by some as superstition, feared by others as unreliable. Yet beneath those myths lies resilience, chemistry, and healing.

Black Cat Botanics is a reclamation. A name for the misunderstood. Now, when I pull comfrey roots from autumn soil or simmer elderberries until the kitchen fills with their purple perfume, I think of all the places that taught me.

Black Cat Botanics is a thread woven from all of it.

It is not just a business. It is memory, necessity, and devotion braided together. A reminder that healing can be humble. That medicine can be simple. That science and tradition can walk hand in hand.

I’m a helper. And this is my work: to help where I can, with what grows, with what science confirms, and with what tradition remembers.