Caroline Nicholas, a 25-year-old West Virginia native, is reconnecting with her roots to revive and repopularize Appalachian herbalism in the region and beyond.
She started Hill & Holler Herbal Co., where she handcrafts wellness products using handpicked and foraged Appalachian herbs and plants. Although she established her business in 2021 as a way to celebrate her heritage, her love for herbalism developed during her childhood.
“Being from such a rural area, my family spent a lot of time in the woods when I was a kid,” she said.
But location wasn’t the only thing drawing her towards herbalism. As a child, Caroline surrounded herself with “old-timers” and elders in her community who passed on this knowledge to her.
“My early introduction to horticulture and herbalism was definitely a byproduct of spending my summers with my Grandpa Rupert in the garden,” Caroline said. “It’s not so much that he had a passion for gardening, but it was a necessity he enjoyed. He taught me the life cycles of the plants he grew, which ones liked the shade of the trees in the corner, when to fertilize, which prayers and verses worked best to help the crops thrive and so many other tips you can’t find in a Farmer’s Almanac.”
Though it would take her “forever” to name all the folks in her life who shaped her character and inspired her business, her Grandpa Rupert, Grandma Marian and Papaw Keith were very dear to her, and she continues to use the lessons they taught her today. After her elders passed, she “moved on from plant stuff” and attended West Virginia University to pursue a career in documentary photojournalism. After constantly busying herself with schoolwork and finding it difficult to overcome the stress of academia with a learning disability, Caroline began to turn back to her roots — gardening. Initially, she collected books about botany to merely help cope and connect with the people she missed, but when COVID hit, she moved back to her hometown of Duck, WV, and once again began hands-on practice with Appalachian plants.
After a year of reminiscing on her grandpa’s gardening lessons, reading countless books on herbalism and studying various lectures from The American Herbalist’s Guild, Caroline decided to put all her hard work to the test and created Hill & Holler Herbal Co., named in honor of her Grandpa Rupert.
“One of my most favorite memories was on a hot summer day, after Grandpa and I had left the garden because the sun got too high, and ‘the plants needed to nap.’ We were walking along the railroad tracks and talking about why too much juice from a grape vine makes your stomach hurt when we came across some litter that hadn’t been there on our last walk,” she said.
“He sighed and asked me to pick it up, and when I asked, ‘Why do we have to pick it up? We didn’t leave it,’ he kind of smiled at me and replied, ‘Well, sweetheart, as long as we take care of these hills and hollers, they’ll take care of us.’ That’s always stuck with me,” she said. “It’s the spark that lit my passion for environmentalism, and it eventually became the name of the business where I would start using the things he taught me.”
From there, she hit the ground running, and what began as merely a side hustle turned into a full-time gig.
“There aren’t enough hours in the day to obsess over each detail like I wish I was able to. It’s been a steep learning curve to learn how to run a small business full-time,” she said.
Her process involves taking inventory of her seeds in early winter, planting in late February or early March and then moving the budding plants outside when the weather begins warming up.
Caroline, who now lives in Morgantown, WV, makes the two hour drive back to her hometown up to three times a month to forage for herbs. The easiest for her to find are jewelweed and mullein, two herbs that grow best in dense, mountainous areas. Other herbs, like native yarrow and dandelion, are harder to come by in her holler.
“A key component of responsible foraging is to only take as much as you need,” she said. “A good rule of thumb is to take no more than a third of the available herb within each patch to make sure that there’s plenty for both wildlife and the plant to thrive.”
Once she returns back to Morgantown with her foraged herbs, she breaks down her harvest into smaller, more manageable pieces and sorts them by species. Then, she takes special care to rinse and wash the herbs to remove any dirt and insects that might be stuck to the plants. Depending on time constraints, Caroline either hang-dries them for a couple weeks or puts them in her dehydrator for a day.
From there, Caroline uses the plants she gardened and the herbs she foraged to create a lineup of wellness products including lip balms, medicinal salves, organic body care products and her most popular product: teas.
Caroline did extensive research on Greek mythology, astrology, folk medicine, folklore and queer history to create specific tea blends based on characteristics and influences of each collection.
“Recipes take several months to a year to complete, and the exact process varies from collection to collection,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun to challenge myself to create these recipes, it’s almost like solving a puzzle!”
The Greek Collection is named after gods and goddesses, and Caroline picked ingredients that fall into the “mythos of Olympus” while concocting a flavor profile unique to each blend. “For example, the Aphrodite, Ares and Hephaestus Blends all have a rooibos base, because the three gods are cosmically intertwined,” she said.
Similarly, her Celestial Collection focuses on creating common threads between characteristics and ‘vibes’ of each astrological sign. Teas based on fire signs contain sunflower, while earth signs contain mint; air signs contain white clover, and water signs contain butterfly pea flower. The final touch is edible glitter, added to replicate the night sky in your cup of tea.
Her Crystal Collection heavily relies on the “magickal properties” of the stones. After lengthy research, she used gemstones’ symbolic properties to connect to the metaphysical ones of herbs.
“Amethyst products are good for meditation and serenity, based around herbs like lavender, jasmine and thyme. Lapis lazuli products are for protection, centered around blueberries and evergreens. Aventurine products were made to promote good luck and prosperity, with ingredients like mint and ginger,” she said.
She also offers two lines that are more culture-based, allowing her to have a little more fun with ingredients. To recognize the queer people in Appalachia, she made the Y’all Means All Collection based off of the colorful pride flag.
Her most popular product, The Cryptid Collection, is based on the appearances and witness accounts of infamous Appalachian cryptids, such as Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster, the Vegetable Man, the West Virginia Yahoo and the White Things.
Not only does Caroline handpick and compile her tea blends into collections, she designs her own packaging as well.
“The labels are so different from collection to collection,” she said. “I actually just spent a few months redesigning all of my labels to better represent the collections and to make them look more refined and modern.”
Outside of the creativity she explores within her products, sustainability is the cornerstone of Hill & Holler Herbal Co., according to Caroline. She did a “ton” of research before starting her business to see how sustainability can fit within many West Virginians’ lifestyles. “Zero-waste isn’t sustainable unless you can sustain it. Most compostable packaging requires an industrial composting facility, so how sustainable is that packaging in West Virginia, an area without curbside composting service? It would just go to the landfill,” she said. “How sustainable is an ingredient that isn’t transparent about its labor conditions? How sustainable is a product that is sold at a price point most people can’t afford? There are dozens of factors that go into true sustainability.”
Therefore, Caroline uses the practice in every product she can. Every container is made with home-compostable bioplastic, reducing its chances of being sent to the landfill. The labels Caroline uses on her products are adhered by a byproduct of sugarcane that is cruelty-free and compostable at home. Her full-size lip balms and salves are plastic-free and come in cardboard pushup tubes, and the sample sizes come in aluminum tins.
At markets and vendor fairs where Caroline sells her piping hot cups of tea, she serves them in either home-compostable hot cups or aluminum cold cups. She even offers a buyback program where a customer receives a discount on their next cup of tea if the customer brings back their cup to be recycled.
She is “honored to be a part of the community reviving these old mountain traditions” such as herbalism. And she thinks the disconnect between Appalachia and the greater United States pushes young people to “crave a connection to our distinct history and culture.”
“I think people are captivated by these old traditions as a way to escape late-stage capitalism. Many of these practices, like gardening, foraging, raising livestock, baking bread, etc., are more based on self-sufficiency than anything else,” she said. “In this age of political instability, inflation and rising poverty rates, I think people are attracted to the idea of self-sufficiency as a way to both prepare themselves for the worst-case scenario, and as a form of escapism into days gone by, when the labor benefitted the family unit or community directly instead of working for someone else, receiving payment, using that payment to secure food and shelter.”
For Caroline, Hill & Holler Herbal Co. has been a way to reclaim her Appalachian heritage, honor the memory of the elders before her and spread her knowledge of herbalism far and wide beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
