I grew up in Ohio, where plants were part of the family story. My grandmother started a greenhouse business along the Maumee River in the late 1960s, and my father carried it forward for more than fifty years. Twenty acres stretched under long plastic houses — made of rows that held heat, damp soil, and the steady work of tending. By the time I was old enough to be trusted to sow seeds or water the rows, the place already had its own rhythm: seedlings rising, fading, and returning again with the seasons.
At home, my mother’s garden unfolded in quieter measure — four decades in the making, never finished, always being written. Watching her taught me that abundance and loss are never far apart, that plants keep their own time, and that we’re there mostly to listen. People call it a “green thumb,” but I’ve always thought of it as something quieter: a kind of empathy. To notice the lean of a stem, the thirst in the soil, or the way a shade-loving plant sulks when forced into sun.
Photo: my mum's glasshouse in Ohio
That foundation stayed with me. I later earned a BA in history and biology — a pairing that might look unlikely on paper, but to me felt obvious. One field studies people, the other studies the world around them. How could one be told without the other? The more I studied, the more it became clear how deeply entwined human life is with the plants and landscapes we often treat as backdrop. Our species has always tried to write ourselves apart from nature — casting it as enemy, resource, or muse — but never as equal partner. That tension has shaped my curiosity ever since.
Years later, my husband and I moved to Kingston, New York, into a 17th-century Dutch stone house whose walls had seen centuries of weather. For the first time, I began a garden of my own: a living, changing journal written in shade and bloom. Turning that soil didn’t feel like a fresh start so much as a return — a continuation of the thread that began in Ohio.
Photo: the Kingston garden circa 2022
Society Botanica is rooted in this same continuity. What started as reflection and experiment became a way of working: bringing fragrance, body care, and design into one language. Each product is composed in-house, shaped with the same patience I learned in gardens and greenhouses — attentive to atmosphere, texture, and detail.
But the story isn’t only mine. Every garden, every field, every windowsill plant is part of the same long record of human life alongside the natural world. Society Botanica exists to honor that record — to remind us that fragrance and form are never just surface, but a way of carrying fragments of living history into the present.
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