About
Hi, I'm Heather, welcome to Hearthroot Hollow.
I've been a practicing pagan for 25 years now — long enough that the wheel of the year stopped feeling like a calendar and started feeling like weather. But, it started with an assignment, not a calling. I was a reporter, sent to cover the pagan community around Halloween for a story my editor was nervous enough about that he came along to the interviews himself, just in case. That Halloween ritual was my first. It was also the last story I filed before the story became my life.
That newsroom background is why the newsletter reads the way it does — built to be trustworthy first, pretty second. I fact-check my folklore the way I used to fact-check sources. If I tell you why marigolds show up at Samhain, I've gone and found out why, not just repeated what sounded good. If I don't know something, I'll say so.
I'm also a photographer and a sustainable, permaculture farmer, which is the other half of what you're holding: the images aren't stock. They're shot here, on the land the herbs and nature inclusions actually come from.
And that land is the real differentiator. I run Hearthroot Farm — 9.5 acres in Zone 7b Virginia that I've been building toward since 2008. The pressed flowers, the herbs, the feathers tucked into your mailing didn't come from a craft store. They came from this specific dirt, in this specific season, gathered by me between everything else the farm demands. When the correspondence sidebar tells you an herb's folk use, there's a decent chance I've grown it, harvested it, and used it myself first.
Plenty of witchy subscription boxes are beautifully art-directed. Few are run by someone who backed into this practice by accident twenty-five years ago, spent a career learning to tell a story, and now has a farm's worth of proof that the seasons in this newsletter are the seasons she's actually living through. That's the difference.