One Foot In The Mundane, One Still In The Magic

I wasn’t standing in some enchanted forest when it happened. There was no ceremony, no dramatic revelation, no lightning bolt of inspiration. I was just walking across a perfectly mowed yard with my grandfather, heading toward the orchard the way we did every weekend.

He stopped at the edge of the woods where the briars grow wild with blackberries — that tangled barrier between the tidy lawn and everything untamed beyond it. He bent down and started inspecting a few weeds with this intensity, like he was reading something the rest of us couldn’t see. Then he picked a few leaves off what I assumed were just briar bushes, stuck them in his mouth, and started chewing.

I stood there, stunned.

He bent down again, picked a few more, and handed them to me. “Try it,” he said. So I did — because he was my pap, and I did whatever he told me to do.

The instant I started chewing, a tingling sensation flooded my mouth like taking a huge swig of spearmint mouthwash. My brain lit up. What? It tasted like chewing gum and breath mints, and yet it was just a handful of leaves growing wild in the briars at the edge of the yard.

It’s not that I hadn’t known plants were grown for food. I knew that. I’d been tending my grandparents’ garden and orchard for years. But something about that moment — the wildness of it, the fact that this intense flavor was just there, growing abundantly in a place nobody cultivated or tended — cracked something open in me. Plants had uses and powers that went so far beyond what I’d ever considered. That handful of leaves was the first time I realized the world was hiding things in plain sight, and all you had to do was pay attention.

That curiosity never went away. It just waited.

The Thing About Growing Up

Here’s what happens to most of us. As kids, our imaginations are wide open to all the wonder that could be — but we don’t have the knowledge yet to understand what actually is magical about the world. Then we grow up. We learn how molecules form the physical world around us. We learn how gravity keeps us grounded. We learn how plants can be distilled into medicine. And somewhere in all that learning, we lose the very thing that made us want to learn in the first place.

The wonder fades. The whimsy disappears. The world becomes logical, mechanical, methodical. We respond to what we experience with efficiency instead of awe. We become so focused on thriving — on keeping our jobs and our families and our routines intact — that we forget the miracle and the mystery that this world still has wrapped inside itself.

But here’s what I believe down to my core: we haven’t figured it all out. We haven’t seen everything that exists. We don’t know all there is to know. And the moment we let go of that childlike “what if” — that wide-eyed “what could be” — we lose something we can never afford to lose.

Keeping one foot in the mundane keeps us and our families thriving. But keeping one foot in the magic? That keeps our minds and our hearts fulfilled. And it might just teach us something new that changes the course of everything.

That’s what this brand is built on. Not one world or the other — both.

Finding The Door

I’ve started a lot of projects over the past few years. Some I finished. Some I didn’t. The ones I never finished almost always stalled at the same wall — the next step either cost money I didn’t have, or it required a skill I hadn’t yet learned. And I had already taught myself so much. Graphic design from scratch. Product mockups. Print-on-demand production. SEO. Social media strategy. At some point, you can’t keep stopping everything to learn one more new thing every time you hit a roadblock.

Then I found this project.

I was sitting in Canva, staring at what had started as a single rectangle on a blank canvas. I’d been researching herbs — their medicinal uses, their magical properties, their elemental associations, the planetary symbols tied to each one. And as I designed, something happened. That rectangle turned into a card. A real card. It looked like an actual tarot card — aged parchment, botanical illustrations, elemental symbols, the whole thing. I set it next to the back card I’d designed for Borage — Starflower, Courage, Air, Jupiter — and they looked like they belonged together. Like they’d always existed and I’d just uncovered them.

That was my light bulb moment. Not anything magical — just the quiet, certain realization that I could do every single step of this myself without it costing me anything more than my time. Every skill I’d picked up along the way, every half-finished project that taught me something before I walked away from it — all of it had been leading here. This was all or nothing.

And I was more than ready.

What You’ve Walked Into

If I had to describe what I want this brand to feel like, it would be this: imagine walking into a place you’ve never been before but somehow recognize. Like an old building you shouldn’t be in but can’t walk away from because you have to see what’s inside. There’s excitement — and a little apprehension, too. The kind of feeling where the people who were once there still linger in the walls even though you can’t see them.

It’s a ghostly kind of familiarity that sits you back on your heels and gives you chicken skin on your arms. A cozy home that feels like yours even though you don’t know how you got there, or why, or who might be there with you — but you know, somehow, that you’re meant to be there.

That’s the Unearthly Apothecary.

A place that shouldn’t exist but somehow does, tucked into the corner of nowhere with dust on the shelves and strange plants climbing the walls — waiting for the right person to find it.

Why Hoodies

People ask me sometimes why I chose hoodies instead of t-shirts or prints or mugs or any of the thousand other things you can put art on. The answer is personal.

When I feel uneasy, unsure, or maybe a little insecure about something I have to face in my day, I always feel better in a hoodie. I don’t fully know why. But a hoodie wraps you up completely. It’s security you can wear. It reminds me of home.

That’s what I want our hoodies to be — a reminder of home, wherever home is for you. Hoodies are what every girl steals from her boyfriend. They’re what teenagers pull over their heads when they need to disappear into the background for a little while. Everyone loves a hoodie for different reasons, but mostly it comes down to the same things: a little mystery, a little security, and sometimes a little bit of home.

If I can wrap all of that into one product — if putting on one of our hoodies feels like reading a mystery novel by the fire, bundled in a blanket, at home — then that’s a win in my book.

And the back of every tarot hoodie? That’s the mystery novel itself. Nine plants, each with their own story — medicinal uses passed down through centuries, magical properties whispered through folklore, elemental symbols and planetary associations that connect the natural world to something much bigger. Flip the card. Read the story. Wear the knowledge.

Welcome To The Space Between

Earthly Odditees is the grounded world — the real plants, the real science, the real history. Unearthly Apothecary is what lives on the other side — the folklore, the wonder, the things we can’t quite explain but know are real because we’ve felt them.

This blog is where those two worlds meet. You’ll find herb guides that teach you what a plant can actually do for your body alongside the magical traditions that surrounded it for centuries. Botanical deep-dives that start with a scientific name and end somewhere much more interesting. And maybe, along the way, a little bit of that wide-eyed wonder you thought you’d outgrown.

I didn’t start this brand because I had a business plan. I started it because a handful of wild spearmint leaves in my grandfather’s briars taught me that the world is more extraordinary than it lets on — and I never forgot.

Welcome to the Unearthly Apothecary. You were meant to find this place.

Earthly OddiTees—Herbal Wisdom, Worn Boldly

Visit our shop on Etsy and follow along on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Threads.

---