WELCOME TO FERAL HOLLOW
Appalachian Plant Magic Land Wisdom Deep Healing
WHAT IS
FERAL HOLLOW?
Feral Hollow is an off-grid botanical sanctuary and forest garden nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We offer clinical herbalism and functional nutrition care for bodies that respond to the world with intensity, rooted in the land, built for depth, shaped by disability justice and lived experience.
Feral Hollow is also an exploration in slow, sustainable living. We haul water, chop firewood, and grow our own medicine in a mountain hollow we tend by hand. We're rooted in seasonal rhythms and kinship systems that allow us to center community and reciprocity. The clinic and the land pour into each other; what the land grows, the clinic offers, and what the clinic needs, the land moves toward.
We offer:
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The Nervous System Grimoire, a clinical guide for POTS, MCAS, and hEDS
All rooted in the magic and resilient spirit of our mountain.
"TO LOVE A PLACE IS NOT ENOUGH. WE MUST FIND WAYS TO HEAL IT."
-ROBIN WALL KIMMERER, BRAIDING SWEETGRASS
THE ECOLOGY OF US:
OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FERAL HOLLOW
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Our family first set foot in Feral Hollow a decade ago, when the hollow was home to the Blue Heron Outdoor School. We came as students, apprenticing ourselves to the land and kinship worldview. We spent several long summers living primitively on the mountain while we learned to forage, track, find clean water, and build shelters for ourselves. In 2020, the pandemic became a portal that allowed us to take over stewardship of the botanical sanctuary we had fallen in love with. Since stepping through that doorway, we've worked to both deepen our skills and rebuild the diversity and resilience of Feral Hollow. After years of study and apprenticeship, we've replanted the missing species we would expect to find in an Appalachian cove forest, built our farm infrastructure slowly and intentionally by hand, and learned a constellation of skills to make a project like Feral Hollow flourish from other farmers and gardeners. Now we're ready to weave in community into all the work we've done, and we invite you to share in the magic of our mountain hollow.
OFFERINGS + INVITATIONS
Appalachian Plant + Fungi Magic
THE NERVOUS SYSTEM GRIMOIRE: SPELLS FOR DYSAUTONOMIA
A field guide to living with POTS, MCAS, hEDS, and the autonomic collapse that comes with them—written by a clinical herbalist who's been there.
This is the book for the person whose body has become the problem no one can solve.
The Nervous System Grimoire is part survival manual, part clinical herbalism guide; it offers practical protocols for managing flares, herbal and supplement strategies that actually work for reactive systems, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from years of living—and working clinically—with these conditions.
This is not a cure. It's a companion for the long road.
FARM-TO-CLINIC APOTHECARY
Our mountain apothecary is a bridge between land stewardship and clinical support, between plants and people. Crafted from the plants and fungi we tend in our sanctuary, we distill the wild resilience of Feral Hollow into potent, land-based medicine using traditional methods and modern clinical insight. Each remedy is rooted in relationship and the unique ecology of the Blue Ridge Mountains - often called the "medicine chest of the world" - before being made available to our community exclusively through our clinic, where small-batch remedies are shipped monthly to our clients.
CLINICAL HERBALISM + FUNCTIONAL NUTRITION CONSULATIONS
Some bodies speak in a language conventional medicine was never trained to hear. If you've fought for every answer, collected pieces of a puzzle that never quite resolved into a whole picture, or simply know that something is wrong and haven't been believed, you're welcome here. River works with complex, highly sensitive bodies at the intersection of rigorous clinical herbalism, functional nutrition, and a decade of deep apprenticeship to this mountain land. River is currently accepting clients - book here to step into Feral Hollow and begin working together.
GET IN TOUCH! TELL ME A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT BRINGS YOU HERE TODAY, OR ASK A QUESTION ABOUT OUR UPCOMING CLINICAL COHORT.
PO Box 568
Amherst, VA 24521
