Brenda's Story behind Black Sheep Botanicals

“You’re always mixing something ~ in the kitchen or in your lab.”

A dear friend once said that to me, and I could never argue with it.

I grew up in Scotland, shaped by Celtic folklore, old wives’ remedies, and a bone-deep reverence for the beauty and riches of the natural world. That heritage has never left me. Neither has the instinct to make things: good food, welcoming spaces, and products I can stand behind completely.

Clients and customers have called me their good witch, their pixie, some such endearment, and I’ve come to accept that with a smile. My work with herbs and essential oils grows from the same root as everything else I do. We are Nature, and Nature is generous ~ deserving, like us, to be embraced and cherished.

Right from the first whiff, I was hooked !

I was at my very first aromatherapy class in 2000, learning to blend essential oils, and I became enthralled by them. I could hardly wait to share these underestimated treasures.

I studied on my own and bought a selection of oils to sell in my massage office. I wrote up instructions on how to enjoy them and presented them proudly to my clients. But they didn’t share my enthusiasm. Busy people just don’t have time to figure out how to use essential oils on their own, and I so wanted my circle of clients and friends to benefit from them.

There was nothing else for it. I’d have to create ready-made products.

So I ventured into the world of manufacturing complete products, and I loved it. It was the perfect venue for everything I care about: herbal craft, personal spaces, wholistic living, creative design, relationships.

Ten Years in the Making

In a lab of my own design, surrounded by bottles and containers of oils, herbs, flowers, roots, seaweed, and moss, stirring, grinding, mixing my own concoctions, I continued studying with the Atlantic Institute of Aromatherapy, gaining their certification.

I experimented. I found what worked, sometimes by way of what didn’t. Designing the packaging to carry the intention behind each creation was, and still is, one of the most thrilling parts of the process.

I formulated and hand-crafted a full line of botanical products with essential oils at their heart: skincare, scented gifts, soaps, creams, bath salts, comforting massage lotions. For ten years, that collection, simply called Scents & Botanicals, moved through my shop and office – A Touch of Wellness, in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands – until I relocated to Florida in 2011.

Now in Florida

With this move, I tried focusing only on building my next massage therapy practice, but this calling kept whispering. One day, a friend, worn out from long hours of intense physical work, asked me to make him something soothing for his wrists and forearms. I made a gel with eight essential oils. He was so impressed by it that he shared it with anyone who’d let him. I began getting orders, and developed it into a cream.

That product, Comfort Cream, became the signature product of Black Sheep Botanicals.

Shop Comfort Cream

A Little More About Me

As well as being a certified aromatherapist, I’m a practising board-licensed massage therapist, and an educator at heart ~ I’ve trained massage therapists, taught public workshops on stress management and wellness, and organized larger seminars along the way.

Whether it’s a client in my office or a student in a classroom, my drive has always been the same: a wholistic, natural way of living, well-made food, remedies drawn from nature, and the everyday environments that support real wellbeing.

I’m also, by nature, an adventurer ~ for a while, I cooked professionally aboard a charter yacht. To this day, one way or another, I’m still mixing something.