for the love of Motherlove

A passion and knowledge of herbs evolves into a successful herbal company providing products for women. At age 7, Kathryn Cox was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a life-threatening bone infection, and told she'd never walk again.

Twenty-five years later, she started Motherlove herbal company – by giving educational herb walks. Some of us dream of changing our lives. For Kathryn Cox, life changed with a dream. A dream about applesauce.

In 1982, pregnant and "living off the grid," Cox and her husband, Charles, were completely self-sufficient: "We grew our own food, gathered our own medicine, our heat was solar, we had everything covered," Cox explains. By that time an experienced herbalist, Cox started creating products for her own use during pregnancy.

"I started making things from the focus of, 'I'm pregnant what can I put together to prevent stretch marks? To relieve leg cramps? For low iron?' Then after my daughter was born, I gave the products away, and people said, 'This stuff is great. It really works.'"

Cox began conducting herb walks in 1985 as a way of sharing her knowledge. The walks led to classes, and the classes caught the attention of Columbine, a former Fort Collins natural foods store.

"One of the folks in my class happened to be the owner of Columbine – this was before it became part of Wild Oats – and he wanted to carry my products in their store. So I started hand making labels," explains Cox, "and then I had this dream.

"Charles and I were serving a whole group of people applesauce," Cox remembers. "I got it out of the freezer, all this frozen applesauce we'd made from apples we'd picked, and you know the colored tin foil that's blue on one side and silver on the other? I actually dreamed about that foil rearranged around our applesauce. I got up the next morning and told Charles about my strange dream, and he said, 'This is about your business about creating a package that the public will see and know.'

"That very same day," continues Cox, "The Coloradoan called me for my first interview, and that was the beginning of Motherlove herbal company as a real business."

Dreams aside, Cox also woke up to the realities of running a real business. "It wasn't long before I had to make some big decisions," Cox admits, like taking on apprentices three days a week instead of gathering all the herbs myself. But soon the order got too big even for what we could handle."

Cox then proceeded to find certified organic growers, making a point to "get to know them personally because you can't have a better product than the quality of the herb." She also made the decision to niche Motherlove into a women's line, because more herbal companies were coming on the market.

"Basically, it already was a women's line," says Cox, "because the foundation of it was products I made for myself when pregnant. But I felt that, in order for Motherlove to grow, women needed to be our focus."

That niche required another decision. "My thing had always been working with local, Colorado herbs – whatever was growing outside my back door," Cox says. "But for a true women's line, there are some very good herbs that don't grow in Colorado. I'd lived for several years in California, and that gave me knowledge of a whole new ecosystem beyond what we have here in the Rocky Mountains: plants like ginger, bay, eucalyptus, hedgenettle and the pimpernels." Subsequently, while still focused on plants from the Rocky Mountain region, Motherlove herbal company products do occasionally incorporate herbs from other regions.

While reluctant to leave her home-based Stratton Park locale near the top of Rist Canyon, Cox also realized she needed a more practical business address.

"We just had to move in town – it started to get too nuts," she laughs. "We'd been working out of a production shop that we built on to our house, but we lived at the end of a dirt road and, come winter, UPS couldn't get to us. I'd be hauling product out on sleds.

"That was also the time," Cox says, "when I had to choose between having a small business where I did everything myself, telling people, 'You can't have my product because I can only do so much,' or taking the leap of hiring others and trusting that somebody else can do it as well as I can. It was difficult, because Motherlove had grown by being known for its quality. But I didn't want to deny these products to people, so I took the leap."

Motherlove herbal company lept to Kintzley Plaza in Laporte and Cox started sitting at a desk. "Behind a desk was not where I wanted to be," says Cox. "For two years, I sat at a desk while other people made the products, while other people grew the herbs. I didn't start out to have a business where I ran a business. My lifestyle simply evolved into a business. So I wasn't happy."

Happily, the perfect business manager appeared in Alicia Jensen, and Cox was free to refocus her energies on the aspects that she loved.

She admits, "What I needed to do to grow the business was not what I wanted to do. Once Alicia came on, and I was able to continue my teaching, speaking, formulating products, giving seminars, things just exploded."

That Cox's lifestyle grew into a business is no understatement. Reared in a family that prized its large, fervent gardens, she inherited a green thumb: "One time, a friend went through my house and counted all my potted plants and it ended up being something like 800."

Fresh out of college, Cox traveled the world to further explore the world of plant life, gathering seeds from everywhere she went and everything she ate. She even went so far as to live for awhile in a tipi, immersing herself completely in her passion.

"My life became about going out and gathering things and I'd take them to CSU and ask, 'What does this do? One of the first herbal books was 'Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains' by J.D. Harrington, and he was a CSU professor," say Cox.

She also spent some time in Santa Cruz in the late 1970s, where she added knowledge of the healing arts to her repertoire.

"By the time I went to Santa Cruz," she explains, "I'd done body care with herbs and played a lot with cosmetic herbs, plant dyes and edible plants. Back then, Santa Cruz was the Mecca of the healing arts. It was there that I delved into nutrition, medicinal herbs, checked out reflexology, polarity, massage and acupressure. And it really solidified in me that yes, herbs are my path, herbs are my calling. It gave me a real awareness as to the possibilities of medicinal herbs."

She took that awareness and blended it with a healthy dose of respect for traditional medical practices: both Cox's grandfather and father worked at the Mayo Clinic.

"With my childhood diagnosis of ostomyelitis, my parents were told I'd never walk again," Cox says. "But since my father was a physician at the Mayo Clinic, I had access to the best doctors. I received experimental surgery, and they ended up writing books about my case. As a result, Cox is well-versed in the ins and outs of mainstream medicine. But she delights in the fact that she can now teach the medical community a few things.

"When my children were small," she recalls, "we were vacationing and a man got stung by a bee. Turns out he's a doctor. Now my kids, by the time they were 3 or 4, they knew if they got a bee sting, to chew some plantain. Plantain is a leaf – a common 'weed' – that takes care of bug bites. So here's this little kid, handing this doctor a bunch of leaves and telling him to chew them up. I love the simple things like that – its knowledge you can take everywhere."

Knowledge that you can take everywhere – personal empowerment – is a basic principal behind Motherlove herbal company. Cox emphasizes it in her seminars and herb walks as an integral part of Motherlove's ongoing mission to educate people about the world around them.

"One of the questions I like to present to people is, 'What is a weed?' You know, confront the whole concept of what makes a weed a weed," says Cox.

Cox is particularly fond on dandelions. "Who knows where the thinking started that dandelions are to be sprayed out of lawns," Cox says. "I use dandelions as an example, because every part of a dandelion is useful and dandelions grow everywhere. That tells you right there that everybody should be using it and that it's a valuable plant. It's everywhere. Get a clue!" Cox rolls her eyes in exasperation.

"Dandelion root is extremely high in iron. When I was pregnant and my hematocrit (blood count) was very low, I dug up dandelion roots after the iron pills the doctor gave me didn't work, the three weeks later my iron count was 10 points higher. Roast dandelion roots and they taste like coffee. The leaves are great for salad plus they're very high in vitamin A. My kids make dandelion muffins out of the flowers. Dandelion stems are great for warts, you can make pickles and wine with dandelions, and yet people are spraying them."

"That," continues Cox, "is the real irony, because dandelions are one of the best liver herbs there is. So here we are putting all these toxins into the environment by spraying them out of lawns – the toxins go into your water, you walk on it and bring the toxins into your house, you're breathing it – and it's THE best plant for helping the liver eliminate those very toxins. It's crazy."

Cox enjoys showing people the hidden wonders of weeds. "Some of my favorite plants are very common weeds that you'd recognize everywhere. I show someone what a weed can do and they get amazed. They say, I've been pulling that OUT of my yard?' Like my story about the doctor chewing up plantain, it's a real change in consciousness. So along with simple plant identification on my herb walks, I try to slip that in, that notion of the difference we can make by our daily choices. People talk a lot about planetary healing. I believe we have to balance personally first, and then the planet will balance: there's just no way to do it otherwise."

Emphasis on daily choices and personal balancing, the desire to focus on the individual, led Cox to develop personal seminars. "Right now, huge herbal conferences are in vogue. But I want to keep it personal so participants don't have to find child care and don't have travel expenses, and teach what's growing at a person's house, in their yard, in their town.

Cox is also looking to target professionals in the medical field: nurses, midwives, lactation consultants and pharmacists.

"The herb business has grown so big so fast, that these professionals are suddenly getting patients asking all kinds of herbal questions, and they need to know what alternative products Motherlove herbal company has to offer," Cox says. "A perfect example is our lactation product More Milk, which works very quickly vs. Reglan, the pharmaceutical, which has a side effect of depression. But until they get my information, Reglan is the only answer they have."

The key to success for Motherlove, Cox says, is keeping the small-time feel in a big-time business. Motherlove enjoyed 45 percent growth in both 1998 and 1999, and now has international distribution.

"There's a real difference between an herbal business that is not conscious of where its herbs are coming from, the kind of company that just orders several tons of Echinacea, pays the pickers their money no questions asked and is only in the business because there's money to be had in the business now," says Cox, "and the herbal business that understands what the plants really have to offer and takes concerns about the whole cycle of regrowth. We support sustainable, ethical wildcrafting; there are plenty of things growing that are viewed as nothing more than weeds that we can use – that if we don't use, someone will say 'There's a weed problem here, let's spray.' But too many things are being just taken, taken, taken… especially roots… and those do need to be grown in certified organic form."

The herb business is ideal for supporting small farms, Cox says. "Motherlove can be a leader in that, because not only do we put out a product but we look at the other end of it, too, supporting the people who do the growing and gathering. There are ways to do it right in any business, whether you have an herbal business or, say, a computer business. It's all a matter of choice."

Cox says she feels strongly that in everything and every way, the future depends on personal choices. "People are getting to a place where they want to be informed and they want choices. There's a growing focus on personal responsibility in preventative health care, and herbs can play a big role with simple concerns like colds, headaches, stress, sprains, cuts or bruising.

"My premise is," Cox says, "that using your local plants can balance you physically, mentally and spiritually. The self-empowerment of knowing where your food and medicine is coming from balances you physically. Mental balance comes with being out in nature, tuned in to your surroundings. And then of course the spiritual, with people going back to their roots – to me, it's going back to our herbal roots. So by knowing and using your local plants and being balanced in those levels of your life, you can take responsibility for your health and, ultimately, the health of the planet.

"It all starts at a personal level," she adds, "that awareness of what you are creating and how you are walking on the earth. If each of us can reconnect, individually, to the planet, then it's a mute point about planetary healing – it's done."

Printed in Rocky Mountain Spirit, Spring 2000