At four, when Elise's mother told her they might have to live in her car for a while, Elise decided she wanted to help make money for rent. She made watermelon juice steeped with mint from her mother's garden—a garden she helped tend—and sold it so she could give the money to her mom. Entrepreneurship began as resourcefulness, care, and a child's instinct to help keep her family afloat.

That instinct kept showing up. Although she wasn't allowed to eat chocolate bars herself, Elise won the school sales program year after year and turned recess into a tiny candy empire. Her mother would take her to Big Lots to stock up on inexpensive candy bars, and Elise quietly resold them at school. Resourceful? Absolutely. A tiny bit mischievous? Let's just say recess had a supply chain. In middle school, she started an organization and feng shui business because she genuinely loved clearing what no longer served, rearranging rooms, and changing the energy of a space. By thirteen, she was responsible for paying for her own phone and phone bill, movie tickets, clothes, and anything else she needed or wanted to buy—another lesson in earning, problem-solving, and creating opportunities rather than waiting for them.

By eighteen, her goal had become true self-sufficiency: to be able to support herself, make what she could, grow what she could, and build a life with her own hands instead of waiting for someone else to create it for her.

From age four, Elise worked toward becoming an Olympian and professional soccer player. A career-ending injury changed the direction of that life completely.

Her grandmother Dixie—a multimedia artist and orchid judge—encouraged her to try selling the art and herbal gifts she was already making for people she loved. What first looked like an ending became the beginning of a different kind of creative life.

A local craft festival became the beginning. Hand-painted wine and champagne glasses, crystal jewelry, and whatever else felt joyful enough to make came first.

The work expanded into art + yoga events and festivals, homegrown herbal potions, nature art, and a broader vision of what a small handmade business could hold.

Farming, herbs, gardens, pollinators, and bees became an even deeper part of the work—and of the life being built around it.

At the old farm, Elise transformed the entire 0.75-acre front and backyard into a food forest, then inspired a community share garden in the neighborhood. That work grew into designing food forests for others at nearly every scale—from tiny apartment porches, like the one where she first began growing after moving out at seventeen, all the way to food-forest designs spanning more than 30 acres.

The vision Elise had carried since childhood finally became real. It first took shape for her at Fox Hollow Farm, where her mother worked as a bodyworker in the farm's holistic hospital, and where Elise first imagined a life built around land, healing, creativity, and community.

Years later, Wild Indigo became the living version of that early vision: a forest farm, retreat center, apothecary, creative laboratory, guest experience, habitat project, and an ongoing practice in relationship with land.