Meet Our Wolf Pack
Wild Indigo Forest Farm
Meet Our Wolf Pack
Family-run. Art-soaked. A little wild on purpose.
Wild Indigo has always felt more like a living ecosystem than an org chart. The work here grows from a simple throughline: care for land, people, creativity, and the living weave that connects them all.
Meet the humans and four-legged family at the heart of that work.
Founder & Steward
Elise Dixie Jane
Clinical Herbalist · Sustainable Earth Artist · Wildlife Conservationist · Garden Designer & Educator · Bee-Centric Keeper · Apitherapy Practitioner · Sylvotherapy Guide · Aura Photographer
Elise is a third-generation herbalist and second-generation Reiki Master, raised around the Chakra and Aura systems, Traditional Chinese Medicine, plant medicine, and a deep reverence for Earth Mother.
Elise Dixie Jane was raised by the hands of strong women - artists, nonprofit presidents, women's and civil-rights activists, and a bodyworker - who modeled what it looked like to build a life around service, creativity, conviction, and self-direction. She was also quite literally raised in the theatre. Without traditional babysitters, much of her childhood unfolded at Derby Dinner Playhouse among stage actors, cast and crew, rehearsals, costumes, sets, and the strange everyday magic of live performance. That world became one of the roots of her creativity, alongside the artistic influence of her grandmother Dixie and her father. Working for herself and following the pull of her passions never felt like a strange idea; creativity and self-direction were part of the landscape she grew up inside.
Long before Wild Indigo had a name, Elise kept returning to wild places whenever life became too loud. Wild Indigo grew from that remembering - and from a belief that care for people and care for land are not separate systems, but interconnected parts of the same living ecology.
Today, that work is less a list of job titles than a way of tending: growing and processing herbs for the homegrown Apothecary; caring for forests, habitats, gardens, beehives, and pollinators; serving as the chef behind Wild Indigo's forest-to-table catering for the Retreat Center, Bed & Breakfast, and campers; designing spaces and experiences that help people reconnect with Earth Mother; and creating aura portraits, workshops, retreats, and other offerings that make the invisible feel a little more tangible.
Elise is a trained and practicing apitherapy practitioner, bringing her care for honeybees and the living landscape into the study and responsible use of hive products in wellness traditions. Apitherapy explores bee-derived materials such as honey, beeswax, and propolis. Her approach emphasizes education, informed choices, allergy awareness, and respect for what scientific evidence can and cannot establish. Through Diagon Apiary, she is also working to secure funding for a future Apitherapy Hut, envisioned as a thoughtful space for nature connection and learning about the hive.
After 18 years as a small-business owner, the throughline is still the same: meet people where they are, make things with care, and keep the work connected to the living world around it.
Elise Dixie Jane is a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier International’s Kentucky Chapter and NAWBO Kentucky, connecting her work at Wild Indigo with a wider commUnity of women building, leading, and shaping businesses across food, hospitality, entrepreneurship, and beyond.
Apothecary & Plant Work
Growing, harvesting, drying, processing, blending, and brewing many of the herbs that become Wild Indigo's homegrown Apothecary.
Land & Habitat
Forest stewardship, native planting, food forests, garden design, habitat restoration, pollinator support, and the slow work of helping a place become more resilient.
Artsy Farty Alchemist
Upcycling, visionboarding workshops, handmade projects, garden design, creative workshops, The Artist's Way Book Club & 13-Week Creative Practice, and a lifelong habit of turning useful materials into something with soul.
Gatherings & Experiences
Retreats, sylvotherapy, aura photography, visionboarding workshops, herbal education, forest-to-table gatherings, and the thousand practical details that make guests feel held.
Wild Indigo Aura Camera & Aura RX
When the aura experience Elise imagined did not exist in the form she wanted, she and her husband Andrew began building it themselves. Her vision and curiosity met his work as a software developer, engineer, and systems architect, and nearly a year of experiments became Wild Indigo's custom-built Aura Camera and the software behind Aura RX.
The result is an in-house full-spectrum aura experience created by Wild Indigo, not a generic reading system with our name placed on top. Read how the camera & Aura RX came to life →
Creative Technologist & Builder
Andrew
Software Developer · Systems Architect · App Creator · Woodworker · Artist · Adventurer
Andrew is the creative technologist behind the Wild Indigo Aura Camera & Aura RX, Wild Indigo Cosmic, and the My Wild Indigo app - and our resident coder extraordinaire. He has coded so much of the magic behind Wild Indigo, from the systems that help our ideas reach the world to the rainbow stars that sprinkle across our website like a tiny shooting-star pack. He has worked in information technology since 2004, following in the footsteps of his father, a longtime CIO, while forging his own path as a developer, engineer, and systems architect.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Andrew carries a deep love for his city and its culture wherever he goes. When he steps away from technology, you will likely find him hiking, backpacking, amateur gardening, tackling a unique woodworking project, creating art, gathering everyone around a board game, or being a devoted fur daddy to our animal family.
He is endlessly curious about wine, always eager to discover new regions and unusual bottles, and loves traveling the world with his wifey, Elise Dixie Jane - experiencing different cultures, meeting new people, and trying every wonderful food and wine along the way.
At Wild Indigo, Andrew brings together technology, artistry, curiosity, and craftsmanship. He loves creating apps - and just you wait until you see the My Wild Indigo app he has created for us - developing new ways to access and share information, and building the tools that turn our W I L D ideas into something people can actually experience.
Wild Indigo Bodywork Studio
Kimberly Krueger, LMT
Herbalism · Flower Essences · Therapeutic Massage · Lymphatic Drainage · Reflexology · Reiki · Nervous-System Support
Kimberly is Elise's mother and one of Wild Indigo's longest-standing links to both the healing arts and the performing arts. She began ballet at four and spent much of her life dancing, singing, and performing in musical theatre.
After high school, Kimberly lived in California, where she worked in musical theatre, modeling, and acting, and later in Minneapolis as a holistic veterinary technician and Ayurvedic practitioner. Those years deepened her relationship with the healing arts, including flower essences, herbalism, essential oils, Ayurveda, energy work, and body-based practices that would shape the rest of her life.
Kimberly was the first person at Rainbow Blossom to create a holistic medicine and plant medicine newsletter.
Kimberly then attended Louisville School of Massage, graduating in 1990. Around that same transformative chapter, she became pregnant with Elise and stepped into motherhood. Shortly after Elise was born, another surgery brought Kimberly's dancing and singing career to an end, but her gifts did not disappear - they found a new expression through touch, movement, intuition, and healing work.
Her therapeutic-massage career now spans 37 years. Her work is grounded in fascia-aware bodywork, chronic-pain support, and a blend of modalities that may include Lymphatic Drainage, Reflexology, Reiki, and other therapeutic approaches.
You may meet Kimberly in the Wild Indigo Bodywork Studio, or alongside Wild Indigo at one of our retreats and gatherings.
The Four-Legged Folk of Wild Indigo
They hike the trails, inspect the harvest, patrol the porch, and dance through the mornings.
And remind us that the Wild Indigo wolf pack has never been humans only.
Forest Kitty · Trail Guide · Keeper of the Knob
Persimmon
Persimmon was part of Wild Indigo before Wild Indigo was even ours to steward.
After tragically losing both of our cats the year before, Andrew swore we would never adopt another. Instead, he said that someday, when we lived in a forest, the forest kitties would find us.
The very first day we came to view this land, there was Persimmon.
And, well... the forest had spoken.
We named our first kitty Persimmon because of his obsession with climbing persimmon trees and their wonderfully rough, alligator-scaled bark. He has grown into the most extraordinary little hiking companion, happily wandering the forest trails alongside us and keeping a watchful eye on his woods, while terrifying his parents by climbing 30-plus feet up trees.
Compassionate, goofy, endlessly lovable, and famous for dramatically rolling at your feet, Persimmon also takes his role as guardian of Wild Indigo very seriously. When someone comes down the driveway, he is often the first to report for duty, appearing on the porch to make sure everything is exactly as it should be.
We like to think the forest sent him to us exactly when our hearts needed him most.
Professional Goofball · Forest Adventurer · Pawpaw Inspector
Loki
Loki is our big, fluffy, wonderfully clumsy boy who approaches life with enormous enthusiasm and occasionally questionable judgment.
He loves hiking through the forest, getting into absolutely everything he shouldn't, and conducting regular quality-control inspections of the pawpaws and persimmons. If food is within reach, Loki considers this a personal invitation to squeeze in a third lunch.
Underneath all that fluff and foolishness is an incredibly loving soul.
Loki grew up alongside his beloved sister, Princess Leia. The two were so inseparable that we called them Copy & Paste.
Within a year and a half, Loki lost all three of his siblings, and their absence has been hard on our sweet boy. The forest has brought a little peace back into his life: long hikes, familiar trails, trees overhead, and room to simply be. And whenever he misses them, we like to imagine he only has to look up at the night sky to find them in the stars, looking down and watching over him.
These days, Loki can usually be found tromping through the woods, investigating something suspiciously interesting, eating something he probably wasn't offered, or settling in near one of his favorite sounds: crystal singing bowls, which have fascinated him for as long as we can remember.
Equal parts tender heart, woodland adventurer, and magnificent goofball, Loki has a way of meeting life with his whole enormous heart.
Miracle Baby · Morning Dancer · Professional Snuggler
Lady Slipper
Lady Slipper is our little miracle baby, an angel who found her way into our family through a chain of serendipitous circumstances after a difficult beginning. We believe our beloved Princess Leia helped plant some of the seeds that ultimately led us to her, making Lady Slipper's arrival feel less like chance and more like one love quietly helping another find its way home.
Beneath that tender origin story lives an absolute goofball: delightfully clumsy, endlessly expressive, and happiest when spinning across the room in one of her morning dances. Every morning, we dance together while I sing to her, continuing a ritual I once shared with Princess Leia. Teaching Lady Slipper to dance has become a small, living thread between those two great loves.
Music has become part of her language, too. Lady Slipper is especially drawn to the gong, just as Loki has long been fascinated by crystal singing bowls and Persimmon seems to prefer the drum and rattles. Apparently every member of the Wild Indigo animal family has selected an instrument.
After the dancing and sound comes her other great vocation: snuggling. Few places suit her better than curled into our necks or asleep across our chests, as close to her people as physically possible.
And then there is food. Like Loki, Lady Slipper has developed a passionate relationship with pawpaws and persimmons and holds very strong opinions about who the harvest actually belongs to.
Tender, ridiculous, joyful, and deeply affectionate, Lady Slipper carries both the story of where she began and the extraordinary joy of where she landed.
Our little Lady Slipper, dancing her way through the forest and straight into our hearts.
How the Wild Indigo Story Grew
It did not begin as a master plan. It grew through curiosity, necessity, making, reinvention, resourcefulness, and one strange little next step after another.
At four, when Elise's mother told her they might have to live in the 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. Let's just say recess had a supply chain. In middle school, Elise 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.
At twelve, Elise's father and stepmother required her to begin working during the summers and paying for her own movie tickets, phone bill, and the extras she wanted or needed. It was an early education in earning, responsibility, and figuring things out for herself.
By eighteen, Elise had graduated high school early and was living on her own. As a single mother, Kimberly could no longer afford a home for them both and needed to move in with her boyfriend. Determined to remain in Indiana, Elise found a place of her own, and a coworker moved in with her. Elise prepaid six months of rent. While Elise was away at Disney World, that roommate disappeared with the rent money and virtually everything Elise owned, including family heirlooms. The home had been cleared out almost completely, leaving behind little more than a few linens and two spoons. Her beloved Volkswagen Beetle, Betty the Bug, had also been driven while she was away and the engine damaged so badly that the car ultimately blew up on the highway, leaving Elise without reliable transportation to work.
Faced with rebuilding what had vanished, Elise returned to what she had always known how to do: make something with her own hands. That necessity became the seed of her first formal business.
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.
Elise's Pieces became Elise's first formal business, born not from a polished business plan but from the need to rebuild after losing her savings, housing, transportation, and belongings. She began with the things she already knew how to make: hand-painted wine and champagne glasses, crystal jewelry, and other handmade pieces.
A local craft festival gave that work its first public home, turning a difficult beginning into the first named chapter of the creative business that would continue evolving toward Wild Indigo.
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.
Memberships, Affiliations + Organizations We Support
Wild Indigo is part of a wider commUnity of people and organizations working toward stronger local food systems, women-owned businesses, forest restoration, environmental protection, and meaningful travel throughout Southern Indiana.
Les Dames d’Escoffier International
Kentucky Chapter · Elise Dixie Jane, Member
A global organization of women leaders across food, beverage, culinary, hospitality, and allied professions.
NAWBO Kentucky
National Association of Women Business Owners · Elise Dixie Jane, Member
Connecting women entrepreneurs, business owners, and leaders across the region.
Indiana Grown
Wild Indigo Forest Farm · Member
Proudly connected to Indiana’s network of growers, makers, producers, and locally grown businesses.
SoIN Tourism
Wild Indigo Forest Farm · Team SoIN Partner
Part of Southern Indiana’s tourism commUnity, helping visitors discover the places, people, food, forests, and experiences that make this corner of Indiana worth wandering into.
United Plant Savers
Wild Indigo Forest Farm · Member
Supporting the protection of native medicinal plants and the habitats they depend on.
One Tree Planted
Wild Indigo Forest Farm · Partner
Supporting forest restoration through our commitment to planting one tree with every purchase.
Rainforest Action Network
Wild Indigo Forest Farm · Member
Standing with a wider movement working to protect forests, climate, and commUnities affected by environmental harm.
What Holds the Pack Together
Wild Indigo is built around a few simple things we keep returning to: reciprocity with the land, handmade over disposable, access over exclusivity, consent over assumption, curiosity over perfection, and commUnity that leaves room for people to arrive as they are.
Stewardship First
The forest, wildlife, pollinators, water, gardens, and soil are not scenery. They are part of the relationship.
Handmade Matters
We value the fingerprints in things - art, food, gardens, buildings, herbal work, and experiences shaped by actual people.
Access & Belonging
We keep asking how more people can feel welcome outdoors, in gatherings, and in wellness spaces without needing to perform belonging first.
Keep It Human
We are serious about the work without taking ourselves too seriously. Warmth, humor, flexibility, and meeting people where they are remain part of the practice.
Come Find Your Way Into the Forest
Meet the People. Meet the Land. Stay Curious.
Wild Indigo makes the most sense when you experience it rather than simply read about it.