An 80-year-old man who lived off-grid in the Southern Appalachian Mountains for 50 years had mastered the art of living and thriving in harmony with nature; a self-sufficient life that taught him the value of community.
Joe Hollis lived at the foot of the Black Mountains in western North Carolina on a 2.8-acre plot he bought for $800 back in the ‘70s. Mr. Hollis grew much of his food, cooked on a propane stove, and sourced water from the national forest above his land. He used two sets of solar panels to generate power for his property, which he called Mountain Gardens.
A Lifestyle Overhaul
“I’m the last place on the road joining the national forest,” said Mr. Hollis, who claimed that if the grid went down, he could likely sustain himself indefinitely. “If I had six or eight people here, it might start to get more challenging.”
From his home, Mr. Hollis made an income by selling seeds, plants, and herbal tinctures in addition to providing educational plant walks for visitors. Mr. Hollis also taught herbal preparations at Dallas Traditions School in Asheville. “For many, many years I'd say my annual income was well under $10,000,” he said. “My goal is to earn as little money as possible without feeling like I’m suffering ... I never could have done any of this if I had a nine-to-five job.”
Mr. Hollis grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and moved with his family to North Carolina. After leaving home as a young man, he traveled with the Peace Corps to Borneo where he lived with tribal people for three years. He suffered “significant culture shock” on his return home to the United States.
“The culture shock was coming back and seeing this glut of stuff that we have, just walking into a mall,” he said. “I spent several years thinking about going back to graduate school and studying anthropology, and going back overseas and working with these people. Eventually, I decided I just didn’t really want to study because I was so impressed with their lifestyle.”
Coming out of Detroit, he felt that people didn’t do anything beyond working at a job, making money, and fulfilling their needs with money. However seeing people that built their own houses, grew their own food, and lived a self-reliant life with all long-distance communication happening via canoe, Mr. Hollis was inspired and wanted to do the same.
Craving the “healthier, happier” life of the tribespeople in Borneo, Mr. Hollis joined forces with neighbors in Detroit who wanted to set up a commune for craftspeople on some land in a local valley. He contributed $500 from a season of apple picking to help buy tools and 50 pounds of brown rice, and the group bundled into a Volkswagen to set off for their new off-grid life.
A few years later, the group disbanded, but Mr. Hollis had gained a taste of the life he wanted and decided to continue living the life alone. He started his home base on a 2.8-acre plot by building a traditional Appalachian cabin and expanded from there.
“Nobody was moving into Hudson County at that point, it was the second poorest county in the state. There was land for sale everywhere or you could just have empty houses,” he said.
Left to himself, Mr. Hollis brought his dream to fruition: a garden for medicinal plants and herbs, based on the layout of Chinese gardens to optimize spiritual development. He called it Mountain Gardens.
“I made this [Mountain Gardens] out of a couple of acres of land that was too rocky and steep, it had never been farmed,” Mr. Hollis said. “The biggest machine that’s ever been on this land would be a chainsaw. Everything is just hand labor.”
He described it as a botanical garden that comprises useful plants, grown ecologically and arranged ornamentally, a beautiful garden where all the plants are pretty much growing by themselves. He thus became a hunter-gatherer in his own garden.
“I picked up this book sort of randomly called Chinese Tonic Herbs. ... Most of them are not available in America, [so I started] looking for trading partners and seed saver exchanges and corresponding with botanical gardens in Korea and Japan.”
Up in Flames
As his project grew and his contacts expanded, Mr. Hollis was invited to China to attend a conference on medicinal herbs, a long-held dream that had been out of his financial reach. But tragically, on March 4, 2022, a fire destroyed the main building on the property, and Mr. Hollis lost his apothecary, library, seeds, garden tools, greenhouses, communal kitchen, solar power system, and so much more.
The fire was started accidentally by a person who neglected to put a domestic fire out when they went to bed. Mr. Hollis was woken up at 5 a.m. by the blaze and ran downstairs to grab a fire extinguisher. But he quickly gave up on the idea of saving the cabin: the flames were 50 feet high.
“The building that burned down was the first thing I ever built,” Mr. Hollis said. “This was half of my life’s work right here, the other half being the garden. ... The whole back wall was full of books, then the back end was my apothecary, where there was a whole wall of tinctures of both Chinese and native plants, and another partial wall of dried Chinese herbs and maybe 100 different species. There was a cabinet which had my seed bank, some of them quite rare.”
