With Blue Ridge Aromatics, Ian Montgomery has made his way—one step at a time and with a misstep or two—into the business of beautiful scents.
Hannah Miller
MAIN IMAGE: A small drop of liquid delivers a powerful punch of memory. INSET: Ian Montgomery inspects a plot of backyard bee balm beside gurgling Pine Branch.
Eastern red cedar limbs lie piled on the deck of Ian Montgomery’s cabin, high above Big Laurel Creek in the wilds of North Carolina’s Madison County.
A trailer full of hemlock branches is parked in the yard, near where a wild turkey strolls and the delicate leaves of bee balm and mountain mint grow near a stream.
The cedar, hemlock, even the herbs are destined for the homemade, stainless-steel distillery on the cabin’s back porch. There Montgomery, an adopted son of the mountains, will turn them into essential oils that tease the noses of long-departed natives with sweet smells of home.
When one customer’s daughter enters her mom’s home at Christmas, Montgomery reports, she exclaims, “I don’t believe you got a real tree this year!”
She is actually smelling strips of cloth that her mom saturated with Fraser-fir oil and hid in her plastic tree.
Montgomery, 36, has long been passionate about conservation. When at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, he delved into botany. He then earned an M.B.A. in sustainable enterprise at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.
A former girlfriend introduced him to essential oils—a plant’s moisture distilled into a liquid for diffusers, perfumes, soap and aromatherapy products.
“I was just blown away, it smelled so much like the original plant,” he remembers.
He thought at first that producing the luscious scents was big business and therefore beyond his reach.
Then, realizing his love of plants wasn’t going away, and taking stock of his experience in metalworking and nursery management, he thought, “I can do this.” . . .
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