We all dreamed of things as kids and young people. Perhaps you wanted to be famous, or be a scientist, or a star athlete. Blake wanted to live in a more peaceful, more abundant world.

Blake Cothron's love for plants and nature started very early. He was once a little boy with a love for trees, rain, wild animals, fields of wildflowers and all things Kentucky. What kickstarted his love of gardening was the tomato plants his late mother bought him as a child in the 1990s which he planted in his fledgling 3' x 6' home garden in his parent's suburban backyard.

His passion and desire to develop his horticultural skills went hard as a teen. Between reading stacks of old farming and gardening manuals and building more gardens, he wanted to live closely to, and in alignment with nature and work with the Earth to meet his needs.

He developed a desire to learn everything he could about fruiting plants and trees in the early 2000s. This even led to him pruning neighbor’s fruit trees to bring them back into production, to planting trees of his own. 

This intensified with him traveling the USA in his 20s to learn organic farming and fruit growing in a wide diversity of climates and regions. These travels spanned from managing an organic apple orchard in Missouri, managing acres of diverse organic fruit trees in the Bay Area of California, working with figs, persimmons and guavas in the humid gulf area of Mississippi to climbing coconuts and working in tropical fruit forests in Hawai'i. He dedicated many years to hands on learning, managing operations in various US locations, as well as exploring organic farming and fruit cultivation all over the world with gusto for over 8 years.

After many years learning new and innovative approaches to land stewardship and regenerative agriculture, as well as the pitfalls of conventional chemical agriculture, he felt ready to settle down and start his own farm and business.

He kept his dream alive by returning to Kentucky in February 2013, and working to start the business and acquire land. After lots of patient and dedicated work, in the Summer of 2014 he started and founded Peaceful Heritage Nursery LLC, right in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky on the outskirts of the 'Holy Land' region of Kentucky.

He gradually built the nursery over time, all from scratch on a rugged Appalachian mountainside in Crab Orchard, Kentucky. There he began trialing many diverse species and fruit cultivars, experimenting with innovative and regenerative techniques, putting in 1000s of hours of research, on-ground trials and working on new small-scale agriculture strategies and solutions. This is an on-going process that has led to the release of a growing number of unique and innovative plants into the nursery trade. Blake also has written two books: Pawpaws: The Complete Growing and Marketing Guide, and The Berry Grower, both available for order online and at your local library.

Since 2014 Blake has been the team leader and visionary of Peaceful Heritage, but over the years a number of people have contributed lots of work to grow the nursery and help it succeed. There's a small active team of people that contribute to keeping PHN working and thriving. It's a team of hardworking middle America farming people as well as a few hardworking IT bros all working in alignment with right livelihood to keep a good thing here going strong. We also maintain a living library of many hundreds of fruiting and native plants and hundreds of cultivars. Through this effort we offer customers our scion wood and cutting products as well as supply our nursery with high quality plant material to propagate.

Our nursery is here to provide excellent, top-shelf plants to our many happy customers. It's also a goal for us to assist you in reconnecting to the mystery, beauty and abundance of the Earth by creating your own oasis and sanctuary of homegrown fruit, food and abundance. We also support local wildlife proliferation through offering native plants.

It's our aim to supply you with top shelf nursery plants, horticultural products, accurate information and excellent customer service.

Plants named and introduced to the nursery trade as of 2025 by Peaceful Heritage Nursery LLC (those marked with * are varieties donated to the nursery by private plant enthusiasts and collectors:

Mulberries: Honeydrops, Madhava, Varaha, Vajra, Asheville Delite *,

Pawpaws: Golden Moon, Avatar, Sri Gold, Free Byrd *, Florence White *

Berries: Hidden Gem Black Raspberry, Braveheart Juneberry

Grapes: Re-introduced many 1800s Munson varieties to the nursery trade, recovering them from near extinction.

Nuts: 'Gideon' English walnut, now only existing in the orchard of Cliff England, which was discovered growing in and producing full crops of high quality nuts in Kentucky. Scions were saved just before the trees were destroyed; Cliff grafted it.

Passionfruit: Genesis Passionfruit

Tomato: Flying Mountain (discontinued).