On a recent visit to Nashville, my brother introduced me to High Garden, an “old fashioned apothecary herb and tea shop,” in the proto-gentrifying neighborhood called East Nashville. The location felt appropriate to me because this is the kind of store that in New York would detonate like a bomb in Williamsburg or play the beckoning outpost empty warehouses in Bushwick. But High Garden is not in Brooklyn. It is far too charmingly humble and reasonably priced to be so. When I walk into the shop, I want to buy everything.
High Garden is a bit like something out of The Shire or else from a hard-pack crossroads where friars and maidens going this way chew the fat with knights and knaves going that way. I love the place, and not just because I’m at least 1/3 a hippie. High Garden is kind of magic. Glass jars containing herbs and teas both familiar and obscure cover the back wall floor to ceiling. Need lung wort, yarrow, or kava kava? Not sure at all what ashwaghandra, milk thistle, or catuaba bark are for? Well, you’re in luck because owner Leah Larabell not only sells them but thoroughly knows this stuff like the back of her hand. She’s a trained counselor specializing in teens and adolescents, but this—the ages-old wisdom of which plant is good for which of our ailments—is obviously a passion.
Present Leah with any number of symptoms and she’ll ask a few questions, cross to her jars, and mix together in a silver bowl on a wooden table teas and herbs to address your needs. I told her, for example, that I sleep like hell, am frequently anxious or angry, and just might be prone to the occasional delusion about the fabric of the world (though maybe you’re the delusional one, buddy) and the woman nodded, went to her jars, got to work. While this went on, her husband and co-owner Joel spooned gourmet tea blends into tea bags and poured me a milk-steamed Oolong and orange drink that was a crackerjack transposition of a creamsickle into beverage form.
A few highlights thus far:
Yerba Mate Blends have recently rocked my world. Yerba Mate is probably the most obscure of the four naturally-caffeinated plants. Steeped in water, it’s called simply mate, and is drunk all over South America, frequently from fancy gourds, which strikes me as a pretty awesome way to drink a drink. It is, in terms of a daily pick-me-up, everything that coffee can only dream of; it perks up my attention without destroying my focus or sparking the jitters, and it’s much easier on the stomach. The first blend Joel served me contained mate, chocolate, milk, and honey. It was lighter than a coffee mocha and the honey left a bit of bitter bite. About ten minutes after finishing it, behind the wheel, I felt so on-point I could have threaded a needle in the dark with my toes. The second blend, which I bought in tea form to take home, was a Dark Roast Pumpkin blend that includes sarsaparilla, cardamom, and orange peel. It’s fantastic, slightly creamy and smoky with the tiniest nod toward a tang. In a society in which seasonal variations of a product are omnipresent artifacts of end-stage Capitalism, this seasonal blend tasted native and inevitable.
Shannon says I’m a hypochondriac. That’s not true. I’m just very in-tune with the possible consequences of previous lifestyles. Thus I asked Leah for something for lung health. She mixed up some Spearmint with Lung Wort, used for centuries to treat chest, lung, and breathing issues (though not studied by the FDA; I can’t imagine why not, nor for whom they may work) as a tea. Brewed with some honey, it’s refreshing and makes me optimistic.
High Garden’s Fall Harvest Seasonal Tea, which I discovered on the last day before they turn to making their Winter Tea, is a rooibos-based tea that includes honeybush, calendula, and spices like nutmeg and cloves. It tastes like the changed leaves on the trees look. It’s a bit piquant, warming, the kind of tea that goes well with burning leaves in the backyard while wearing long sleeves.
And finally, revelatory’ily, High Garden turned me on to Kava Kava Root Powder, the primary ingredient in most of the bigwig medicinal tea companies’ calming blends. I cannot overstate how happy this herb makes me. When I wake up half-bugged out, when I’m anxious for no reason, when I just need to get a goddamn grip because some distant cliff has come into sight, I now know to mix a tablespoon of this powder, half a cup of hot water, honey, and milk, and drink it down. My lips go a little bit numb for a couple of minutes, which is kind of a treat. And within about 180 seconds of consumption, my heart no longer feels like I’m running a marathon, my chest is more relaxed, whatever is coming next in my afternoon feels less like a battle to be fought, and the day seems less rushed in general. It’s really kind of magic. It’s the real deal.
All of this stuff, by the way, is very, very reasonably priced. Again: a store born out of a passion. The fact that the shop is a kind of preservation—of restoration—only adds to my pleasure in shopping there.
Leah and Joel also do mail orders. Dig it.