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. Continue reading →