What Is Lemon Balm? How InVine Botanicals Grows & Infuses It in Tallahassee, Florida

Of all the herbs we grow here at InVine Botanicals, in our garden in Tallahassee, Florida, lemon balm might be the most quietly useful of the bunch. So let's spend a few minutes really getting to know it: what lemon balm is, how we grow, dry, and infuse it, and the two balms it ends up in. Lemon balm is a leafy perennial in the mint family, and its botanical name is Melissa officinalis.

Its heart-shaped, deeply veined leaves have softly scalloped edges and a slightly puckered surface, unmistakable once you've grown a patch of it yourself. That first name, Melissa, is the ancient Greek word for honeybee. Beekeepers once rubbed the crushed leaves inside empty hives to help settle a new swarm, and to this day bees crowd its small white summer flowers.

You'll sometimes see it called sweet balm, or bee balm, or simply melissa, but the name most of us know it by comes straight from the scent of the leaf. Brush a leaf between your fingers and it releases a bright, clean smell of lemon, all the citrus with none of the sourness. That aroma comes from delicate oils in the leaf, alongside the compounds lemon balm is most prized for: rosmarinic acid and a family of plant antioxidants called flavonoids.

Rosmarinic acid is a big part of why lemon balm has been valued in skin care for so long, and it's most concentrated when the leaf is grown well and cut right at its peak. People have been growing lemon balm for more than two thousand years, all the way back to the herb gardens of ancient Greece and the physicians of the medieval Arab world. In medieval Europe it filled monastery gardens and household herb cabinets alike, and it was written into one of the most famous herbals of the age, the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum.

Few garden herbs carry a paper trail quite that long. From those first Mediterranean beds it spread across Europe and eventually around the world, following gardeners who simply didn't want to be without a clump of it near the kitchen door. We grow our own lemon balm right here in the Tallahassee garden, in the warm, humid Florida climate it happily settles into.

Give it a little afternoon shade and its patch spreads a bit wider every season. Florida's heat and humidity are hard on a lot of herbs, but lemon balm is forgiving. It thrives in the same beds where fussier plants struggle, growing alongside the mints, rosemary, basil, and calendula we tend entirely by hand.

Like everything in this garden, the lemon balm is planted for one reason: to become balm. Nothing here is ornamental. Every bed is grown to be harvested, dried, and infused.

We watch the lemon balm closely and cut it just before it flowers, the point when its leaves hold the most aromatic oil, taking it with shears, just a few stems at a time. We try to cut our herbs in the cool of the morning, once the dew has dried but before the day's heat pulls those volatile oils up and out of the leaves. Every herb in this garden is harvested the same slow way: by hand, sprig by sprig, gathered gently into a basket rather than stripped from the plant, so it can keep growing all season.

A basket of fresh-cut herbs like this, lemon balm among them, smells like a whole grove of lemons, and that scent, captured at its peak, is really the whole point of growing them ourselves. Whatever we cut comes indoors right away, while it's still fresh, because from the moment a leaf is picked, the clock on its aroma and its compounds starts running. Fresh lemon balm can't go straight into oil, though.

The water still in the leaf would spoil an infusion, so first the whole harvest has to dry. We lay it out in a single layer on screen racks, the same racks that hold every herb and flower we bring in from the garden. The drying room is climate-controlled.

We hold it at around seventy-six degrees, keep the humidity low, and keep it dark, the exact combination that protects the leaf's green color and its aromatic oils. Depending on the herb, drying takes anywhere from four to nine days, always slow and gentle, never forced with high heat, and never in direct sun, which would bleach the leaf and scatter the very oils we grew it for. Lemon balm is ready when the leaves are fully dry and crisp and crumble easily between your fingers.

Only then is it ready for the next step: oil. This is the step that really defines InVine. We pack the whole dried leaf into a jar, not a concentrated extract, not an essential oil, but the entire herb, exactly as it dried.

Then we cover it completely with cold-extracted organic oils, extra virgin olive oil and unrefined virgin coconut oil, and seal the jar up tight. A whole-herb infusion like this draws a much fuller range of the plant into the oil than distillation can, both the fragrant, fat-soluble compounds and the more delicate ones held inside the leaf. No heat is applied, and no solvents are used.

We simply stir the herbs down beneath the surface of the oil, and set the jar somewhere cool and dark. For lemon balm, that slow infusion runs a full eight weeks, on shelves lined with jars of every herb we grow, each one quietly steeping in its own oil. In the jar, the clear oil slowly takes on the green and gold of the leaf.

You can watch the infusion happen, week by week, right through the glass. Over those weeks, the oil gradually pulls the lemon balm's aromatic oils, its rosmarinic acid, and its flavonoids out of the dried leaf and into itself. There's no way to rush this part.

The oil takes what it takes, week after week, until it has carried the full character of the whole plant. When the infusion is finally finished, we strain the spent leaf out through a fine mesh, pressing every last drop of the golden, infused oil from it. What's left is a gold-green, deeply fragrant lemon balm oil, one that carries the character of an entire plant, rather than a single distilled note.

From there, the infused oil is gently warmed and blended with just two more things: our own pure beeswax and a little Vitamin E. Then it's poured into jars by hand and left to set into a soft, scoopable balm as it slowly cools. There are no fillers, no synthetic fragrance, no alcohol, and no parabens, just infused oil, beeswax, and Vitamin E, and nothing else.

Every jar is labeled with its own batch number and infusion date, so each one traces right back to the herbs, the garden bed, and the season it came from. So where does all of that lemon balm actually end up? It goes into two of the balms we make here, and in both, it's a whole-herb infusion, not a fragrance.

The first is our Bug Bite Balm, where lemon balm is infused together with lemongrass, rosemary, sweet basil, and lemon mint, then finished with a touch of tea tree. Lemon balm was the very first herb Janice reached for when she formulated that balm, drawn to its clean lemon aroma and its long, documented history in traditional skin care. Bug Bite Balm is a simple cosmetic balm, meant to be dabbed gently onto the skin after time spent outdoors, gentle enough for all ages, and for sensitive skin.

Both balms lean on lemon balm for the same quality: a fresh, green, lemony softness that keeps the blend from ever feeling sharp or heavy. Lemon balm also appears in our Breathe Free Balm, where it plays a quieter role, a soft, grounding note that balances the brighter peppermint and spearmint alongside it. That balm is made to be massaged onto the chest, neck, or temples, purely for its cool, invigorating, aromatic scent, the character of whole herbs rather than synthetic fragrance.

In both jars, lemon balm isn't an oil dropped in at the end for smell. It's a whole herb we grew, harvested, dried, and infused ourselves, from the first cutting to the finished balm. And because we grow the lemon balm ourselves, we know exactly which bed and which harvest went into each batch, the kind of certainty you simply can't buy in as a ready-made extract.

That, in the end, is the whole idea behind InVine Botanicals. We grow it, we infuse it, and we make it ourselves, slower and smaller, but honest all the way down. So that's lemon balm, from a fragrant green mound in our Tallahassee garden, to the balm on your shelf.

com. Thanks for spending a little time in the garden with us.