Meet Rosemary: How We Grow It and the Balms It Goes Into — InVine Botanicals, Tallahassee FL

Of all the herbs we grow here at InVine Botanicals, in our small garden in Tallahassee, Florida, this might be the one we reach for the most. So let's take a few minutes and really get to know rosemary: how we grow it, how we harvest and dry it, and the balms it ends up in. Rosemary is a woody, evergreen herb in the mint family, with fine, needle-like leaves and that unmistakable piney, resinous aroma.

It's been a staple of herb gardens for thousands of years, and here, it goes into four of the products we make. We grow our rosemary right here in our Tallahassee garden, in full Florida sun. Given room and light, it grows into a dense, fragrant shrub you can smell before you even reach out to touch it.

It grows alongside dozens of other herbs we tend by hand: the mints, lemon balm, basil, calendula, and more. Like everything in this garden, rosemary is grown for one reason, to go into our balms. A working herb garden like ours is always a little wild: feathery fennel in one corner, a tangle of mint in another, rosemary anchoring its own bed.

We plant for the plants, not for tidy rows. Rosemary has been valued in herb gardens and kitchens for centuries, prized for its aromatic, resinous leaves. We grow it for that same character: the scent, and the oils held in the leaf.

When the rosemary is at its peak, we harvest it by hand, sprig by sprig, with shears, the same careful way we cut every herb in this garden. We only ever take what we need for the next small batch. We never strip a plant bare, so it can keep growing and giving all season long.

Everything we cut goes straight into a basket and comes indoors right away, while it's still fresh. Harvesting by hand is far slower than running a machine through a field. But it lets us cut selectively, keep the herbs whole, and keep the garden healthy year after year.

Even the potted herbs are tended and cut one at a time, by hand. A fresh-cut bundle of herbs like this, rosemary among them, is where every one of our infusions begins. But fresh herbs can't go straight into oil.

First, they have to dry. Here's a rack of our harvest drying, with rosemary laid out alongside calendula and roses. We dry everything slowly, on screen racks, for anywhere from four to nine days, depending on the herb.

The drying room is climate-controlled. We hold it around seventy-six degrees, at low humidity, and we keep it dark. That combination is what protects the color and the aromatic oils inside the leaves.

Drying slowly and gently, instead of with high heat, is one of those small steps that takes more time but keeps the herb closer to how it was in the garden. Rosemary is ready when the needles are brittle and snap cleanly. By the end of the season, these racks hold the whole garden, drying and waiting to become balm.

From here, the dried rosemary is slow-infused into organic oil for weeks, and that infused oil becomes part of four of our balms. The first is our Breathe Free Balm, made with rosemary, the mints, and lemon balm. Rosemary is also one of the herbs in our Bug Bite Balm, alongside lemongrass, lemon balm, and basil.

It's in our Muscle Revive Balm, with ginger, cayenne, turmeric, and the mints. And it even finds its way into our Rose Renewal Crème, where it's paired with our own garden roses. In every one of those products, rosemary isn't a fragrance added at the end.

It's a whole herb we grew, harvested, dried, and infused ourselves, start to finish. And that's really the whole idea behind InVine. Growing our own rosemary, instead of buying a ready-made extract, is slower and smaller.

But it's the only way we can know exactly what's in every jar, and exactly where it came from. Our garden runs nearly year-round here in Florida, which means there's almost always something to harvest, dry, and infuse. We grow from seed and from cuttings, expanding the beds a little each season, always with the same plants we actually use in the balms.

And along the way, the garden gives us more than ingredients. Coneflowers, calendula, and roses that are as good for the spirit as they are for the balm. Like all of our balms, each jar is poured by hand in small batches, never stockpiled, and labeled with its own batch number and infusion date, so it's traceable right back to the garden.

So that's rosemary: from an evergreen shrub in our Tallahassee garden, harvested and dried by hand, to the jar on your shelf. If you'd like to bring some home, you'll find all of our garden-grown balms at invinebotanicals dot com. Thanks for spending a little time in the garden with us.