A Walk Through Our Tallahassee Herb Garden — Where Every InVine Botanicals Balm Begins

Welcome to the InVine Botanicals garden, in Tallahassee, Florida. This is where every herb in our balms begins. Not in a factory, and not bought from a supplier, but grown right here, by hand, in these raised beds.

We're a small, family-run herbal company, and growing our own botanicals from seed and cutting is the whole idea behind everything we make. So come walk the beds with us, and we'll show you exactly what we grow, and how it ends up in the jar. Let's start with rosemary, which is one of the herbs we reach for the most.

It grows in full Florida sun into dense, fragrant, needle-like foliage, and we grow enough of it to infuse into our Bug Bite, Breathe Free, and Muscle Revive balms. Rosemary is one of the easiest herbs to grow well, and one of the most rewarding to walk past on a warm morning. Next is lemon balm, a soft, lemon-scented member of the mint family.

Left to its own devices it spreads into a thick, aromatic patch, and it goes into both our Bug Bite Balm and our Breathe Free Balm. Further along the beds you'll find our mints, spearmint and peppermint, growing in their own containers so they don't take over. Mint grows vigorously here in Florida, and even puts up little flowers; we grow it for our Breathe Free and Muscle Revive balms and our Spearmint Hand Cream.

A single mint plant gives us cuttings all season long, which is exactly what a small-batch maker wants. These purple coneflowers are echinacea, grown from seed, and easily some of the prettiest plants in the whole garden. We let each bloom open fully in the summer sun before we pick it; echinacea is one of the botanicals in our Moringa Face Cream.

Watching the bees work these coneflowers is one of the quiet pleasures of growing your own herbs. Tucked among the other plants, calendula opens its golden-orange flowers, a classic garden botanical we love to grow alongside the rest. We grow several kinds of basil, too: sweet basil, holy basil, and Thai basil, which we infuse into our Bug Bite Balm and our Basil Body Butter.

Lemon thyme grows in a low, dense mat near the edge of the beds, and finds its way into our Breathe Free Balm. Oregano spills out of its container all season long, one of the most generous herbs we grow. And there's always more coming up: feathery fennel, bright curly parsley, and California poppy, with its delicate orange blooms, all part of a garden we're always expanding.

Broad-leaved comfrey fills in a shadier corner, another traditional herb-garden plant we tend by hand. Everything here is grown the slow way, started small, potted up, mulched, and watered through Florida's long, warm season. There are no synthetic shortcuts in these beds.

Just soil, sun, water, and time. Growing our own herbs means we control every step, from the seed in the ground to the jar on your shelf. When an herb reaches its peak, we harvest it by hand, with shears, a few stems at a time.

We cut only what we need for the next small batch, the way you'd gather herbs for your own kitchen. Flowers are picked one at a time, at the moment they look their best. Everything goes straight into a basket and heads indoors, fresh.

A basket of fresh-cut herbs and blooms; this is the real starting point of every InVine balm. So why grow it all ourselves? Because most botanical skincare doesn't.

Most balms and creams are built from oils and extracts bought in bulk; ours start with whole plants we grew and picked ourselves. That means we know exactly what's in every jar, and exactly where it came from: our own garden, here in Tallahassee. It's a slower, smaller way to make skincare, and it's the only way we've ever wanted to do it.

So here's how the garden becomes the jar. The herbs you've just seen are dried, then slow-infused whole into organic oils for six to eight weeks in cool, dark conditions. Then that infused oil is blended with beeswax and Vitamin E, and poured and capped by hand, in small batches.

Every jar is grown and crafted right here in Tallahassee, Florida, and labeled with its own batch number and infusion date. Thanks for walking the garden with us. To bring a little of it home, shop our garden-grown balms at invinebotanicals dot com.