Thyme & Seasons: China’s Shop and Gardens

The farm blog is all a buzz today with the virtual visit by China Bayles author, Susan Wittig Albert. As a China reader for many years, I am especially honored that Susan has included Possum Creek on her blog tour to introduce her new book. We have swept the porch, put on tea, watered the herbs and mulched the gardens in honor of her visit. Join us throughout the day by posting your comments and questions to Susan. You might even be chosen to win an autographed book from Susan and China. Here's Susan....

A big thanks, Michele, for hosting me here at Possum Creek today. I’ve wanted to visit your farm for ages, but Tennessee is a long way from Texas. A virtual visit is the next best thing!

This blog tour celebrates the launch of Nightshade, the sixteenth China Bayles mystery.

China is a former criminal defense attorney who has opted for a quieter life as the owner of an herb shop in Pecan Springs TX. Of course, her life isn’t really very quiet (there are all those dead bodies!) but she loves her herb shop and gardens—and so do I. In this post, I’d like to tell you how Thyme & Seasons came into being. (For posts on other subjects, check out the tour calendar.)

Thyme & Seasons: The Shop
If you’ve been reading the China Bayles series, you know how important the herb shop is to China. Like many of us, she had an active and demanding career that left no time for the simpler pleasures in life. She was doing well, but she knew that something was lacking: something that came from the heart. So she jettisoned her career (“People thought I’d gone crazy,” she says in Thyme of Death. “Me, I knew I’d gone sane.”) and headed for the Hill Country, where she bought an herb shop in a century-old stone building surrounded with herb gardens.

Why herbs? “I have a stock answer,” China says, remembering her experiences as a lawyer. “Plants don't argue. They also don't lie, cheat, connive, or hit below the belt.” There’s more, of course. China has loved plants all her life, as have many of us. When—in desperation, as I imagine it—she looked around for some meaningful purpose for her life, herbs beckoned. She accepted the invitation and has never looked back.

I’m sure (aren’t you?) that her shop has a great deal to do with the pleasure China has found in this way of life. I love the way she describes it in that first book.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves along the back wall hold jars and bottles of dried herbs, tinctures, salves, and ointments. Herb books are neatly racked in the corner, and shelves on another wall are full of potpourri and potpourri makings. A wooden display case houses essential oils, bottles, and perfume supplies. Other shelves hold various herb products that I make or buy from local crafts-people--gift-baskets, vinegars, seasoning blends, jellies, soaps, candles. Hand-made baskets are stacked in the corners and spill onto the floor. Dried flowers are everywhere, bunched in jars and hanging from the wooden beams, and braided ropes of red peppers and garlic hang on the stone walls.

It sounds almost too good to be true? It isn’t. This description is derived from the real-life herb shops I’ve visited all over the country, where the owners have put their hearts into their shops. Visit one, if you can, and see for yourself. In Pennsylvania, drop in at The Rosemary House. In Ohio, the Village Herb Shop is wonderful. In Indiana, stop at Carolee’s Herb Farm, where the shop is located in a big barn. There’s the Herb Bar, in Austin TX, where I used to sell the herbal wreaths I made from my garden. China’s fictional shop, Thyme & Seasons, borrows from all of these real shops—and more.

In the first three books, China’s shop is small, and she lives in an apartment at the back. But by Book 4, Rosemary Remembered, she has moved in with McQuaid and his son Brian and expanded the shop into what used to be her living room and bedroom. “Thyme and Seasons is just about perfect,” she says, looking around at her renovated space.

But not quite, for her friend Ruby Wilcox (Ruby rents the other half of China’s building for her own shop, the Crystal Cave) proposes that they open a tea room at the back of the building. Ruby has won the lottery, you see, and wants to make a good investment. At first, China doesn’t think this is a good idea, but she comes around, and Thyme for Tea is ready for business in Mistletoe Man (where there is a slight problem with the new kitchen help, who turns out to be a murderer). The tea room thrives, but by now (Nightshade), it is mostly Ruby’s baby, with the able assistance of a new partner, Cass Wilde, a gourmet chef. This leaves China a bit more time to spend in the gardens.

China’s Herb Gardens
When China opened the shop, she turned the grassy yard into display gardens, front and back, so customers could see herbs growing and blooming. Mentioned in various books are her apothecary (medicinal) and culinary gardens, beverage garden (all those wonderful tea herbs!), dye garden, fragrance garden, and the native herb garden. I know you’ve never been able to visit Pecan Springs (except in China’s books), but if you’ve been to the National Herb Garden at the Arboretum in Washington D.C., you have an idea of how beautiful herb display gardens can be.

But the display gardens can’t produce the herbs China sells in her shop. In Dead Man’s Bones, she says: “Every year, I seem to want more of something--more lavender, more sage, more parsley, more thyme.” She buys wholesale (from herb farmers like Michele Brown here at Possum Creek), and she has a large garden behind her house, where she grows many of the herbs she packages fresh and sell in the produce section at Cavette's Grocery in Pecan Springs. “I always smile,” she says, “when I see those neat little raffia-tied cellophane packages of Thyme and Seasons basil and rosemary and marjoram, and think of somebody cooking with them, making soup, maybe, or a salad, or a main dish. Somehow, it's like spreading the wealth.” I imagine that Michele and Pat feel the same way about the herbs they grow at Possum Creek.

Of course, China is a fictional character, and her gardens are entirely imaginary. If you want to see how a real herb farm works, Possum Creek is a good example. As Michele tells us on her “About Us” page, her farm began with display gardens and a retail shop, but over the past nine years, her customer base has changed from retail to wholesale. She and her business partner, Pat Stewart, grow the young plants in their six greenhouses, pot them up, and ship them out to buyers all over the country. “The shop is now our shipping department,” she emailed me, adding a smiley face. The ladies retail their plants and other herb products at the Chattanooga Market—an important “buy locally” venue—and offers retail products from the website. Michele and Pat, are two extraordinarily busy people (especially at this time of year), but the greenhouse work will soon slack up enough to allow them to work in their own gardens.

Bet if you asked Michele, she’d say that China’s life as a fictional character may be fun (except, of course, for those dead bodies), but real life is a lot more work! And yet Michele has taken time away from the greenhouses and plant shipments to host me on her blog. That’s an herbalist for you—always generous and helpful.

Thanks, Michele. And thanks to all the readers who are following this blog tour through cyberspace. I appreciate your notes and comments—I’ll hang around today to answer questions. I’ve got to be out of town (really, not virtually) on Wednesday and Thursday, but I’ll check back at the end of the week.

About the book drawing and Susan’s blog tour
If you’d like to enter the drawing for a copy of Nightshade go here to register. But you’d better hurry. The drawing for Possum Creek closes at noon on April 10, 2008.

Want to read the other posts in Susan’s blog tour? You’ll find a calendar and links here.