Growing Grace: New Memoir Recalls Madison County Gardens and Tearoom

‘Memories as Sweet as Wild Mountain Honey, as Potent as Blackberry Wine’

By Gina Malone

Once upon a time, Bobbie Cyphers had a dream of creating a magical place in the middle of nowhere. “The idea for some kind of creative, horticulture-related business of my own sprouted when I moved to South Carolina in the late 1980s,” she says. “By 1991, after John and I married, I began researching and planning in earnest, using the old business model still practiced in much of Europe: living over the shop or, in our case, with the shop. Two years later on a sunny mountain morning, we hung out the sign—The Herb of Grace.”

Bobbie’s memoir, Growing Grace: Stories from The Herb of Grace Gardens, Nursery, Shop & Tearoom, invites readers into a charming world of vintage roses, fragrant herbs and bountiful spreads of teas and culinary delights nestled “in a valley hidden deep in the heart of old mountains” in Madison County. Along the way readers will meet the people who helped sow the seeds for her dream—neighbors, employees, patrons, visitors and, most essentially, family.

As a child in Florida, the outdoors beckoned. “I wrote most of my earliest stories either sitting in a field of wild pinks and sandspurs or wandering through the piney woods with tiny brown bats dangling from the fennel weeds,” she says. “So I think growing up a child of nature and of the soil gave birth to The Herb of Grace with all the wonder and beauty of that special place.”

Growing Grace is a “Before” story, as Bobbie calls it, for she ends her narrative just before a family tragedy in 2002. “I wanted the readers when they closed the book for the final time to leave with a feeling of hope and joy,” she says. For her, though, “The thread of my life snapped,” she says, “and a wide, deep, dark chasm opened up.” She and John closed the business and moved to a farmhouse in Tennessee to grieve. “On the other side was my After.” In time, she would turn to memories, all that she felt she had left. “So I began writing them down,” she says, “to hold on to them.

Then one day I gathered the courage to open the boxes that held all that remained of my small commerce. Each picture, each scrap of paper or note, or recipe, or worn plant label seemed to glow with sunlight, sparking a memory and a story.” Family members shared their memories as well and, in time, the book was finished.

Bobbie’s hope as a writer is that readers “turn the last page and feel as if they’ve spent time in the company of remarkable souls at a time and place most magical.” Over the course of the book’s stories, which complement, overlap and build one upon another, the small business grows as word spreads and visitors wind along mountain roads to arrive in a paradise of well-tended gardens with, eventually, a verandah of tables for tea.

“There’s always been tea,” Bobbie says. It was a pastime she and her daughter Kim enjoyed from the time Kim was tiny. “And throughout the years of my life,” Bobbie says, “‘having tea’ was a soothing ritual after a long day, kind of like a sigh or taking your boots off—only quieter and more elegant.”

With help from a connoisseur at the British American Tea Company, located then in North Carolina, Bobbie expanded her knowledge of teas such as Royal Gunpowder, Nepal Ilam and Vietnam Black. As for tidbits to serve with afternoon tea, she relied on her own upbringing. “I started with old family recipes—some written down, others learned by watching and listening to the women in my large extended family as they went about feeding the multitude,” she says. A love of cookbooks helped also as she made the recipes of others into her own with “a smidgen of this instead of that, a dollop instead of a pinch,” until she had something deliciously original. Favorite recipes are included alongside stories in the book.

Part of her preparation for writing was going through guest books from years ago, which sparked memories of the many visitors to The Herb of Grace. “Reading what they wrote, hearing their conversations, I realized early on, they sought us out not only for tea outside on the verandah or a beautiful rose or even just a stroll through the garden but for the spirit of the place made up of all those things, shared.”

Days spent cultivating and caring for plants, cooking and serving teas, and selling plants and gifts from the shop often stretched to a wearying 18 hours; nevertheless, though the time has passed for another such enterprise, Bobbie says, she misses it. Today, she and John live in an old farmhouse on 25 acres called Garden in a Wood. “With us we brought hundreds of left-over potted plants from the nursery propagated by me and Kim and Mom,” she says. “I started digging, and a garden began to grow from the ashes of the past.” Although she does not formally open the garden to visitors, she shares it when she can with garden clubs, herbalists, children’s groups and those who love the outdoors. “Every day we feel like we’re ‘walking on holy ground,’” she says. “Just as we did at The Herb of Grace, we treat the land and gardens and all the creatures who share it with us with reverence, sustainably, organically, holistically and in imperfect harmony with nature.” It’s this “heartbreaking beauty” of nature that brings her peace as she finishes a sequel to Growing Grace. “I call it From the Ashes,” she says, “the garden stories of After.”

To learn more about Garden in a Wood or to order a copy of Growing Grace, visit BobbieCyphers.com.