Taking the Garden Path

It is a giant leap from creating high-fashion lingerie to building a makeshift backyard greenhouse, from buying Karl Lagerfeld suits on Paris business trips to getting mushroom compost under once finely manicured fingernails.

But onetime lingerie company owner Lore Caulfield made the jump from bras to basil five years ago and now happily earns a living growing and selling herb plants and freshly cut herbs.

“It feels so good to be free,” she said one recent sunny afternoon in her compact Camarillo greenhouse, where she propagates plants from seeds.

Caulfield is part of what Entrepreneur magazine has called a “renaissance taking place in the backyards and small farms of rural and suburban America.”

Accounting for herbs’ sweet smell of success are the growing demand for medicinal and therapeutic herbs such as St. John’s wort (nature’s answer to the depression-fighting Prozac), the rise of farmers markets and chefs’ increasing appetite for fresh ways to enhance restaurant fare.

But it is a field that can also prove treacherous for would-be lemon verbena vendors who fail to realize what is involved in being a full-fledged agronomist.

“At 1 acre or more, it’s not gardening anymore, it’s farming,” said Maureen Rogers, executive director of the Herb Growing and Marketing Network, a 2,000-member trade group in Lancaster, Pa. “It’s really work, and it’s dirty work, and you don’t make a lot of money.”

Often, devotees of herb growing attempt to turn home gardening into a business because they read a romantic article about the joys of going back to nature or see Martha Stewart in action once too often. They quickly grow discouraged, Rogers said, when they learn that “the seeds aren’t free, the plants aren’t free, they need machinery and they need to advertise.”

When Caulfield talks of being “free,” she means she has shed the grueling travel and manufacturing demands of the 17-year-old lingerie business she shut down after Southern California’s recession exacted too big a toll.

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After leaving Los Angeles and separating from her husband, she leased a house in Camarillo that came with some land. Although she had no intention of farming, she had always been a serious gardener. When she learned about the farmers market in Camarillo, she talked her way in and began selling wreaths crafted from the herbs and flowers she grew.

“I took my little flower cart and I wore a big, floppy straw hat and I would stand in the hot, blazing sun and sell my stuff,” she said. “Well, people remembered me.”

Before long, she was invited to sell at markets in Thousand Oaks, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Culver City and Westwood--the five where she is now a regular participant.

It is a heavy load. With few exceptions, Caulfield works seven days a week, 52 weeks a year (unless it rains, when instead she worries about lost business). She hauls potted plants in her squeaky white van to the 2-acre hillside plot she leases a few miles from the house she bought in a Camarillo subdivision. Rain or shine, she spends five days a week barreling down U.S. 101 to stand for several hours under a canopy, bagging and selling herbs at farmers markets.

Caulfield spends as much as $100 a week on supplies and seeds without knowing precisely where her next $100 will come from. Her operation is not certified as organic, but she said she tries to use organic growing methods as much as possible. Flowering herbs tend to attract beneficial insects that eat plant-destroying pests, and the garlic she plants helps repel pests naturally. Nature is not always so kind: Two years ago, she lost her spring flower crop to heavy rains.

Typically, Caulfield said, she grosses $60,000 to $70,000 a year, enough to pay a helper who tends the fields and to live modestly.

It would be tough to put a value on Caulfield’s daily pleasure of wandering through the haphazard rows of sweet Annie, wild sage, basil, roses and Indian corn. She calls it free aromatherapy.

“People are attracted to my stand at the farmers market for blocks because they can smell it,” she said.

As sole owner of Lore’s Best Basil & Herb Farm (her name is pronounced “Laurie”), Caulfield sees much untapped potential for her bounty. In addition to herbs, she has become known for antique roses (which she hastens to note are classified as herbs) and heirloom tomatoes, century-old varieties of unusual shapes and colors that she sells at farmers markets and to fine restaurants, including Campanile and L’Orangerie, both in Los Angeles. The bouquets she sells are enlivened with herbs, which she also dries and turns into wreaths.

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Heeding stepped-up demand, Caulfield has been building her inventory of herbs reputed to have medicinal and therapeutic properties, such as St. John’s wort, lemon verbena, chamomile, feverfew (thought to ease the pain of migraines) and echinacea (for treatment of cold and flu symptoms).

“When I start marketing the medicinal herbs, I can’t wait to see the reaction,” she said.

Nonetheless, she recognizes the hazards. One year there might be great demand for echinacea, but the next year plantain (a laxative) could be the big seller. It’s a fickle, competitive business, she noted, and no small farmer can grow everything.

Reliable figures about the size and growth of the overall herb market do not exist, but multilevel-marketing giant Herbalife and companies such as tea maker Celestial Seasonings have shown that there is huge opportunity.

Surprisingly, given its foodie culture, California isn’t as wild about growing herbs as people might think, said Rogers of the Herb Growing and Marketing Network. By her estimate, there are perhaps 100 herb growers and retailers in the Golden State. Michigan, on the other hand, has perhaps 150 herb businesses, and there are as many as 300 in New England. Little Connecticut, a hotbed, has 60.

California is home to one of the biggest producers: Green House Fine Herbs in San Diego, which sells $25 million in fresh herbs each year nationwide to Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats and other big food chains. The company, which has grown rapidly over the last five years, owns 600 acres and contracts with other growers. Basil accounts for 48% of sales, said Debra Bigelow, a spokeswoman for Green House Fine Herbs. Another hot seller: epazote, a traditional black bean “calmative.”

The potential for growth in California and elsewhere is enormous, said Cathy Sebastian, executive director of the International Herb Assn., a trade organization in Mundelein, Ill. “For the last six years, I’ve seen herbs in every part of life--from landscaping to aromatherapy in nursing homes,” she said. “It’s big business right now.”

Caulfield, a former producer of documentaries and commercials, is counting on that. Aside from some residual funds from her lingerie business, she said she has little financial cushion.

“I hope I can find some crop that will generate enough so that I can save some money for my old age,” said Caulfield, who is in her 50s. But she has no regrets about having abandoned the fast-paced whirl that once packed her schedule with jaunts to the world’s best restaurants, hotels and resorts.

“I was very ambitious, very aggressive, very material,” she said. “I wasn’t myself. I was somebody else.

“After all these years, I’ve finally found myself.”