It’s still difficult for Leah Larabell to look at pictures of High Garden Tea on Woodland Avenue. It was “pure magic,” she says. She and her husband Joel had built it themselves, bringing their love of the forest indoors and lining the walls with $150,000 worth of teas, herbs and tinctures.
At least 1,200 others found it magical, too — that’s how many people donated to a GoFundMe campaign after Nashville’s deadly March 2020 tornado destroyed the space. The campaign raised more than $80,000.
Time and Again
Larabell is still emotional when she recounts these events to the Scene. High Garden used half of the money to pay staff for several weeks, pay off bills and outfit a building on their property in Joelton to complete online and wholesale orders. The remaining $40,0000 was put toward replacement inventory. High Garden’s renters’ insurance didn’t technically cover tornado damage, so another $40,000 was hard-fought. The plan was always to rebuild, Larabell says, but they didn’t own the space and didn’t have savings. Plus they saw their peers closing due to the pandemic, which arrived just days after the historically catastrophic tornado.
“We learned in that moment, you can work as hard as you want through something, you can hang on as tight as you want, and you can lose it at a moment’s notice,” Larabell says. “We poured everything — every last dime, every last minute — into that shop, and it was literally swept away overnight.”
She continues, “High Garden, maybe it was supposed to shift, maybe it was supposed to change. It felt very pointed — [the tornado] reached in that building and just picked it up and threw it.”
Steve Larios, owner of East Side skate shop Asphalt Beach, had a different reaction to his building being destroyed by the March 2020 tornado.
“We had the foundation, and I was determined to come back,” Larios tells the Scene. “It was just important to me to rebuild. Like, ‘Fuck you Mother Nature, I’m coming back.’”
Steve Larios, Asphalt Beach
An insurance adjuster took one look at the Woodland Avenue building Larios owned and deemed it totaled. Larios used $20,000 in GoFundMe funds to set up a temporary location on Elm Hill Pike as the pandemic raged on. Roller skates began to sell out around the country, but he had a reserve he had put on hold when the tornado hit — a silver lining.
Even with insurance money, he couldn’t afford to rebuild the brick structure and instead opted for a more price-conscious glass-and-steel buildout.
His property taxes reached $29,000 per year for the new structure, but they recently jumped to $43,000 — which, he learned, was due to the newness of his building. He’s got to sell a lot of skates to hit that number — his average sale is $170, he says. He also says neighbors who were able to keep parts of their old buildings aren’t paying as much in property tax.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, you got a nice new building, it’s worth $4.5 million, so pay taxes on it,’ like I’m some corporation or something,” he says. “I’m just some schmo with a skate shop.”
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The owners of FLWR Shop knew they were East Nashvillians for life after the building they lived in and ran their business from was damaged during the March 2020 tornado. Strangers helped them clean up their yard, and some even salvaged plants, sold them and gave the money back to FLWR. Owners of fellow small business Consider the Wldflwrs started a GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $12,000 on behalf of FLWR Shop. That money was used to help the husband-and-wife team — who rented their Victorian home on South 11th Street — get a home loan.
“All of the GoFundMe money saved us from becoming homeless, really,” says co-owner and director of operations Quinn Kiesow. “We really felt incredibly supported.”
For the first nine months of the pandemic, FLWR Shop had more orders than normal, which they completed out of a planned second location in Belle Meade. But business began to falter.
The FLWR Shop location at 911 Dickerson Pike, which opened in October 2024 as the Belle Meade location was closed, recently added a snack and beverage service in addition to community events in an effort to remind customers they’re still around. With decor nodding to the original Five Points Victorian home, they get repeat customers, and some who think the business is brand-new.
“It’s shocking to me how long it really takes,” co-owner and creative director Alex Vaughan tells the Scene. “We’re not out of it. In order to get this open, we had to go into a huge amount of debt, which wouldn’t have happened if our location hadn’t been destroyed.”
Larabell thinks people embraced the East Nashville location of High Garden so strongly because they felt at home — like she does — in the forest. She’s planning a new High Garden Woodland Tea House and Wild Sanctuary in Rising Fawn, Ga., near Chattanooga. It will include a place to have “tea with the trees,” Larabell says.
Larabell says she didn’t want Nashvillians to feel betrayed, but High Garden couldn’t afford to follow their new purpose in the area. She and her husband saved up a portion of sales to purchase 30 acres of forest to preserve, plus two acres to run their business on. Still, 80 percent of High Garden’s online sales come from Nashville, and 90 percent of wholesale orders from Nashville cafes. After the forest location is settled, a Nashville presence will be next, she says.
“The people of Nashville are still holding us in their arms, and we’re not going to forget that,” Larabell says.
