A Small Business Blossoms

Image Gallery Undaunted by first-year sales of just $1,200, Ann let patience and care do the rest.

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Home Remedies

Sweet Annies Herb Store.

By Frank Greco

Women stand mixing dried roots, barks, berries, and flowers in washtub-sized crates, their dust masks caked with herb dust, bags crunching as they pour more ingredients into the crates and restock. Whatever the season, Sweet Annie's Herb Store smells of drying plants, reminiscent of fall.

Once a mere hobby, growing, preparing, and storing herbal medicines has become a booming business for Ann Marie Wishard. She turned a sizable profit in her second year of selling herbs, and every year it got better. A two-woman operation in 1976, the herb store now employs 15. More than half her business is mail-order, though plenty of curious people stop by to browse at Sweet Annie's and to see the store's proprietor.

A middle-aged, fairly tall woman with dark hair and eyes and a penchant for black clothing and digging around in the dirt, Ann Marie Wishard is used to being considered an oddity.

"Everyone calls me a witch," she says. "You must have heard I was a witch from someone. Any time a woman uses her gift to heal another person, is seen dig ging in the dirt, or collecting herbs, people immediately think that she's a witch."

Although she doesn't in fact practice witchcraft, she does believe that if people take responsibility for the health of their minds and bodies, there are few things that cannot be alleviated by herbal medica tions. "Herbs and modern medicines can be combined with very few side effects to the patient when compared to modern medicines alone."

"And preventative medicine is the way of the future," she adds from her office at Sweet Annie's, where hanging and potted plants absorb each available ray of sunlight. Drying flowers swing from the ceiling, and a cup of herbal tea steams next to the computer on her desk. One of her well-behaved muts lounges on the hardwood floor next to the piles of papers and books she referred to while writing her now completed book, Herb Talk (Sweet Annie's Herbs, Inc., 1995).

It all began—the book, and the now booming home business—some time ago when Ann Marie lived in Tussyville, Pennsylvania. Wild plants surrounded her farm house and she began reading all she could about them—from their nutritional value to their vitamin content and healing properties. She remembers looking out a window into the meadow and thinking to herself, "We will never go hungry here" But when the weeds in the pastures began to appear on the dinner table, company became scarce.

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