A Childhood Interest in Herbs Flourishes : Profile: Jim Long grows more than 350 varieties of the fragrant plants. After a difficult beginning, his Ozarks farm is enjoying the sweet smell of success.

It isn’t that Jim Long hasn’t heard the old axiom about location meaning everything to the success of a business. He just chooses to ignore it.

Getting to his remote Ozarks herb farm, which straddles the Missouri-Arkansas line between Branson and Eureka Springs, isn’t easy. It sits at the end of bumpy, dusty, twisting gravel back roads--paths seemingly surveyed and laid out by a drunk man on a blind mule, as the hill folk say.

“This is not on the way to anywhere,” Long said. “People have to really look to find me.”

But customers and delivery drivers manage to locate the Long Creek Herb Farm without much problem. For almost a decade, Long has made his living growing, selling, lecturing on and writing about herbs, and marketing by mail 85 products he makes from herbs.

Long, 49, spent 25 years as a landscape architect in southwestern Missouri before he finally “got real tired of putting pointy bushes in front of people’s homes.”

That was when he decided to follow the advice that his grandmother, who cultivated his interest in herbs as a child, once gave him.

“She said if you do what you love, everything else will take care of itself,” Long said. So he set out to fulfill his dream of being an herb farmer.

Long rented and later bought an overgrown farm hidden deep in the dense oak and hickory forests offering a glimpse of the Long Creek arm of Table Rock Lake.

After a couple of lean business years, however, Long wondered whether Grandma knew what she was talking about.

“But I kept going back to what she said, and I kept doing it because I saw it being done in other parts of the country--herb businesses that were in ridiculously remote locations and building a reputation for doing good, quality things and attracting people,” he said.

Long started writing books and magazine articles about herbs, and customers steadily began making their way to his farm. Now, several hundred herb enthusiasts from around the nation attend seminars he gives at the farm on how to grow and use herbs, herb folklore and medicinal uses of herbs.

“The guy has done his homework,” said Jim Featherston, who grows medicinal herbs and wildflowers and teaches classes on herbs at two eastern Missouri junior colleges. “He knows plants and how to raise them.”

Long and business partner Joshua Young grow more than 350 varieties of cultivated and native herbs that are used in the recipe seasonings, teas, bath blends, soaps and dozens of other products made at the farm.

Dream pillows--small pillows filled with fragrant herbs that date back a few centuries--are one of Long’s most popular items. A pharmacist suggested Long insert one in his pillowcase a few years back to combat bad dreams he was having after a divorce.

“It works the same way as any fragrance does evoking memory, like the smell of fresh-baked bread,” Long said. He sells several types of pillow kits, including the “romantic kit” and the “pleasant dreams kit,” for $4.95 to $7.95.

Long’s farm is open to customers just one day a week--Wednesdays--from May through October. The herbs are grown organically, fertilized by chickens and goats that roam the farm.

Long also writes a syndicated newspaper column about Ozarks life and is at work on his 12th book about herbs. A member of the board of directors of the International Herb Assn., he lectures on the topic around the country.

“Herbs seem to be one aspect of gardening that touches people’s emotions because you smell them, you taste them, you do crafty things with them,” he said. “People seem to receive a lot of enjoyment from them.”

Long also is in demand at Civil War battle reenactments and schools, where he portrays a drafted civilian doctor, authentic right down to his clothes and the medicinal herbs such as mint and yarrow in his black bag.

From a rocking chair on the shady porch outside his gift shop, Long surveys his herb garden. The plot, which shares space with cheery straw flowers that he dries and sells, is alive with bees and flitting butterflies.

It wasn’t a good herb crop this year--too hot, too dry, too many groundhogs and armadillos rooting through the beds. Still, business is thriving to the point that Long knows he should add on to his cramped gift shop. But he’s reluctant to alter his relaxed lifestyle.

“I’m real dedicated to the philosophy that if the business is not enjoyable, you’re in the wrong business,” he said. “I want it to remain enjoyable. If I start building on bigger and bigger and bigger, I might lose that.”