Category Archives: Herbs

Lemon balm

18 Tuesday Sep 2012

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– Lemon balm with a halo of borage flowers

The other day I was having one of my morning wanderings in the garden, with a cup of tea in one hand, when I accidentally brushed against the lemon balm (Melissa officinalis). Instantly I remembered my first attraction to herbs and lemon balm was one of those early charmers. In fact I think its scent is the most beautiful of all. However, I have paid it no attention at all this year while my mind has been on propagating the more popular and easy to grow herbs. When I say ‘easy to grow’ I don’t, of course, mean that lemon balm doesn’t grow quickly, and lusciously but that it is very difficult, for an amateur at least, to keep it looking healthy enough for someone to want to buy it. It succumbs to rust very easily indeed and I have never had a bush without that affliction.

At this time of year, with its tiny flowers out, or having gone to seed, it is well past its best. I always mean to have at least two plants of each kind so that I can keep one well clipped and let the other do its own thing, but I haven’t got there yet.

And what of lemon balm’s other charms? Margaret Brownlow in her book ‘Herbs and the fragrant garden’ suggests making a tea using one part lemon balm leaf to two parts of tea leaves. I haven’t tried this but I can imagine it would be good.

I do use lemon balm with mushrooms, where it provides just the right zing, especially in an omelette. I also put the leaves in my salads.

Lemon balm is otherwise known as bee balm. The name Melissa originates from the Greek word for the honey bee and bees do love this plant. Gerard, in his ‘Herball’ says ‘The hives of bees being rubbed with the leaves of bawme, causeth the bees to keep together, and causeth others to come unto them’. In addition to all this lemon balm is traditionally known and used as a cure for melancholy.

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Selling herbs

09 Thursday Aug 2012

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Last week after much prevarication I finally put out in the front garden a small selection of herbs for sale. I meant to do it before but finally plucked up the courage.

Herb sales from the front garden

I was amazed to find that on the first afternoon I actually sold one and then several on each of the following days. Admittedly sales have slowed in the last couple of days but I hope they will pick up again. I don’t expect to sell them every day but perhaps a few every week during the summer.

I have learned a lot from buying in a small number of plug plants and growing them on this year.

  1. The fact that they grow faster the later you buy them. I bought my first lot in mid-April but the next batch, bought in mid-May, grew considerably faster.
  2. Most common herbs can go into their final pots in the garden quite early and will grow happily.
  3. Once they were out in the garden they came under severe attack from the slugs and I had to watch what was happening carefully and replace badly damaged plants, so keeping them under cover for longer does enable you to protect them from predators better.
  4. It is important to keep their growth under control and not let them get too leggy before you cut them back. You need to try and create a good, bushy shape.
  5. Some plants like mint really do look past their best about August time and need to be sold by then.
  6. It is best to put herbs requiring the same conditions in pots together. Having said which there doesn’t seem to have been a significant problem when I haven’t done this.

Herb garden

I am planning on having a herb sale in the garden in a few weeks. So providing I manage to sell a good number of the plants I will feel that this year has been successful and a very good learning experience. Also, when you really love what you are doing it is simply wonderful when people want to buy what you are selling.

Herb pots ready to sell

 

The joys of marjoram

02 Thursday Aug 2012

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Marjoram ‘Acorn Bank’

Marjoram’s Latin name Origanum means ‘joy of the mountains’. There are at least 7 different species of marjoram and many cultivars.

Marjoram is a great value plant for many reasons. Bees and butterflies love it and it flowers prolifically. The flowers are not the most showy but they provide good pale pinks and whites in the border for long periods. Although it is generally recommended for dryish and sandy soils it grows like a weed on my heavy clay.

In the kitchen marjoram provides good flavour in soups, stews and salads and it can be drunk as a tisane. All marjorams, but sweet, knotted marjoram in particular, are great in cheese (especially cream cheese) sandwiches. Marjoram is heavily used in Mediterranean cookery. Sweet marjoram has the best flavour in my view and Greek marjoram is also noted for its flavour. Owing to the strength of the herb all marjorams should be used judiciously in cooking to begin with.

Gerard’s herbal of 1597 prescribes marjoram for those subject to ‘overmuch sighing’. Juliette de Bairacli Levy in her ‘Herbal handbook for everyone’ recommends its use for digestive complaints, sore throats and coughs.

Pot marjoram (Origanum onites) seeds itself freely and will cover any gap in your border.

Golden marjoram is similarly useful and has beautiful yellow/green foliage making a beautiful tight clump early in the year. When it flowers it grows more leggy, as you can see above.

Golden marjoram before it flowers

Two particularly attractive cultivars include ‘Acorn Bank’ illustrated above and ‘Country Cream’ with its variegated leaves.

Marjoram ‘Country Cream’

The pleasures of small things

16 Monday Jul 2012

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Over the last three days we have had some good, dry, almost warm weather. After mowing the lawn the garden looked quite respectable. The flowers seem quite unphased by all the rain and are blooming as usual. Even the roses did not seem to be as spoiled as I would have expected.

I went and picked a small bunch of flowers for our visitor’s bedroom and was pleased to see how beautiful the most unobtrusive flowers can look in a vase. How well pale yellow and mauve go together.

This arrangement consists of Marjoram ‘Acorn Bank’, curry plant, several types of pot marjoram, an annoying weed, name unknown but shown in the top right of the picture in pale pink, although it is usually purple and bachelor’s buttons or Santolina chamaecyparissus. The button-like flowers of the latter, so easy to ignore, especially as the plant grows straggly, are actually exquisite when they open out.

Santolina chamaecyparissus flowers

Herbs in June

22 Friday Jun 2012

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Many herbs are at their best in June with lush new leafy growth. I believe it is in the month before flowering that herbs have their best flavour and medicinal value. Anyway, they are certainly looking very healthy.

Last year I bought a valerian (Valeriana officinalis) and I suppose it is a bit disappointing looking, its early flowers are whitish but it becomes tall and straggly. However, the flowers smell so sweet. I have cut some for the house and they are lasting very well.

Valerian officinalis

I see from Jekka McVicar’s Complete Herb Book that she uses a decoction of the herb root as a relaxant for anxious cats and dogs and it is traditionally used as a sedative and nervine in herbal medicine.

Santolina ‘Lemon Fizz’ is a useful plant in the rock garden. Its vibrant lime green leaves really brighten up the border. In order to keep its colour it is important to cut out the darker green leaves as they show through.

Santolina ‘Lemon Fizz’

Its relative, the cotton lavender (Santolina chamaecyparissus) is looking very good. The bush shape is still neat and its buds are ready to break into bright yellow buttons, after which it will need drastic re-shaping.

The curry plant is also ready to flower and at its neatest. It is the one herb that you can smell as you go past even when it has not been touched.

Curry Plant (Helichrysum italicum

The thymes are rampaging over the rock garden ….

Creeping Red Thyme with Woolly Thyme and Pink Chintz Thyme

…and into the pond

Creeping White Thyme

Herb garden in May

22 Tuesday May 2012

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At last some warm sunshine for the plants to enjoy, not to mention me. Most herbs put on a good spurt in the spring and are good value when other plants are just getting going. Sweet Cicely is up early and flowering prettily in May.

Sweet Cicely in May

The scent and flavour of the plant are aniseedy. The leaves are beautifully soft and fern-like. You can use the herb to reduce the amount of sugar needed in stewed fruit such as rhubarb and gooseberries. Unfortunately once it has gone to seed it is not so attractive but by then other herbaceous plants take over in the border and you could chop it down and allow new leaves to develop. It is easy to grow provided the soil has moisture and there is some shade. The seeds seem to germinate better if they have a period of very cold/frosty weather in the ground, so sow them in autumn.

Another star at present is comfrey. This is the dwarf comfrey and it is covering the ground very fast but is also looking pretty.

Dwarf comfrey May 2012

Last, but definitely not least as it is my favourite herb, the rosemary is looking very good. Here is Rosemary ‘McConnell’s Blue’.

Rosemary ‘McConnell’s Blue’

This is a lovely prostrate rosemary with quite bright blue flowers and it seems to be very hardy. Rosemary excels in the qualities of aromatic herbs, wonderful, healing scent, fantastic culinary qualities and its beauty during the flowering period.

Herb plans

07 Monday May 2012

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I am trying out growing on plug plants with a view to selling them, somehow, when they are large enough.  I bought 90 plug plants from Norfolk Herbs and they are fine, sturdy little things. This is an experiment as I have no idea how quickly they will grow to a reasonable size.

Herb plugs growing on

 I am aiming to produce 18 large pots with 5 herbs in each and will do a couple of assortments:

basic i.e. rosemary, thyme, curled parsley, sage, mint;

type 2 – Prostate rosemary, golden marjoram, french parsley, thyme ‘Silver Posie’, lemon verbena;

type 3 – Apple mint, purple sage, french parsley, tarragon, lemon thyme.

I am hoping it won’t be too difficult to sell just 18 although I also have some of my own cuttings and divisions to sell to add a bit of variety. It may well be that they won’t grow large enough this year and I will have to keep them for next year, which is not really a problem.

Any tips on selling plants locally would be gratefully received. I get the impression from talking to some people that selling in a small way is not any easier than a larger scale operation and that if I really want to do it I should think bigger but as I said this year is very  much experimental. Having mentioned my plans to a few people I already have a few potential customers.

December reflections

19 Monday Dec 2011

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December is definitely the time to look back at the successes and failures of the year before moving on to the exciting planning for next year.

Overall the garden looked great this year. I was aware of all the weeds but I don’t think visitors (unless they are avid gardeners themselves) really notice them. All the beds were highly productive and pretty much as planned.

A new herbaceous bed in July

The outstanding bed was the new rock/alpine garden – it was a joy all season. One plant in particular deserves recommending – Achillea ‘King Alfred’ flowered from spring until late autumn. The thymes were also great performers. They loved the sandy soil and gritty mulch and grew much faster than I had anticipated so they are all running into each other. They are Thymus serpyllum ‘Pink Chintz’, Thyme ‘Doone Valley’, T. s. coccineus, T. pseudolanuginosus. Santolina ‘Lemon Fizz’ is good fun and I tried and failed to take some cuttings, obviously not carefully enough.

The unusual feature in the bed is a small Monkey Puzzle tree. We bought this, height 13 inches, about 5 years ago. It was in the front garden but grew not an inch in three years, so, thinking it was not in the right spot, I moved it into a pot while deciding what to do with it. This year I wanted to find it a permanent home since it was still just the same, no growth that I could see. The only place that seemed even remotely suitable was the rock garden, so that is where it went. I am going to measure it in a moment but I am pretty sure it still hasn’t grown. Anyway shortly before moving it there I decided to look up growing these trees and found that it is quite usual for them not to grow for years after being moved! I should have left it where it was.

My passion – herbs

My real gardening love is herbs. I discovered them when I first worked in Birmingham Reference Library in the early 70’s and was serving some lovely ancient herbals to readers. I started growing them in my parents’ garden and in all my subsequent gardens. What I really love is the sensuality of gardening with herbs. Every time you work amongst them the scents are delightful: lemon balm, marjoram, rue, mint, curry plant to name but a few. I love their histories and the knowledge that you are working with plants with a long tradition of cultivation and use. I love their simple beauty.

The first herb border

And then there are all their uses. There is nothing like popping outside to gather a handful of herbs for the lunchtime salad. For me, the most interesting addition to salad is Buckler Leaf Sorrel – wonderfully lemony. Young horseradish leaves also pack a punch, but every herb adds a new dimension to your salad.

In consequence most of the plants in this garden are probably herbs. They are a main feature of almost all the beds and some of them are represented in all the beds, e.g. marjoram, although once you’ve got it it’s pretty difficult to stop it being part of every bed. The other delightful thing about many herbs is how much the insects love them: Gatekeeper butterflies on marjoram,  for example (I have only just learned how specific butterflies are in their tastes); bees on borage and hyssop (pink as well as blue varieties); hoverflies on parsley that has gone to seed, all a delight to watch.

So the idea is to incorporate herbs into the garden in every way and increase the number I grow, which is in excess of 60 varieties at present. I have the main culinary herbs and am trying to introduce cultivars in new borders.

Last winter was difficult for some of the herbs and I am hoping that this one won’t be as cold. I know now to cover the bay, which has come back amazingly well after frost damage, but much of the growth is very young and would be highly vulnerable in a long, cold spell. Since living in the south midlands I have managed to keep rosemary every winter whereas in the Pennines I lost it pretty well every winter. I have introduced some varieties which are not as hardy as the species Rosmarinus officinalis and was very worried about how they would get through last winter. Oddly enough the only one I lost was R.o. Maybe because it was a taller bush. Who knows.

Here’s to a mildish winter and an early spring!