BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Half a Hundred Herbs

Half a Hundred Herbs – the seed list
Well, as firefox would say, this is embarassing! After saying I was cutting back on seeds this year, because of time and space constraints and all that, I went out and spent £30 on seeds from Chiltern Seeds. If you add to that the seeds I saved last year, which I will try to propagate if only to see how viable the harvest was, it becomes, frankly, all a bit much!

Here’s the list (just as they come to hand):
- nasturtium
- marigold
- ammi majus ( a large white umbellifer – high class relation of cow parsley)
- snapdragon, for window boxes
- daisy ‘pomponette’
- carthamus tinctoria (saffron thistle), a nice golden flower, good for dyeing, and which dries well and looks cheerful for ages
- cornflower
- wallflower ‘blood red’
- white trailing lobelia, for window boxes
- molucella laevis which has good green bracts for drying
- forget-me-not
- shoo-fly plant – of limited herbal use, but has intriguing inky blue seed pods
- clary
- chervil
- sweet peas, in two varieties, one called ‘flamingo flamenco’ and the other a dwarf for hanging baskets
- sweet cicely
- red valerian
- honesty
- chives
- sweet rocket
- bronze fennel
- avens ‘herb bennet’ whose root is scented
- welsh poppy just because I love them
- basil
- parsley
- coriander
At some point I will have to sort them into batches of early (started in the house), mid-term (in the greenhouse) and late, and make sure I know what the special requirements of each are, and work out where I’m going to put them all —-

If anyone would like any seeds or young plants, I’ll have way more than I need myself, so do get in touch.

In the current frost (down to -8 in Dunblane and Kilsyth, though not as bad as that here) the herb-related activity is still in the house. I succumbed to the lure of the supermarket and bought a pot of parsley yesterday, which I used to make tabbouleh and cacik ( a yogurt and cucumber salad, flavoured with mint, parsley and garlic. You may remember my rather grudging notes about parsley last summer but now I’m ashamed to say I’m a complete convert. It was so light and flavourful and full of sunshine! There will be a lot of parsley in the garden this year, and some pots in the greenhouse to keep us going through the winter. And my lemon verbena plant, which I brought inside because the greenhouse is unheated, has burst into new leaf, and there are pots of hyacinths and tete á tete daffodils blooming. Surely spring can’t be too far away!
February 3, 2015
Half a Hundred Herbs – a Booklist

This is today, so you can imagine there is not much going on in the garden. We lost a couple of fence-panels in the wind – and there is another being propped up from next door. I took this photo in an interval of bright sun, but snow is falling again, and all the gardening is happening in my head. Over the last year, after a strange and disconcerting start to my reading – in which I discovered that almost everything we tend to assume about the history of herb use is pretty much wrong – I finally got to grips with some very good books on the subject. I’ve put together a list on a pdf which you can find here: Booklist.

I’ve been a bit surprised by poetry too. Firstly, there isn’t as much as you might think. There are, of course, some lyrics about primroses and daisies and so on, some doggerel rhymes and some cultural references to holly, ivy or rosemary, but poems about herbs themselves, rather than floral decorations, have been harder to come by. There are a few, though, and I hope that through the year I’ll do a list.

There are a few herbal references in contemporary poetry, and these are increasing, partly as they figure more in our kitchens, and the scents are so evocative that they can trigger memories or moments of discovery, but mostly as weeds and wild flowers – elderberry, bramble and hawthorn, meadowsweet and yarrow. It will be interesting to follow this up, and find out what poets are doing with this new kind of attention.

January 13, 2015
Half a Hundred Herbs – Looking Forward to 2015

This is the stock bed at the concept stage last year, and this is the same bed in May when things were beginning to move.

By September, it looked like this:

a bit overgrown and weedy, but you can see that there are more plants, everything has grown bigger and sprawled about a lot, and the new chamomile bed, which started off as one plant in a pot I bought at the Gardening Scotland show, is in full flower. It’s only two feet by four at this point, but I never thought I’d be able to have a chamomile lawn at all, so I’m happy.

I never thought I’d be able to have a knot garden either, but look:

This has bedded in now, and seems to be coping with the cold and wet. I realise that I am in for more meticulous weeding than I generally care for, to maintain the clear outlines of such a formal bed, but I’m sure the discipline will be good for me.

I’m hoping to keep up the knot garden next year, double the size of the chamomile lawn, and create some more exciting planting combinations with the plants that have matured. I had hoped to add a cutting bed, and have flowers for drying, but reality intervened, and there won’t be room for that sort of caper. I’ll just be growing what I’ve been growing, only with more attention, and trying to make good use of the many curious and interesting plants that I have managed to come by.

I have drawn up a list of the herbs in the territory – some wild as well as the ones I grow on purpose: It’s a pdf. file here – herb list. That should keep me busy!

Happy New Year everybody!

January 6, 2015
Hedgerow Medicine

This lovely book arrived yesterday, from the people at Just Botanics whose blog I mentioned last time. I won it in their facebook competition, and I am very glad to have it. It is beautifully illustrated, which makes the plants it mentions easy to identify, and it’s full of interesting information about the folklore and traditions around some common wild plants, including many whose uses I had never heard of.And it includes the surprising fact that Goji berries – the little red ‘new superfood’ that magazines were going on about a year or two back – have been growing wild in this country for almost three hundred years. A plant was imported by the third Duke of Argyll, in the 1730’s, and was known, apparently, as the Duke of Argyll’s tea.

But it is also thorough, exact and meticulous in its instructions if you would like to make or use any of the remedies. This last is not as common as I might have thought, at the start of my herbs project, so it’s a book to treasure. Thank you, all the kind people at Just Botanics – you made my day!

Please note – the review of the Just Botanics blog was drafted before the competition, though it didn’t appear until afterwards!

December 16, 2014
The Year Among Herbs

This was taken in the wonderful garden at Poyntzfield this summer – one of the highlights of a busy, fascinating and frustrating year of Half a Hundred Herbs. There were the three gardens I visited in the summer – Culross, in Fife, Poyntzfield, near Cromarty, and the Secret Herb Garden on the outskirts of Edinburgh, all full of scent and colour and inspiration.

There was the Herb Society which I rejoined in June. When I was last a member, this seemed to be a backwater for romantic amateurs and unreconstructed hippies, but it is now a more grounded mix of botanists, medical herbalists, cooks, gardeners, academics and folklorists. There are more events, a wider membership and a lively news network, not to mention a quarterly journal full of well-written articles and information, and I’m getting a lot for my subscription.

As I went through the year, I moved from a feeling of despair about the standard of writing about herbs, to discovering some fascinating historical research, beautiful illustrations and soundly based practical information about growing and using them. Some really excellent books have come my way, and I’ll be adding a bibliography to the Half a Hundred Herbs page over the Christmas period. Blogs have emerged that go beyond the gossipy journal, the sales pitch or the cut and paste vignette. As well as Whispering Earth which I mentioned here, I’ve come across two. The first is written by Renee Davis, and though it isn’t very active, the articles are current, well-researched and relevant. You can find it at https://www.goldrootherbs.com/

and then there is the excellent blog on the JustBotanics site, written by Debs Cook, well-written, thorough, and with lots of useful links. You will find it here: https://www.justbotanics.co.uk/blog/.

I’ve had a really interesting time growing, propagating and harvesting the herbs in my garden. I’ve succeeded with bergamot and chamomile for the first time, propagated horehound, hyssop, and mullein, and managed to get hold of the genuine orris plant, scented leaf geraniums and a new mint – which is still shedding its own distinct fragrance round the greenhouse.

Two small scale projects I’m thrilled to have tried are the chamomile lawn – a mere six feet by three, so far! and the knot garden, which is barely four inches high just now, but which has established good roots, and should get away early next spring.

Next year this blog will be focussing more on the different ways of using herbs. I have my eye on recipes for herb salt and pepper, flavoured vinegars, candied angelica and seeds for flavouring bread and cakes. And I’ll be thinking of how our use of herbs affects our relationship to the earth, to nature, our senses, our health and our food; how we acquire transmit and value knowledge, how we use them to reflect our values, create political and economic practices and express our creativity, traditions and tribal allegiances. It’s a big intellectual burden for a bunch of small green plants, but herbs can take it!

December 8, 2014
The Adventure in Progress

For the next four months or so, the territory of rain is going to look like this. There are still leaves clinging to very sheltered trees, but not so many now. Teal, merganser and goldeneye are back on the river, and the sparrows are very quick to notice when I fill up the bird feeder. I have winter pansies and some cyclamen in pots which are still in flower, but even the last brave marigold is gone from the garden.

And that is the end of the herb posts for this year, because I foolishly forgot to take photographs. However, there are still fourteen posts outstanding and next year I aim to catch up with what I owe, as well as keeping a record of the herb-related activities I’m planning. There will be herb teas, seasonings, oils and vinegars, some basic remedies, candied angelica (which I’ve always wanted to try), some household cleaners, and perhaps some more adventurous experiments.

Meanwhile here’s a list of what I’ve grown this year:

• alecost
• alkanet
• angelica
• avens
• basil
• bay
• betony
• borage
• calamus
• carnation
• chamomile
• chervil
• chives
• comfrey
• cowslip
• cyclamen
• dandelion
• english mace
• fennel
• feverfew
• foxglove
• gaultheria
• heartease
• hellebore – mixed purple and white, christmas rose
• honeysuckle
• horehound
• horsetail
• houseleek
• hyssop – pink and blue
• ivy
• japonica
• jasmine
• ladys mantle
• Lavenders – blue madrid, white madrid, lavender alba, lavender arles , lavender avignon, lavender dentata, lavender rosea
• lemon balm
• lemon verbena
• lily of the valley
• marigold
• marjoram
• Mints – apple mint, eau de cologne mint, mount atlas mint, peppermint, spearmint
• monarda – fireball, citriodora
• mullein
• myrtle
• nasturtium
• nettle
• oregano
• orris
• parsley
• pink
• poppy
• primrose
• roman wormwood
• roses – alba, gallica, sweetbriar, zephirine drouhin
• rosemary
• sages – green sage, purple sage
• santolina
• scented geraniums – apple, lemon, rose
• sorrel
• southernwood
• st john’s wort
• sweet cicely
• sweet rocket
• tansy
• tarragon
• thymes – common thyme, lemon thyme
• violet
• winter savory
• woodruff
• yarrow

Meanwhile, on the family front, phase one of our adventure is over. We have three new jobs and one new house. Another house move is under way and a new business venture is in preparation. A tricky shift in a health situation has gone well, and things all around are beginning to look up.

Although I’ll be pretty busy between now and Christmas, (like everybody else!) I’m back to writing and planning for next year. I have been reading a lot of good new poetry over the summer, and I hope my next post will include some reviews and recommendations. It will be nice to feel like a poet again!

November 17, 2014
Half a Hundred Herbs Week 37 – Honeysuckle

Isn’t this fabulous? It isn’t, needless to say, growing in my garden, but on a path near Ben Ledi, and it wasn’t taken this year, but in 2009, but it’s what I aspire to! Honeysuckle can be a bit of a thug in a hedge, growing wildly and twining everywhere and choking the life out of anything small and delicate and vulnerable, but it is so beautiful, so wonderfully coloured and so sweetly scented that you’d forgive it anything. Wild honeysuckle is mostly an elegant cream and gold, but this is a cultivar ‘serotina’ – the late Dutch honeysuckle.

It is in flower for a long time, beginning early in June in the wild, and lasting well into October in my garden. Butterflies like it, and bees, as there is a lot of nectar in those long elegant tubular petals. It is recommended for drying and including in pot pourri, but I’ve never found that the scent survives. You can steep the flowers in oil for scent, or in syrup to make a soothing remedy for coughs – it was especially recommended for asthma or nervous headaches. However, as it also has a reputation for being an emetic, maybe this advice should be followed with caution. And although birds seem to like them, the berries are definitely poisonous, so beware.

The long stems have been used twisted together to make baskets. In the past I have used them for centrepieces at Christmas, and this year I made a herb dryer from it:I’m saving acorns and pine cones and other autumnal goodies to spray with gold paint, and then my grand-daughter and I will combine them with holly leaves and pine branches to make a wreath for our Christmas front door.

October 28, 2014
Half a Hundred Herbs Week 36 – Poppy

One poppy! But opium poppies seem to bloom like this – no matter how many plants you have, you mostly get one bloom at a time, for months.

There are, of course, many varieties of poppy – the red field poppy, which has long narrow seedpods, whose seeds don’t seem up to much, (though I have found references to them being ground to make a substitute for olive oil), the big blousy oriental poppies, who don’t set useful seed at all, but which spread via their thick roots so they can be as persistent as ground elder, and the Wesh poppywhich isn’t even the same botanical family, being a meconopsis not a papaver. No herbal uses are recorded for this plant, which also comes in a gentle orange, and seeds itself everywhere, but bees like it, and I do too. No, the one you want for edible seeds is papaver somniferum.

Poppy has a very dubious reputation in folklore. Children were discouraged from picking them by the warning that it could bring on headaches, thunderstorms or blindness. Because it is called the opium poppy, and has been used for making all kinds of narcotics from laudanum and morphine to heroin, people have sometimes tried to change the name of this plant – the breadseed poppy, mawseed, white poppy, and so on. And it’s important to point out that every part of this plant except the RIPE seeds is poisonous. But you can’t make drugs out of poppy seeds in a domestic kitchen, thank goodness, while you can dry the RIPE seeds and use them in baking.

And of course you can pick those pretty seedheads and put them in vases without water, when they will keep that sophisticated blue-green colour indefinitely. I’m thinking of spraying some with gold paint to use as Christmas decorations too.

October 23, 2014
Half a Hundred Herbs Week 35 – Alecost

It’s a bit ragged now, and has had an attack of mildew which doesn’t add to its battered charms, but this is my row of alecost. This herb has a lot of other names some of which might be more familiar – costmary, sage o’bedlam, our lady’s mint, goosetongue, and one which comes from America – bibleleaf, because it was placed between the pages of your bible so that its scent would be refreshing and stimulating if you got sleepy during the sermon.

At other times it was also known as mace or allspice, because of the tangy spicy edge to its taste. This confused me a little at first, as there is also

(the small white flowers among the lavender). Jekka Mcvicar calls this English mace. It’s Latin name is achillea ageratum, which makes it a relative of yarrow, whereas alecost is tanacetum balsamita – so related to tansy.

It was traditionally used to ease the pain of childbirth, and also for headaches, catarrh and stomach upsets, but its best use is for pot pourri. As well as having a really good scent in itself, it contains coumarin, which helps to intensify and preserve the scents of other leaves and flowers.

As I’m about to make my potpourri this week, this herb is just what I need.

October 7, 2014
Half a Hundred Herbs Week 34 – Tarragon

From a small cutting taken this spring, my tarragon has grown into this:

This is the French tarragon, which you are always told to ask for, rather than the Russian. Russian tarragon is hardier and can be grown from seed in this country, but has not the special distinctive taste which makes this herb so special. Sometimes you get pictures which aim to show you the difference between the two, but I’ve never been able to work it out. The bottom line is to buy plants, not seeds, and rub the leaves of any plant you are offered. If you like the smell, you’ve probably got the ‘true’ French tarragon.

It is one of the ‘fines herbes’ used for omelettes and salad dressings, and is often paired with chicken. It makes an excellent vinegar, which is good for vinaigrette. The taste is distinctive, somewhere between liquorice and aniseed, and you either like it or you don’t. It hasn’t much use in medicine, though it is comforting to the digestion, but was once planted as a cure for the bite of snakes or dragons. In fact the name ‘tarragon’ means, via Greek and Arabic, ‘little dragon’.

It’s tricky to grow so far north. It likes warmth and sun, and light, but rich soil, and it hates getting waterlogged. I usually make sure I overwinter it in the greenhouse, but I notice that Audrey Wynne Hatfield, whose book The Magic of Herbs was my first introduction to this project, says that ‘a lot of tarragon plants survived the severe winter of 1962-3, in districts where a number of herbs considered to be more hardy succumbed.’ This autumn, which has been so dry, might be just what my herbs need.

September 30, 2014

Latest Posts

Blog Categories

Archives by Date

Newsletter

Tag Cloud