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Marigolds are such a cheerful herb. They’ll self seed everywhere, stand any amount of cold and bad weather, if they haven’t flowered, and there’s hardly a month when you can’t find a plant in flower somewhere. They like sunny open places, and the flowers turn towards the sun if they have a chance, but they don’t seem to be too picky, which makes them a good first plant for children. The strange sickle-shaped seeds are large enough for small hands to manage, too, which makes them a good subject to teach about seed-saving.

The flowers have been used for flavouring and colouring soups and stews, giving a spicy tang and a rich yellow colour much cheaper than saffron. But the big use is for making creams and liniments for skin complaints. Calendula oil (from the Latin name calendula officinalis) is good for rashes, stings, eczema and allergies, and it is supposed to be anti-septic and anti fungal too, though I haven’t had much success with it. Calendula cream is certainly very soothing, and good for gardeners’ hands.

In the garden it attracts hoverflies which eat aphids, and it’s often used as a sacrifice plant to attract blackfly away from beans. In my experience, however, you just get blackfly on the marigolds as well as the beans, but they do brighten the plot! These are not the marigolds which organic gardeners sometimes plant to get rid of   pests. The ones you want for that are tagetes minuta- the Spanish marigolds which look a bit tawdry, but which have deep burrowong roots which are alleged to kill off earth-living insects, and even out-compete ground elder and bindweed. I wish, that’s all I can say.

This is magnificent, a cultivar called Fireball. It’s doing much better than any variety I’ve had before, which probably means we’ve had a better than average summer.

Bergamot isn’t native, having been introduced from American (where it had the engaging name of swampweed) in the sixteenth century, but it’s been a favourite ever since, and who can wonder with late summer colour like that. It is scented and vaguely minty, and was mostly used to make tea, or to jazz up a pot pourri. It’s very popular with bees and butterflies too.

When I first started learning about herbs, there was only one kind of bergamot, a bright red called Cambridge Scarlet, but breeders and developers have been at work and now there are lots, in pinks, purples red and white. There’s also a separate species called monarda citriodora – a lemon bergamottaller, leggier and with a more citrusy scent. When I bought it, the label said it was a half-hardy annual, but nothing on line indicates that this is the case, and it certainly doesn’t look tender, or like any sort of annual. To be honest it looks tough as old boots. I’ve kept it in a pot, and I’ll cut it back later and overwinter it in the greenhouse. We’ll see what happens in the spring.

This is the classic oregano in its autumn, bee-bothered splendour. It is tough as old boots, spreads itself around the garden like dandelions and will outcompete almost anything on the plot. But there are several other cultivars, which frankly, I can’t keep straight in my head.This one – the one with the pink flowers and smaller leaves is pot marjoram, – a traditional English herb with a slightly more meaty tang, often used in sausages – and the one with the white flowers is Greek oregano – which was green when I planted it, but this year suddenly grew in with these golden leaves. Oregano is ‘the pizza herb’ to the point of cliche, dries well and gives a southern aromatic tang to almost anything mediterranean, but is especially good with lamb kebabs. Bees love it, to the point where you’d grow it just  to see them crawling all over those pink pincushion flowers like shoppers stocking up for Christmas.

Which is the point, really. When the oregano flowers you know there’s not much left of summer, and it’s time to think of rosehips, brambles and apples. I’m not sure we’ll have a good apple crop this year. Last year’s was excellent and I think the trees might be in recovery mode. But I have something I’ve never managed to harvest before. We have a hazel hedge at the end of our garden, and for the first time, I’ve harvested two nuts. What will I do with them? At the moment I am just gazing at them in some awe!

This plant is hard to find in the jungle that is my rose bed. I should think it will need to come forward, between the roses, where it will get more light. It is one of those Mediterranean herbs with fine aromatic leaves that like poor dry soil and sulk in the wet. It doesn’t look too bad in this photo, but earlier this year it was hit by mildew, and has bounced back rather well over the last month.

Southernwood is one of the artemisias, and related to wormwood, but has a fresher, lighter and sweeter scent, which adds a touch of welcome sharpness to pot pourris. It is as good as its greyer relations at deterring moths too, and I like to make a mix of rosemary, southernwood, tansy and lavender for sachets to put among fabrics which need a less flowery presence – my husband’s sock and handkerchiefs, for instance.

This plant is deciduous and gets very twiggy and desolate over the winter. You would think it was dead, but it grows back with incredible vigour once the weather warms up. To prevent it getting leggy and to encourage an abundance of the ferny new leaves you are supposed to cut it hard back in autumn or spring (depending on the climate where you live). Having seen great billowing masses of the stuff in places where they take this instruction way more seriously than I ever did, I can only endorse this recommendation.

I took cuttings of southernwood just after we came home from holiday, and here they are.

For a few weeks I really thought they hadn’t taken, but they look quite perky now, and ready to pot on. I just have to find space for them somewhere —-

This was taken at Culross back in April, at a time when I was looking sideways at my garden wondering if I would have any borage at all this year. I need not have worried. This is what it looks like now.You can see some marigolds behind, struggling to breathe, and there are poppies in there somewhere, but no, the borage has taken over.Bees love it, and  hoverflies and butterflies too. I always feel like a party pooper if I have to take it out. There is one consolation, however, as borage makes a fantastic mulch for growing tomatoes. Its roots are surprisingly long and stursy and they bring up valuable minerals and trace elements from the subsoil. They have a certain amount of nitrogen as well as potash, and did wonders for the peppers in the greenhouse.

For all that, I am somewhat ambivalent about borage. I read somewhere that someone was almost blinded when one of the little hairs off the stems got into his eye, and I’m fairly sure that I’m allergic to them. I now wear heavy duty gardening gloves and keep my sleeves rolled down whenever I go near them.

Borage flowers can be candied, or frozen in ice-cubes – if you take the little black whiskers out first, and they are used in Pimm’s, which I’ve never tried. At one time there was a vogue for using the oil from the seeds in skin cream and for PMT under the name of ‘starflower oil’ – I guess borage sounded a bit banal! But the latest edition of Jekka McVicar’s book says that it didn”t turn  out to be viable. So I guess we’ll have to go back to growing it for fun.

Borage gets a mention in many of my summer poems – I just can’t resist it.

Autumn Equinox

Blue fallen stars –
whiskered flowers of borage in the grass

brown-gold bees tumble
drunken carouse in silk poppy cups

red admiral fans
fiery platefuls of bunched autumn joy

willow warbler flit
green-gold between crimped rowan leaves

gabriel hounds hunting
grey lags calling the dead of winter.

Hyssop is a relative of rosemary and lavender, which means it is strongly scented, and likes things hot and dry, and not too rich. For years I had problems with it dying off over the winter, because it got too wet underfoot for its liking, so now I make sure I have plants overwintering in the greenhouse, where I treat it mean – cold doesn’t seem to bother it too much, – and move it outside when the weather improves. The flowers are long-lasting, and come in blue and white as well as pink. And bees love them.

The taste is something else again, a bitter, tangy, minty dark taste that I’m not too sure what to do with. It is supposed to ‘cut the richness’ of meat like pork or game, and it is an ingredient of chartreuse, not that I’m likely to try that any time soon. medicinally it ‘cures upset stomachs’, reducing flatulence, and I suspect, is just what you need for a night of over-indulgence. The Bible doesn’t exhort you to purge yourself with hyssop for nothing! I’m going by notes in the herbal I started when I was sixteen, and I think, from it’s recommendations for herb tea with honey for coughs, catarrh and rheumatism, it must have some anti-inflammatory properties.

I bought a blue hyssop and took cuttings earlier this year. They’ve done well:

and so have the mixed seedlings I sowed in April, though the slugs have had more than their share. I’m hoping that there will be some white ones among them, which I can use in the world’s smallest knot garden. I’ll be planting that in September, so watch out fot those photos!

This must be a photo from previous years, because this year these particular plants have been hit by mildew. Fortunately there are others, so I have already dried dome of those gilt flossy flowers to use in herb tea for flu, a soothing cream for aching joints and for an interesting moisturiser I found in Lesley Bremmess’ book World of Herbs, made from meadowsweet and buttermilk.

Meadowsweet is a plant that likes damp places, and I associate it with riverbanks and especially canal sides, but it seems to grow along all the road verges around here. I love that colour combination it develops if it gets enough sun – rich creamy flowers, dark yellow-green leaves and crimson stems – it would be a serene and restful decorative scheme to live with.

Books would tell you up till recently about the use of meadowsweet as a strewing herb, and it must have been enormously refreshing to walk over the flowers with their light, sweet almond scent on a hot sultry day. It is only recent writers who include the anti-inflammatory properties of this herb.

But it is a reminder that summer is at its peak. Already our wild flowers have gone from the sparky bright reds and yellows, blues and pinks of earlier in the year, and the road sides are a wash of quieter buff and biscuit shades – hogweed and wild parsnip, duller pinks like fireweed and purples of knapweed and thistle. All this years fledglings are full grown, blundering about the gardens in their natty juvenile plumage, eating everything from  the strawberries to the young frogs out of the pond.But on the plus side, the annual plague of harvest mites doesn’t seem to be happening this year, so maybe all the young birds have dealt with it? It’s too tempting to divide wild things into friends and foes (birds and bees good, slugs and harvest mites evil), but if you go out into the wild, as Gary Snyder says, the only rule for everything is ‘your ass is lunch’. Sometimes you eat, sometimes you get eaten.

This plant is the highlight of the year as far as I am concerned. It’s got colour, scent and chutzpah. It’s good for cooking, perfume, medicine, and an insect repellant. Bees and butterflies love it, and it makes my heart sing. It’s all downhill after the lavender finishes —I went a bit overboard when I visited these lavender fields two years ago, and now I have five varieties of lavender stoechasa lavender dentata (rather tender and temperamental with a rather exciting camphor scent. It isn’t in flower now, otherwise it would be in this post), a white lavender, a pink one (who knew?) and a lot of this English variety – probably Munstead.

I can’t be sure because I grew the first lot from seed, and I’ve been randomly propagating ever since.

These are pictures I took in Provence, at the market in Aix five years ago. We tried to follow the lavender trail in the Luberon, but got lost somehow and didn’t see a single stalk all day. I aspire to make lavender bags as beautiful as this!

The honey from those fields must be something really special!

This is the first lavender fom the garden this year. I’m  going to hang it in my study, to clear the air when I get bogged down in the poetry.

Sorry to push two herbs into one post, but life is busy and we are on holiday for a bit – and so it goes. Anyway I had to do this herb on the feast of St John, didn’t I? In Shetland Midsummer’s Eve is still known as Johnsmass though it’s been secularised in this country – probably since the Puritans. Although pagans would probably point out that St John was probably hitched on to an older festival. Hi-jacked is the word they use, but I reckon that it was simply a recognition that the fun was going to happen anyway—

This is a relentlessly cheery herb with its vivid colours that go on pretty much until winter shuts it down. And it’s fairly indomitable in seeding itself everywhere too, and surviving poor soil and competition, all of which makes it a good herb for depression. It has some scientific backing too, though you have to watch that it doesn’t make you extra sensitive to sunlight. You can make an oil by infusing the flowers which has a very satisfactory scarlet dragons blood kind of colour. And it is brilliant for the nerve pain you sometimes get after shingles.

But this time of the year belongs to the roses. There are gallica officinalis, the apothecary rose, and alba semi-plena maxima, the Jacobite rose, originating in the middle East somewhere, and traditionally used for Attar of roses. There are just about enough flowers for that this year, but I’m going to be content with drying petals for pot pourri, and possibly candying some to decorate cakes.

Roses have a lot of uses, from rose petal jam, and cakes, through scented products and cosmetics – the best skin creams I’ve ever used were made with rose oil, though they were scarily expensive – to medicine. It was supposed to soothe and strengthen the heart, calm fevers and ease tickly coughs, stimulate and rouse people who had fainted (much nicer than smelling salts, I feel!) and cure headaches. And the hips can be made into a syrup which is just busting with vitamin C. I mean to make this some time this autumn, but it will be in small quantities. I feel it is a little bit tainted from having been forced on young children because it’s good for them.

And roses are such potent symbols of love – faithful and passionate, loyal and indulgent, romantic and fulfilled. Even if the lovers in the ballads die before they get it together, roses grow from their graves and intertwine, and there’s a happy continuity somewhere.

Meanwhile it is the beginning of harvest time. I picked seven pounds of gooseberries at the weekend, and made some jelly with some of them this morning. I picked the first of the blackcurrants, and I’ve started to pick wild strawberries in ones and twos. Wild strawberries crop all summer long, but it’s awfully hard to get more than a mouthful at once. Oregano, marjoram  and southernwood need to be dried, and the lavender and meadowsweet will soon be ready to go too.

Here are all the cuttings I took earlier. Turns out patience is a virtue after all, and almost all I took have rooted. These are (from the front, working backwards) blue hyssop, santolina, rosemary, a mixed bunch of pink blue and white hyssop, and sage. There are purple sage and lavender in the greenhouse, and when I come back from holiday I’ll take cuttings of the lavender stoechas, southernwood, winter savory, thyme and lemon thyme. It looks like the smallest knot garden in captivity might still happen this autumn!