BurnedThumb

These are old pictures of bees on flowers in my garden. This year the bees are all on the sage plants, (see below) but although I tried to take photos they eluded me completely. It’s been a wonderful year for bumblebees – I looked up the useful identification guide on the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and discovered that there are buff-tailed bumble bees (males and workers) garden bumble bees, early bumble bees, common carder bees, and red-tailed bumble bees, all working the plants. It’s very noisy, but I hope it means that seed will set. I’ve had some luck with sage from cuttings, but sowing from seed is always interesting.Last week the latest magazine from the Herb Society, herbs, arrived, and I was delighted to see two articles about herbs in Scotland featured in it, as membership is relatively thin on the ground here, and Scotland doesn’t often get a mention. There is an article about the organic herb garden at Poyntzfield, a place I’ve heard of, but never visited, and another entitled ‘Scotland’s Lost Lavender Fields’. This was fascinating as there was a garden at Gardening Scotland featuring ‘Banchory lavender’, which I’d never heard of. I would have thought that Scotland was an unlikely place to grow lavender on a commercial scale, but apparently the original grower, Andrew Inkster, developed a variety from the Munstead cultivar (now named as “Lavender Toramhor”) which was perfectly hardly, and though its yield was less, the oil was of a superior quality. Woodend Barn, the Arts Centre in Banchory, ran a project there last year, which you can read about on the website of the artist Helen Smith.

Added to this, there was a story about the Old Medicine House in Blackden, Goostrey. This made me prick up my ears, as Goostrey will always be associated in my mind with one of my favourite children’s stories, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Sure enough, the house was bought and restored by the author Alan Garner, and the whole site sounds like a fascinating place to visit. Membership of the Herb Society looks like being a really helpful thing as I get deeper into this project!

Horsetails

Like horrible Christmas trees, a bristly
foot-high net of pure silica. Their black
roots thread the wet ground, invade
neglected gardens, remind us by their
dull persistence that they were here,
with ferns and moss, before the trees
and dinosaurs. They will not succumb
to hoes and competition.
They mean to outlive us all.

This herb is the curse of my garden with its wet clay subsoil. It gets in between everything and no matter how I pull it up, hoe it off, feed the soil or plant densely so out-compete it, or even ‘make friends’ with it, it won’t go away.

As the poem says, horsetail stores a lot of silica in its straggly green nets, and this means that people have tried to use it in many different ways. It is said you can use it to polish pewter, but I haven’t found how this can be done. My latest guess is to powder the dried herb, and mix it with a little water to make a paste. I believe you can buff fingernails with it too, and some people say that you can make a strengthening lotion which you can soak brittle nails in. It is also used as a drench for plants affected by powdery mildew, and I’m going to try this as the meadowsweet by the pond is showing the first signs of it.

The chamomile I bought at Gardening Scotland and divided has done so well I’ve had to plant it out, and now I have the world’s smallest chamomile lawn – barely two feet square.

In the stock bed, the first lavender stoechas is in rich and lavish flower,and the sweet briar is in full bloom. I’ll leave these to set hips, and try to make rosehip syrup.In the kitchen, harvest time has begun. Here is the chive and tarragon vinegar, and mint sauce to use when the green herb has died back.and here are herbs I’m drying – peppermint, marjoram, yarrow and lemon thyme. It’s been a busy week!

Revised Post

Parsley, in early spring. When I first drafted this post I wasn’t very excited about parsley. I was finding it a bit dull. Yes, useful in bouquet garni and fines herbes, a bright speckle of green in a dumpling, useful standby as a garnish — and good for you, oh yes, soothing the digestion, (good for flatulence) improving kidney function, well wouldn’t you know it. And yet, only a few months later I was writing this:

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.

Just goes to show. And I think I complained that I couldn’t get it to set viable seed, but last summer, that weird belated no-show, I did indeed collect seed, and I’m going to sow it next spring.

There are many herbs that I’m not going to include in this phase of the project. I reckoned that fifty would be quite enough, and I wanted to concentrate on the iconic familiar ones. But I can’t resist trying to grow them.

Here is the bench in the greenhouse, where I’m propagating chamomiles, horehound, myrtle and martagon lilies, as well as cuttings of sage, hyssop, santolina rosemary and lavender.

And in the pond there is a plant I’m really pleased with, not much used as a medicinal plant, but versatile and precious as a dyeplant – yellow flag.

This is the plant that makes orris root, or at least it does in my house. It isn’t the true variety iris germanica var florentina, which is this one:

which I photographed at Culross. It looks relatively scrawny and a bit pathetic compared with the germanica ones, but it is the real deal, with the roots that were dried and ground into orris root powder for pot pourris and laundry. You could boil the roots with your linen to give them a rich violet scent which lastes for ages and deters moths. It is also a fixative, which means that not only does it small nice in itself, it helps to preserve the smell of other scented plants.

The garden variety which I have may not be precisely the same as florentina, but it does the job. You dig up the roots in the autumn, after they have had a good baking, and dry them out slowly in a cool oven. It takes an unbelievably long time, as you need them to be completely dry and brittle, and then you can pulverise them in a spice grinder. I did this a few years back, and used the powder as recommended in a pot pourri. It was amazing – not so much a distinctive scent, but a kind of rich base note that brought all the lavender, rosepetals, other herbs and spices, into a wonderful harmony. And it did last for several years, so I am going to dry some more roots this September and see what I can do.This is the pond this week. There’s no sign of tadpoles, but it’s pretty busy. I think I have a kind of gated community for elderly frogs, who just want to chill, and who can’t be doing with all the tadpole shenanigans!

We’re not quite here yet, but the flower buds are forming and I’m going to have to cut what I want for drying if I’m to follow the advice to cut before the flowers open. That is when the essential oils in the plant are at their strongest.

If you look up sage in any herb book, you will always find two quotes:

“Why should a man die if he has sage in his garden?” which is attributed to Dioscorides, and the more folksy

“If they’d eat mugwort in April

and sage in may

so many young maidens

wouldn’t go to clay.”

Sage, it would seem, is a life saver, prescribed for almost anything from sore throats to kidney disease – hence the Latin name ‘salvia’ which is linked to the words for health and safety.

The rhyme I kind of like though, is

Where the sage tree thrives and grows

the master’s not master, and he knows.

Oh dear. Myself, I think it’s more to do with the rocky poor soil I planted it in, right at the top of a north facing slope, so it gets all the sun and excellent drainage. It comes in many varietieis, with splashes and variations of colour on its leaves, gold and silver and tricoloured. The one I like, though is the purple. Despite its interesting murky colour, it tastes just the same in a sage and onion stuffing!

I’m going to try and see as many herb gardens as I can while this project lasts, and I started this weekend with Culross.

It’s steeply sloped and terraced, and packed into its small space are herbs, vegetables, fruit bushes and trees, cut flowers, bees and chickens. These are Scottish dumpies – no kidding, it’s a real breed, chosen because they are bred to be hardy in this country – and very beautiful – and vocal – they were too.

Although Culross is only just up the river from here, the garden is much more sheltered than ours, and everything is just that bit further advanced. This is borage, blooming its heart out, although mine is only just appearing.

I came away with a lot of ideas – particularly this chamomile lawn, underplanted with tulips and crown imperials and lilies, which add interesting highlights. I might try that next year – though it will be less than a quarter the size, if I do. I have joined the Herb Society and I will try to visit their garden at Sulgrave Manor, and of course the Chelsea Physic Garden and the American Museum garden at Bath, but I’ll be looking out wherever I go for herb gardens to visit.

And the other thing I have just done is that I have joined The Uncivilisation network
which is the online space for people interested in the Dark Mountain Project to continue conversations started on the blog, or in the books or at the events which the founders of the Project so magnificently set up.

In the Dark Mountain group I have found many people who share concerns close to my heart, about art and society and the environment. There are artists, philosophers, film-makers, musicians, plenty poets, farmers, educationalists, conservationists, fiction writers and journalists of all sorts, and people whose crafts and creativity I can’t even define. It’s a really interesting place to hang out.

This is one herb I will not be propagating. Woodruff is irresistibly pretty just now, and has a fresh elusive smell, which was valued in the days when floors were strewn with rushes. It contains a substance called coumarin, which helps to preserve the scent of other herbs when dried, so I’ll be including it in pot pourris later in the year. But it is a fiercely invasive plant, related to the less glamorous cleavers (known to many children as ‘sticky willie’) and  wraps itself round everything in its path. It needs no help from me – do you think it could out-compete ground elder? There’s only one way to find out —-