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.