Traditional Herb Gardens Articles & Resources

Backdoor kitchen garden

Thomas Gaston of Menlo Park, California, created what might be called the ultimate easy-care, easy-to-pick kitchen herb garden, just two steps from his back door.

Gaston learned about herbs from his Swiss mother, an avid herbalist. "All Swiss are herbalists to some degree," he says. "I guess I'm carrying on the tradition." He started with mints; they're invasive, so he contained them in old chimney pipes left over from remodeling. The rest of the herbs were at ground level. But Gaston liked not having to bend over, so he put many of the others in raised containers, too.

Mainstays for cooking (all in containers) are thyme, tarragon, spearmint, peppermint, rosemary, oregano, and marjoram. In the ground beneath, he grows basil, caraway-scented thyme, chives, garlic chives, Greek oregano, lemon and lime thyme, lemon verbena ("I dry it and make sachets for the linen closet"), parsley, and sage.

Maintenance is simple. Gaston installed a drip-irrigated system with hidden emitter lines that climb the backs of the containers. When plants get woody, he cuts them back to initiate new growth. Basil and parsley are replanted every year.

A Shakespearean garden

After researching herb gardening. Sheryl Lozier of Flinn Springs, east of San Diego, realized that an herb garden, like other kinds of gardens, needs a focal point. She chose a favorite sundial (a bench, bird feeder, or topiary also would work), and designed her garden around it. The garden radiates from the center, Which Lozier says is a colonial design that she finds appropriate for her country garden. A split-rail fence adds to the rustic look.

Lozier decided she needed a theme for the plants, too, so she chose plants that Shakespeare wrote about. Many of them are culinary - Greek oregano, lavender, rosemary, sage, tarragon, and thyme (she grows five kinds: camphor thyme, caraway-scented thyme, elfin thyme, mother-of-thyme, and woolly thyme).

Among the flowering plants are ones she dries and uses in wreaths. Kinds include armeria, catmint, dianthus, larkspur, Queen Anne's lace, salvias, yarrow, and old-fashioned-looking David Austin's English roses.

Lozier lets her plants grow unchecked through spring. "I love the wild look - everything gets big and beautiful." Around the Fourth of July, before it gets hot, she cuts back plants for potpourri, collects seed of larkspur and Queen Anne's lace, and harvests herbs.

The garden suffers in the summer, but when the heat breaks in fall the plants perk up again. In winter, the garden gets another round of maintenance, and most things get cut back. But the garden isn't entirely bare. Lozier plants pansies for color and often has roses blooming in winter.

"The land around us is our inspiration for herb gardening," explains Lozier, referring to the foothills near San Diego in which she lives. "Gardening is a real pleasure with our healthy soil and great weather."

A matter of thyme

When Olive Curtis of Acme, Washington, was a busy home economics teacher, she and her students used dried herbs out of jars. Now that she's retired and has time to grow her own herbs - as well as teach cooking classes - she uses fresh herbs exclusively. One of her favorites is thyme.

Six years ago, Curtis told her husband that she needed more room for her new passion, herb hardening. "He told me, 'You can have the lawn,' so I took him up on it," says Curtis. A friend helped her husband take down huge birch and cedar trees. Then the lawn came out.

"I like circles and meandering path," she says, "so first I put in a curving brick path. Then I planted a circular thyme garden bordered by rocks and divided into sections with bricks." The garden now contains 100 thyme plants of eight kinds. At the center is woolly thyme; around the outside is creeping thyme. The sections contain English, French, Dutch tea, lemon, orange balsam, and variegated lemon thymes.

"I used to have more kinds, but some froze. Now I mulch heavily with bark in winter and, as a security and to fill in the following spring, I take many cuttings, which over-winter indoors."

The rest of her garden expanded to include many more herbs and flowering plants. She now has a semicircle of chives, a sage garden, and a cutting garden of culinary herbs. For convenience, she has pots of herbs on her deck that she harvests at the last minute to sprinkle into soups, breads, and sauces.

Medicinal garden in Gold Country

For more than 15 years, Candis Packard has been fascinated by herbs. For the last 11 of them, she has been developing her herb garden in the Sierra foothills in Placerville, California.

She bought her three acres not because of the house, which she barely took notice of, but because of the beautiful land and its incredible soil. The topsoil runs 18 to 20 inches deep. Her intent was to cultivate a botanical herb garden.

"All of the herbs I grow are for my family's use, but they're also part of my demonstration garden," explains Packard. "I teach herbalogy and prefer that the students develop a relationship with living plants instead of just dried materials."

The main herb garden was designed to reflect a Native American medicine wheel, with the paths following the cardinal points. The herbs come from around the world. They're not arranged in any particular order, but since it gets very hot in the Sierra foothills, Packard planted them according to their needs for sun, shade, and moisture.

Most of the herbs are medicinal. But Packard also has planted some flowers strictly for show. At the wheel's center are calendula, garden sage, and pennyroyal. Petunias and sweet alyssum add long-lasting color. In surrounding beds, Packard grows five kinds of echinacea, used for colds and to aid the immune system, and low hedges of chrysanthemum, whose flowers are used to reduce fevers and inflammations.

Beneath large oak trees, Packard planted shade-loving herbs such as angelica, Chinese foxglove (Glutinosa), skullcap (Scutellaria laterifolia), and wood betony (Stachys officinalis).

She also grows rare herbs from China and India, including astragalus (Mongolicus), dong quai (Angelica sinensis), fo-ti (Polygonum multiflorum), which climbs on a tripod, and ashwaghanda (Withania somnifera).

An unusual herb in her garden grew in almost every European garden in the 1500s. It's called costmary (Chrysanthemum balsamita) or bible-leaf plant because its 4- to 5-inch-long leaves made good bookmarks. It's used to reduce fevers and aid digestion, and has a sweet minty taste.

To keep the beds healthy and to reduce water use in her hot climate, Packard adds composted manure, compost, and worm casings. Then she fertilizes with fish emulsion and kelp during the growing season. Since Sierra soils are low in phosphorus, she also adds organic phosphate.

The entire garden is on an irrigation system - sprinklers for the lawn and soaker hoses, sprayers, and emitters for the rest of the plants.

A Victorian herb garden with a casual flair

Peter and Carol Ann Irsfeld of Cambria, California, wanted their herb garden to be both useful and decorative, since it would be in front of their Victorian home, a bed-and-breakfast called the Ollalieberry Inn. They chose a formal design to suit the house's era, with paths radiating from a circle accented by an old birdbath. But that's where the formality ends.

"We didn't want anything with too much structure," explains Peter. "The garden has a cottagey feel."

The plants in the free-form beds are a mixture of culinary, fragrant, and flowering herbs. "Ninety percent of the plants are herbs, but we use only 40 to 50 percent of them," says Peter. Favorites for cooking are chives, French thyme, golden marjoram, oregano, rosemary, savory, and society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea). "We enjoy going out and picking herbs to make meals for the guests. One of the favorite evening hors d'oeuvres is goat cheese and roasted garlic with fresh herbs."

They planted other old-world herbs such as catmint, comfrey, lamb's ears, and lemon verbena. For fragrance and color, they added herbs such as feverfew, lavender, and rosemary. Long-blooming perennials such as Santa Barbara daisy and penstemon provide points of interest.

More pungent herbs like rosemary and lavender are used freely inside the inn. "We like to use them around the house instead of traditional flowers," says Peter. "People enter and often ask us what the wonderful smell is."

Maintenance is straightforward. Cooking herbs are constantly being nipped at, which keeps them in bounds. The garden also gets several prunings through the year - one major pruning in winter, when most things get whacked back (the Irsfelds add winter vegetables to fill in bare spots), and two or three less severe trims in late spring and summer to control growth.