The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Herbs Be bold with next year’s selection but do keep the fundamentals in mind
HERBS can provide new flavours for your culinary palette but you also need plants that are compliant and attractive. As tender herbs are blackened by the first winter frosts and hardy ones lose their flavour, it’s time to assess which plants fared well and whether to try new ones next year.
Most gardeners grow mint, chives and parsley and may have a stab at tender basil, but why not break new ground and try more unusual varieties of familiar herbs?
Spearmint, a trusty old ingredient for mint sauce, has its place in most herb gardens, but it’s just one of many mint flavours. Poyntzfield Herbs sells 11 mint varieties and Jecka’s Herbetum has 26 on its list.
Unless you want a scented bath, avoid eau de cologne mint and try ginger mint to spice up cucumber salad. Chocolate peppermint really does taste and smell like After Eights, as visitors to our demonstration garden near Jedburgh used to find. Children loved rubbing the underside of leaves and whiffing the strong cocoa odour. Try it with strawberries, or add pineapple mint to summer drinks or a fruit salad.
When buying mints, however, be warned. I always recommend using the Latin name for plants as you’ll get the correct plant. Common names are unreliable as one plant can have several names, and the same name can apply to more than one plant. Sadly, this rule breaks down with mint.
Mentha x piperita f citrata can be applied to six types of mint: eau de cologne, basil, chocolate, grapefruit, lemon and lime. You wouldn’t want eau de cologne with your strawberries or chocolate with your cacik so to avoid a culinary disaster pinch and sniff a leaf before buying a plant.
Chives are good, reliable herbs, but their relatives, Welsh and tree onions, provide a similar taste earlier in the year with clumps of tiny onions as a bonus. For a slightly stronger onion flavour, you could try Siberian chives. Like ramsons, they grow in wet meadows so, unlike other onions and herbs, they don’t need well-drained soil.
Since we all lead busy lives, we want plants that can look after themselves. And though most herbs fit that bill, some have special requirements. You need a sheltered spot for tarragon to prevent damage from driving wind. I’ve also found garlic chives much more tender than their cousins and rarely survive more than one winter.
You might also think twice before choosing tender salvias, sages. The exotically flavoured pineapple and blackcurrant sages come from Mexico, so can’t survive a Scottish winter outdoors.
But the hardy sages, such as Salvia lavandulifolia, come from the Mediterranean and only need protection from the coldest winds. Lavender sage, often known as Spanish sage, has a superior flavour to the broad-leaved sage and its fancy coloured forms.
Thyme is another Mediterranean herb that thoroughly deserves a place in the herb garden, provided you can offer very freedraining soil and as much sun as possible. And there’s no shortage of choice, with at least 37 varieties. These are all useful in the kitchen, but, if you’re restricted to one plant, plump for broad-leaved thyme. Thymus pulegioides has large leaves that are easy to strip from stalks and have a fine, strong thyme flavour.
Lemon-scented thymes have small, fiddly leaves but I find their heady scent irresistible. They are just as decorative as Bressingham thyme or pink chintz which cannot compete on flavour.