Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld

MINT

Growing mint can be a bit of a problem. Once established, the plant’s roots and runners are likely to spread and interfere with whatever is growing near it. I have tried growing mint in a pot, but the roots do not like being confined; the plant may suffer in the second year and need to be divided and replanted in fresh soil. In our kitchen garden we have spearmint growing out of gravel and roaming happily between two raised vegetable beds, and apple mint running riot underneath the currant bushes.

The ancient Greeks apparently rubbed mint leaves over their bodies, and the Romans brought plants to Britain, using them not only as a deodorant but as a medicine (ears and eyes treated with a mint infusion) and a flavouring for their food. Mint has been used in Middle

Eastern cooking for centuries, but the mint sauce which we make with vinegar and sugar is, I believe, unique to this country. You certainly won’t be offered it with a gigot d’agneau in France where, according to Elizabeth David, it is ‘considered positively barbaric’.

A supposedly new mint called Brundall, originally from a village of that name on the Norfolk Broads, has been much promoted in recent years; and I have seen more than thirty varieties of mint listed on a herb nursery website. Among the best for making mint sauce, in my experience, are spearmint, apple mint and the similarly hairy-leaved Bowles mint.

Now that the new season’s mint is appearing in the garden, we shall be sprinkling the leaves over new potatoes and spooning mint sauce, made with brown sugar and not too much wine vinegar, over roast spring lamb. Of the other, scented varieties, I would recommend eau de cologne and pineapple mint as more suitable for Pimm’s. So, too, is lemon balm, a member of the mint family which in our garden spreads all too easily and selfseeds, showing itself last year between two rows of beetroot.