Kitchen Garden

ROSEMARY

When Mary and the infant Jesus rested one night during their flight into Egypt, she was said to have hung her cloak on a bush which, in the morning, was found to have pale blue flowers matching the colour of her cloak. So the bush came to be called rose of Mary. It is a charming story, but rosemary also derives, more credibly, from the Latin rosmarinus, meaning ‘dew of the sea’. This is because the herb thrives in coastal conditions, particularly by the Mediterranean, where it originated before the Romans brought it to Britain.

I have a rosemary plant which is at least twelve years old, with a thick and twisted, woody stem. I have pruned

it over the years and it is still healthy, with blue flowers showing until the end of November. Just before Christmas, I bought a small plant of prostrate rosemary, which should grow to about ten inches high with a spread of up to six feet. If planted close to a retaining wall, it may in time trail along and over the top.

Rosemary can be grown from seed, but cuttings, taken in spring from young growth, are more reliable. This herb will grow in any soil provided it is well drained, and will survive most winters, given a sunny and sheltered position. Miss Jessopp’s Upright is a popular variety, and the very hardy Benenden Blue is suitable for growing into a clipped bush; I have read that it was favoured by Vita Sackville-west.

Surprisingly, Elizabeth David was not a fan of rosemary in the kitchen. She disliked what she called the acrid taste it gives to lamb or fish. And while acknowledging that it was, in Ophelia’s words, for remembrance, she wished it wasn’t ‘for the remembrance of those little spiky leaves stuck in my throat’.

Rosemary has also been associated with death: ‘Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary/on this fair corse,’ Friar Laurence tells Juliet’s father. Most poignantly, rosemary is remembered in Australia because the herb was growing wild on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915.