Carol grows her favourite herbs to perk up summer meals

Herbs can be grown anywhere – whether it’s in your veg patch or pots on a window ledge. Carol reveals her favourites and how she likes to enjoy them

Herbs have always had important roles to play in human society, from the medicinal to the culinary

Herbs are lovely plants, attractive and ornamental, fragrant and evocative of sun-drenched hillsides and wild places, but so often we underestimate their role and their importance in our lives. It’s hard to get serious about sage or challenging about chives, but remove herbs from our gardening and culinary repertoires, and we are so much the poorer. In many cases, you can’t have the latter without the former and though it is true that many herbs can be bought dried, they don’t compare to the real thing, fresh from your garden.

Despite their lowly status, herbs have always had important roles to play in human society, from the medicinal to the culinary. They are crucial to Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, and were part and parcel of daily life – and afterlife – in every major civilisation from the Egyptians to the Amazonians.

They may have lost much of their mystery in a world that attributes so little importance to the spiritual side of life, but herbs play an increasingly important role in the epicurean side, where we use them to enhance and enrich the flavours of our food. Our nation’s tastes have become more adventurous and our increased willingness to use herbs has opened up a delicious world of flavours.

In good taste

When it comes to growing and using them in our gardens, herbs are no longer confined to that 1960s cliché, ‘the herb garden’, where herbs were corralled together simply because they were ‘herbs’, regardless of the growing conditions they needed. Nowadays, we’re more aware of their origins and are likely to consider the conditions they like by finding out how they grow in the wild.

We’re more adventurous about putting them together, too, considering their aesthetic qualities. In common with a huge amount of plants, many have strong ornamental qualities, and mix seamlessly with perennials and grasses in naturalistic plantings. In contrast, they can also be used in strong, modern designs, in blocks to provide areas of a particular colour, texture or scent. Lavender hedges, for example, have a long history but are often an important element in modern gardens.

Gardeners tend to group salads and herbs together, which is a decorative way to grow them. Their requirements are often similar, especially if you stick to annual herbs that can be grown from seed in the same way as you’d grow lettuces, mizuna, mustard greens and rocket. While the leaves of lettuces are often full and