Garden gallery: some of the herbs I grow

Chocolate peppermint, a variety of Mentha piperita. I love peppermint, it's my favourite of all the mints for flavour and for medicinal use. I'm always a little sceptical of 'flavoured' herbs, because some of them really are rubbish and don't taste anything like their names suggest. We would get Pomegranate and Ginseng thyme or Oak-Smoked Cheddar and Somerset Raspberry basil if somebody thought they could make a quick buck out of it. But Chocolate peppermint is good. It doesn't really taste of chocolate of course ... the name is partly for the warmly chocolatey stem colour and partly because the sweet, clean, intense flavour evokes the taste of After Eight mints. But it's tasty enough that I eat the leaves straight off the plant. Love it.



And another of the flavoured herbs which stands out for me. This is Lemon Variegated thyme, more properly known as Thymus pulegioides Aurea and a product of Thymus x citriodorus. It has large rounded leaves of a deep green with bright yellow margins. I always thought the golden variegated thymes were bred for ornamental rather than culinary use, but this one is a corker. The lemon taste is sharp, intense and well developed with no bitter herby undertone, and a little goes a long way when you cook with it. I have two other citriodorus thymes: Lemon Curd, despite its enticing name, has an uninspiring flavour while Doone Valley, another golden variegated one usually sold as an ornamental, tastes better ... but neither of them are in the same league as this one.



Silver Spires rosemary. This is a silver variegated rosemary bred by Christine Wolters of Mayfields Nursery in Guildford. I keep reading that silver variegated rosemary, which was prized in England in Shakespeare's day, has been lost and no longer exists. Well I have it, and it certainly does exist. I bought the plant in 1997, and salvaged it from my old garden when I moved, but haven't seen it anywhere since. Shame, because I rate it highly for looks and flavour. There is a golden variegated rosemary which is more readily available, but this one is quite different.



More thyme. This one is an unknown variety, but I've had the plant for many years and it's the best culinary thyme I've ever found - very intense, refined flavour and dries exceptionally well. I've never seen it in garden centres. It has fine, narrow greyish leaves and grows taller than most popular thymes ... the leaves are looking quite green at the moment because it's on the cusp of flowering. The plant originally came from Waitrose, of all places. It was being sold as a fresh organic herb, the idea being that you don't bother to plant it, just take it home for the windowsill and murder it for this week's dinner. But I did plant it, and it thrived. It came from an organic farm in the Dolomite mountains of Italy, and that's all I know.



Rosemary blossom. One of the joys of this time of year, and the bees think so too.

The herb garden resurrected

I've finally got round to doing something I've meant to do ever since I moved here in 2004 - install a proper herb garden. In my previous garden, which was a miniscule 30ft by 12ft, I didn't have room to grow many vegetables and so herbs were my main thing. In that tiny garden I collected 80 varieties of herbs - culinary, medicinal and shamanic ones. But over the years most have been lost, either by dying off or having to be left behind when I moved. I always intended to make a new one, but it's taken me six years.

Last year a friend up the road had some alterations done in her house which involved knocking two rooms into one, and she said I could have the bricks if I wanted to come round and collect them. As it was an 1890s house and the bricks were lovely handmade ones full of character, I thought they would be perfect for building a raised herb bed. They didn't feel quite so perfect after I'd lumped 140 of them into the boot of my small and very antique VW Polo and made three journeys back home with the exhaust pipe practically scraping along the road - and I was so knackered I stacked them up round the side of the house and didn't do anything with them for a year.

Beautiful as Victorian bricks are, if you've ever salvaged "pre-owned" bricks you'll know what a fun job it is to chisel all the old mortar off them, which has to be done before you can re-use them. But once I'd got enough of them cleaned up, I made this rather nice walled bed. It's five courses high, curved along the front edge, and has enough room for a good collection of plants which will have full sun and good drainage. There's also a border at the back of it which faces south-west, and with the shelter and the reflected light/heat from the bricks it should make another good place to grow some of the more marginal herbs.


The new herb bed planted up with a few things already. Chives, chamomile, oregano and various thymes and parsleys.

Yes, it's a bit amateur and homespun. I've never done bricklaying before (and I don't have a bloke to do this kind of stuff for me) so I just get on with it and hope for the best. I probably shouldn't admit this but I didn't make any measurements or design plans at all. I just laid out the bricks on the ground until I liked the look of them and cut round them to make the outline for the foundations. Then I positioned them all by eye without recourse to tape measure, string-line, set-square or spirit level. What would Geoff Hamilton say? Maybe I'm daft but I'm just not the kind of girl who measures or plans things. Everything I do is improvised. To be honest, the bricks are all so individual and full of subtle variations it would still have looked a bit wonky even if I had meticulously planned everything. So bugger it. I like wonky things anyway.

And as I was building it I suddenly hit on this idea of incorporating this carved stone ouroboros which I've had lying around for years. It dates back to when I was 19 and lived in a farm cottage on a Cotswold hillside (which was freezing cold and infested with mice, before anyone has the word 'idyllic' get anywhere near their head). In my youthful idealism I used to go up the hill and find flat-faced chunks of Cotswold stone, then half kill myself lugging them back to the cottage to carve medieval motifs on them. The hill where I lived, Bredon Hill in Worcestershire, was circled by pretty villages with ancient churches, some of which had spectacular medieval stone carvings in them. The idea was to make hand-made copies of some of these carvings. I can't remember which parish I found the ouroboros design in, but anyway, I spent a happy few days smacking seven kinds of hell out of a chunk of stone until this little chap emerged.


Ouroboros carving, set with a few bits of coloured glass.

I love the ouroboros symbol. It's a deep alchemical motif which carries the idea of motion within stillness, completion, wholeness, energised balance and eternal renewal of cycles. All good things to have in a garden. For years I've been carrying my ouroboros (and a couple of others I made at the time) around with me and could never decide what to do with it. After all this time it's beautifully and naturally weathered - and it fits into the wall perfectly.

Another slightly more subtle feature in the wall … when I was lumping bricks into the car I spotted a set of fingerprints in one of the bricks. It had been pressed into the clay before it was fired, and thus preserved. Maybe this picture isn't the clearest, but the brick retains every detail of the lines in this person's fingers. Things like this are really precious to me. I love the idea that an unknown brickyard worker imprinted their identity into a housebrick 120 years ago and it still survives today as clearly as if it had been made yesterday. Perhaps it has an added significance to me because my grandfather was a brickmaker. Not that there's anything remotely romantic about that. In fact it killed him at age 37. But these little personal touches (literally) of people long gone from the world are the most special historical treasures to me.


A brickmaker's fingerprints etched into a brick surface.

That's not the only bit of hard landscaping I've done this week. My neighbour informed me the other day that he is giving up growing vegetables, because "they don't come to anything anyway, it's a waste of time" (speak for yourself, mate) and turfing over his vegetable patch. I find that very sad, but each to their own. I have benefited from it personally though, because he offered me the edging stones which had formerly made the boundaries of his vegetable garden, which happened to be exactly the right size and quantity for edging the path in my greenhouse, for which I had been trying to psych myself up for a trip to Wickes because I was in urgent need of some. These are old tiles and far nicer than anything I could have got from Wickes anyway. Thank you God. Thank you neighbour.*

*Not that the two are in any way synonymous.

Today in the garden ... after the deluge

These lilies (I've long forgotten the variety name) survived a rainy pelting unscathed

Just as it looked like we were in for a summer of extreme drought ... the rains came. It rained non-stop for 24 hours. And I don't mean normal rain. It was torrential and there was no let-up in it at all. I was woken up again and again during the night by the noise of it pelting on the roof. I fully expected to open the curtains the next morning and find the house had floated off down the street. But no ... the pavement outside was impassable (our street has a double grass verge which acts like banks in wet weather and turns the pavement into a river) but we're still in the same place. And apart from a snapped-off top on one of the Martock broad beans and some very bedraggled roses, there was hardly any damage in the garden. Just a lot of baling out on the patio where a lot of the plants were floating in their pots.

And my rainwater butt, empty since April, has certainly filled up!

But now the weather has cleared a bit I've been able to get out there and do my daily inspection. The daily inspections are taking a little longer at the moment as I pause along the way to stuff my face with fresh produce. Raspberries, tayberries, peas, blackcurrants, then more raspberries.

I chanced to have the camera in my hand when I spotted this beautiful bright orange butterfly on some Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy potato leaves. Butterflies are outside my area of expertise but I think this one is a Comma.

Peas are still the main focus for me at the moment. I'm not sure how well my hand-pollinations have taken. The pods are developing nicely, but the peas inside (which you can see if you view them against the light) are very small, and even those that are developing normally only have a couple of peas in each pod. To some extent this is normal ... hand-pollination is quite hit and miss and it's usual for some of the pollinations not to take. It's just a matter of doing lots of them to ensure enough material for my experiments. But there are factors which may make a difference to the success rate. One is the weather ... peas pollinate much better when it's cool and I did mine on blazing hot summer days. Another is a possible mismatch in the maturity of the flower parts. I have been emasculating the buds at a very early stage to ensure I catch the male bits before they shed any pollen, and there's a strong possibility that at this stage the female part is not yet receptive either. The solution to this is to emasculate the buds a day or two before I do the hand-pollination, which will give the stigma a chance to mature. Worth a try, anyway. I will just have to do lots of pollinations and see what works.

Champion of England produces its first pods

Champion of England is looking fairly typical of an old-fashioned tall pea. The flowers are small-ish and a very slightly creamy white. And it has long, long pods which look like they're going to have 9 peas in them.

The moment has come: I sampled the first raw mangetout pod from Mr Bethell's Purple Podded. Um ... being brutally honest, the flavour was a bit on the weak side ... not to mention slightly earthy and bitter. I ate a similar sized Alderman pod for comparison, and the purple one was noticeably poorer (although it certainly looked a lot more exciting). I will have to try them cooked when I have enough of them. But even if they turn out to taste horrible in every form, it's still worth my while growing them as a heritage variety and as breeding stock. Because I'm guessing the main reason purple peas taste less good is that all the breeding work in the last 150 years has focused on green varieties. Given that the gene for purple colouring is dominant, I see no reason why the colour can't be bred into some existing sweet plump green varieties.

Here are a couple of oddities I have in the garden at the moment.

Americans may recognise this, but it's rarely seen in UK gardens. It's Black Cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa) which is a powerful hormone-balancing herb much prized in Native American medicine. It likes to grow in damp shady places and it produces an effervescent-looking white flower spike which flowers from the bottom up, like a sparkler in reverse. From Poyntzfield Herbs

This is Allium guttatum ssp. dalmaticum, which is so rare it doesn't have an English name. It's an ornamental member of the onion family. From Rare Plants