Herbs: The Complete Gardener's Guide [Hardcover]

Herbs: The Complete Gardener's Guide is not just for gardeners. This book will appeal to many readers who use herbs in the intertwining pastimes of cooking, brewing, folk medicine, and home-based crafts. Author Patrick Lima is a lively writer, and his passion for the simple pleasures associated with growing herbs is evident on every page. He describes picking fresh leaves for the kitchen, making a pot of fragrant tea, travelling down memory lane on a whiff of costmary or rue, and tousling the lavender in order to breathe in its calming scent.

Herbs is less a quick reference than an excuse to linger over a cup of mint tea while savouring tales of tending herbs at Larkwhistle--the author's rural western Ontario garden--along with anecdotes about his grandmother, neighbours, and friends. "In the fall, we often hang herb bundles from a dowel suspended above the woodstove, where the rising heat crisps them perfectly in three days. A neighbour hangs herbs from the rafters of her unfinished attic. A barn, garden, shed or shady screened porch is also a good drying space." The photographs by Turid Forsyth are superb, and recipes for simple dishes, teas, and potpourris mean the herbal harvest need never go unused. --Carolyn Leitch --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Leafy, flowering vines and kitchen herbs, seeds, pods, bulbs and all things herbal are showcased in this expansive study. Lima (The Art of Perennial Gardening) and Forsyth focus on the plants' physical characteristics rather than on cultivation: how they look, smell, feel and taste, what makes them thrive, which parts make the best food or medicine. With some basic but not comprehensive know-how ("This 3-foot North American herb [anise-hyssop] wants a place in the middle of a bed of tea herbs or perennials"), the book offers facts and aesthetic appreciation, and as such will primarily benefit cognoscenti. A handful of recipes and hundreds of photos enhance this charming book.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

A most attractive coffee-table book, this volume is at the same time an excellent reference resource for the herb gardener. (Koraljka Lockhart American Reference Book Annual 20020101)

The book is like a colorful, calming stroll through the realm of summer. (Maclean's 20011210)

Comprehensive guide ... lots of practical advice on growing herbs as well as suggestions for medicinal uses, recipes and decorations. (Globe and Mail 20011124)

A must read for cooks ... people interested in natural alternative medicines, craftspeople ... and, of course, gardeners. (Chesapeake Home 20020101)

What a lovely, informative and motivating book this is. (Robert Howard Hamilton Spectator 20011108)

Expansive study ... focus[es] on the plants' physical characteristics ... recipes and hundreds of photos enhance this charming book. (Wylie O'Sullivan Publishers Weekly 20011105)

Filled with delightful vignettes and essential advice ... lavishly illustrated. (Paper Clips 20010901)

Striking color photographs and detailed watercolors ... This is a delightful and very informative read. (Julie Coleman Lexington Herald-Leader 20020315)

Informational material in this book is exquisitely complemented by photos and illustrations ... as beautiful as it is useful. (Myrna Collins Appleton Post-Crescent 20020227)

Herbs provides you with the essential knowledge to build your herbal garden from the soil up ... fun read. (Haley Carpinelli Colorado Homes and Lifestyle Magazine 20020615)

It is ... herbs as they can be used to enhance the landscape that is most appealing about this book. (American Gardener 20020101)

A text to sit back and read enjoyably while comparing qualities of different herbs. (American Herb Association Quarterly 20041031)

Essential... Lima is one of our great garden writers... a literate charming guide. (Robert Howard Hamilton Spectator )

Herbs: The Complete Gardener's Guide by Ontario gardener Patrick Lima is big, beautiful and reasonably priced. More than 100 herbs are covered in chatty fashion, together with tales of Lima's personal herb-growing adventures. (Mary Fran McQuade Vaughan Today )

Patrick Lima's graceful garden prose takes a wide-ranging approach to herbs.... A lovely book. (Aldona Satterthwaite Canadian Gardening )

When first published, Herbs was extremely well received and set a new standard of excellence for gardening books. Turid Forsyth's photographs and watercolor illustrations capture all the beauty and detail of these fascinating and practical plants, and Patrick Lima's highly entertaining text is chock-full of clear information, helpful advice and wry anecdotes.

The book covers:

• Selecting and growing herbs
• Soil
• Perennial kitchen herbs, such as horseradish, oregano, bay leaf and rosemary
• Annual and biennial kitchen herbs, such as basil, chili peppers and parsley
• Varieties of thyme
• Varieties of sage
• Seeds and sprouts, including anise, caraway, coriander and cumin
• Alliums, including chives, leeks, onions, garlic and shallots
• Leafy herbs, such as arugula and watercress
• Herbs for blending and brewing, such as mint, chamomile and bergamot
• Fragrant herbs, such as old roses and lavender
• Gathering wild herbs

Special sections outline how to use herbs to add color to flowerbeds and how to propagate, preserve and grow herbs indoors. The book concludes with 16 delicious recipes that make the most of fresh herbs.

This beautiful book combines the wisdom of two longtime gardeners, creating a comprehensive reference that any gardener will enjoy and use regularly.

Patrick Lima shares his gardening secrets and strategies he has gleaned from carving out a garden in Ontario's Bruce Peninsula. He is the author of The Art of Perennial Gardening and The Harrowsmith Perennial Garden.

(20081212)

Excerpt from Chapter 1; Sample Entry from Chapter 4

Excerpted from Chapter 1
Starting Out: Herbs in the landscape

Diversity

In a garden, as in nature as a whole, diversity is a hallmark of health and balance. Anything that reduces diversity -- growing a strictly limited number of plants, for instance, or using chemicals that deplete soil organisms or spraying to wipe out insect friends and foes alike -- invites trouble down the road. In contrast, planting a variety of herbs about a garden promotes diversity in both subtle and obvious ways. Beneficial parasitic wasps are drawn to the flowers of lovage, sweet cicely, dill and other umbelliferous plants. Hummingbirds arrive to sip nectar from crowns of tubular bergamot flowers, while swallowtail, admiral and monarch butterflies flit among purple coneflowers or land on the great cartwheel blooms of angelica. Essential for pollination, bumblebees and honeybees seek out nectar from herbs such as lemon balm, lavender, mints and hyssop and busily gather pollen from opium poppies. Where conditions are right, frogs, toads, bats and ladybugs will inhabit a garden and eat their share, of aphids and mosquitoes. Having admired frogs sitting placidly on their water-lily pads, you may be discomfited on occasion to come upon a garter snake -- or, in these parts, a massasauga rattlesnake -- with its mouth full of web-toed amphibian, but it's all of a piece. In late summer, twittering goldfinches fly in to feast on sunflower and mullein seeds.

I can't imagine our garden without its herbs, plants that enchant us somehow and elicit contact and response. When I think of herbs, I think of essence, intensity and strength: pervasive aroma; flavors pungent or sweet but always distinct; essential oils concentrated to a degree that gives a plant character. Working with herbs brings us in touch with intertwining traditions of gardening, cookery, brewing, folk medicine and home-based crafts. So many simple pleasures are associated with herbs: picking fresh leaves for the kitchen; making a pot of fragrant tea; traveling down memory lane on a whiff of costmary or rue; tousling the lavender as you stroll by and breathing in its calming scent.

Herbs encompass a huge variety, and our aim is to be as inclusive as possible. Something that shows up as a herb here may well be another gardener's weed, vegetable or flower. In the chapters that follow, herbs are grouped according to common characteristics and uses: annual and perennial culinary herbs; tea herbs; the various thymes, sages and alliums; herbs grown primarily for fragrance; and old-time medicinals that remain excellent ornamentals for sun and shade. Look around the piece of earth you tend. There are places in every landscape where herbs of one kind or another will thrive, adding their varied appeal of scent and savor, utility and tradition -- creating a garden full of interest and beauty by any definition.

 

Excerpted from Chapter 4.
Summer Seasonings: Annual and biennial kitchen herbs

Chervil
Anthriscus cerefolium

Chervil is so delicate, it never appears in markets. To have chervil in the kitchen, you must grow it in the garden. But once established, this pretty annual sows its hardy seeds and reappears gratis every season. Chervil does not transplant. To start a patch, scratch the long black seeds shallowly into decent loam in sun or light shade. Keep the ground moist until the seeds sprout, thin the seedlings to 6 inches apart, and harvest the outside leaves, always leaving the central crown to continue growing. Lacy umbels of pinkish white flowers -- "like exquisite bits of enamel work," says one observant writer -- are followed in midsummer by seeds. Allowing chervil to seed down saves you the work, but be prepared for new plants to pop up in odd places. When chervil is left to its own schedule, its seeds sprout in early fall, forming a small rosette that winters over and begins to grow first thing in spring.

"The leaves put into a sallet give a marvellous relish to the rest," wrote John Parkinson in his 1629 "speaking garden," Paradisi in Sole.

Later, in the 1699 Acetaria, John Evelyn added his assent: "The tender tips of chervil should never be wanting in our sallets, being exceedingly wholesome and cheering of the spirits." Indeed, the herb's name comes from the Latin chaerephyllum, "a joy-giving leaf"; chervil equals cheerful.

A close cousin to the robustly perennial sweet cicely, chervil holds a milder anise flavor in its soft curly leaves. Given its early growth, chervil is a natural with chives and dill to season spring dishes; try the three in cottage cheese or dips. Chervil butter flavors asparagus, and later on, minced chervil and chives go into lettuce salads and warm potato salad. I often use up to one-third chervil with parsley for tabbouleh. The French fines herbes always include chervil and chives with two others chosen from thyme, savory, basil or tarragon; in any combination, they make a splendid green-flecked omelette. Chervil is best fresh and may be added at the last minute to cream soups such as carrot, asparagus or puree of green pea. In fact, this is all the cooking that chervil's subtle flavor will withstand.