Garden Centre

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Herb gardening again

The uses for herbs in the garden aren’t limited to food, although fresh herbs do improve the taste of any dish. Here’s some ways I use herbs to improve my garden or my hospitality!

• I have a lovely Angelica which thrives in semi-shade. The plant is supposed to reach six feet tall – mine never gets over two because I harvest it so regularly. You can candy the stems of one variety, angelica archangelica which you then use to decorate cakes, but I don’t have time for that – instead I make ice bowls with one smaller bowl (with its outside covered in a layer of cling film) inside a larger one, and water poured between the two. In the water I arrange the huge and delicately cut angelica leaves, so that when I take the ice bowl out and fill it with punch or fruit salad, the tracery of the angelica shows up like a wonderful Byzantine design. The flowers are gorgeous too, as this picture shows.

• Curly-leaved parsley looks brilliant as a lawn or bed edging and is particularly good when set against reds, oranges and yellows. It’s also a potent barrier against slugs and snails. If you find it difficult to germinate, dig a very shallow trench, sprinkle in your parsley seed and then pour boiling water on top – it works, believe it or not!

• If you find you have a gap in your garden, you can divide a clump of chives: either the common purple-flowered or the white-flowered garlic chive and plant them in the gap – cut them down to about two inches as soon as you’ve planted them and they will make a neat little clump within two weeks. They seem to thrive on this kind of behaviour.

Labels: angelica, chives, garden herbs, parsley

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:18 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, November 3, 2007

Plants as structure – the bones of the winter garden

These are the seed heads of garlic chives. Not our 'eating' garlic chives, which have their heads resolutely lopped off as soon as they appear – which always makes me feel like the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, yelling ‘off with their heads’ every two minutes – but our decorative chives.

I have two lots of both kinds of chives, eating ones right outside the door, where I can nip out and grab a bunch for salads, or to chop and lay on top of any egg dish I happen to be cooking, and decorative chives, in clumps in the garden and the latter are grown just for these lovely seed heads.

They will last all winter, and give varying effects to the garden when not a lot else is in bloom. Through November they are usually wet and windblown, and have subtle shades of brown and beige. Into December they become paler and drier and tend to be rimmed with frost. With any luck, in January, they will be standing stalwart but fragile above a layer of snow, and in February I go out and cut them down, ready for the spring growth that appears like magic in March.

Dried plant material, whether seed heads or berries, or certain flowers (like sunflowers) left on the plant stem all winter, can add real interest to the garden. Matched with winter flowering plants (hellebores are my favourite) and berrying plants for splashes of colour, they can give you a garden as full of interest in the cold months as in the summer.

Labels: chives, seed heads, winter interest

The All Seasons Gardener at 2:41 AM 0 Comments

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