Organic Gardening Magazine

Your complete guide to gardening - naturally!

A fresh take on herbs

Anna Parkinson sets out to reinvent the herb garden using knowledge garnered from old herbals.

I used to produce current affairs documentaries for the BBC, but then I fell in love with a gardener…

My husband isn’t actually a keen gardener, and the man I fell in love with has been dead for more than 350 years. But he still changed my life with his beguilingly unfamiliar take on some familiar plants.

“I aim to show you some new ways of using familiar herbs, take you on a tour of forgotten beauties, and encourage you to widen your ideas about what a herb garden is.”

John Parkinson was herbalist to Charles I and passionate about plants for all of his long life. He wrote two books, and the one that captured my heart was the first book in English to concentrate on decorative garden plants. It’s called Paradisus Terrestris, Paradisi in Sole, meaning ‘Parkinson’s Earthly Paradise’, and it was published in 1629. John Parkinson’s later book was the most extensive herbal for many centuries, and both books are a mine of old knowledge about herbs, vegetables, fruit and flowers.

In this new series I want to share some of that old knowledge with you, explaining how you can get the most out of the plants in a modern organic garden. I aim to stretch your tastebuds, show you some new ways of using familiar herbs, take you on a tour of forgotten beauties, and encourage you to widen your ideas about what a herb garden is.

Herb gardens generally have a poor image. On a visit to great gardens such as Sissinghurst, they are the bit you stray into when the dramatic splendour of the rest has been explored. But actually, of course, every plant was once called a ‘herbe’, and many more than we think are useful in our kitchens and medicine cabinets as well as in our gardens. People only began to make a distinction between plants grown for food and medicine and those grown simply for decoration in the 17th century. So many species that we regard as purely decorative were then used regularly as medicine. Cyclamen, for example, was known as sowbread, and one of its many uses was to ‘accelerate the birth’ for women having a long labour. Even hellebores, beautiful but toxic, were then sometimes used, cautiously, as a purgative.

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