Gardens
The great escape
Ursula Buchan
I would be the last to deny that our lives are immeasurably enriched by our capacity to grow herbs. How else could we make good spaghetti bolognese and omelettes fines herbes? When I was a child in the early 1960s, all you could find in most people's gardens were little clumps of parsley and rampant, scruffy shoots of spearmint amongst the ground elder in some shady and forgotten spot. Really adventurous people, who had been Abroad for their holidays, would use fen- nel for fish and rosemary for lamb, but that was usually all. Clearly there was a gap to be filled.
And filled the gap has been — by acres of print on how to grow herbs; on the vexed and irrelevant question of the differ- ence between a herb and a spice; on how to make fennel and yoghurt facepacks, crys- tallised angelica, and horehound ale. However, the information is imparted in such an even tone that it is impossible, unless you are already an expert, to decide properly what is worth doing and what is not.
The growing of the common herbs for the kitchen is, of course, essential. They are ridiculously easy to grow, which makes them well-suited to the needs of the gardening beginner; they give him confi- dente and prove to him that his new-found occupation is not without practical use. They are usually pretty, if not in flower then in leaf, and combine together in a congenial way, hence the popularity of herb gardens. There are good ornamental variegated varieties of sage, balm, and thyme, and lavender flowers come in several colours. Herbs grow well every- where, even in city gardens, and flourish in window-boxes and in pots on windowsills. Many of the essential ones like parsley, tarragon and basil do not need to be dried, indeed they are better frozen in small quantities in the compartments of an ice- cube tray. Although this is not nearly as picturesque as storing them in glass jars, it is undoubtedly less work.
However, I do have misgivings about the growing of some herbs because the grower feels a misplaced obligation to do some- thing with them thereafter. I do not know why it should be so but the making of herbal preparations brings out the barmy in otherwise perfectly rational people. It may be that their perfect rationality is wafer-thin, so thin that herbal concoctions simply act as a trigger to expose a deep- seated, but usually well-disguised, loopi- ness. I have not forgotten the occasion (more than 12 years ago when this craze was in its first fine careless rapture) when I was asked by a woman who looked quite normal whether I would like her recipe (I am not sure she did not say receipt) for sage and orris-root toothpaste.
Even if not. actually lunatic, I consider much of the work involved a waste of effort. I cannot be persuaded of the point of growing coriander, or chilis to make cayenne pepper. Coriander has a disgust- ing smell if not dried properly (a fact about which the books are silent) and cayenne pepper requires a great deal of effort to achieve a product which can be bought in better condition and no more expensively in a cardboard tube. The drying and preparing of many herbs and spices has all the pleasure associated with painstakingly doing something quite useless; in this respect it resembles the knitting of chil- dren's clothes. There is no active harm in either, provided that you recognise that their prime purpose is to give you some- thing to do with your hands. There can be harm done, however, if the urge to do it yourself, just for the sake of it, leads you to admit shockers like horseradish into your garden. The expert advice is to dig up every root each autumn to stop it taking over the garden; you will as easily dig up every root of bindweed.
Just as some women, faced with the imminent adulthood of their children, yearn to have another baby in order to plunge themselves once more into the cosy, unthreatening world of Nappisan and Winnie-the-Pooh, so there are others, mostly women again, who enjoy absorbing themselves in the fiddling business of making herbal preparations. They desire to retreat into an agreeable past, such as they would like to be able to remember, of lavender-bags and camomile infusions, of still-rooms, and larders well-stocked with bottled plums and home-made lemon- curd. The fantasy is innocent, but a fantasy nevertheless, which provides a convenient escape from dreary old reality.
This would not matter one iota were it not for the fact that the rest of us are made to feel failures because we are not growing our own saffron crocuses or drying indi- vidual marigold petals for cake decoration. Perhaps I should console myself with the thought that, although my hair needs rinsing in rosemary water, my eyes bathing with eye-bright, and my feet soaking in a lime-flower infusion, I am still (more or less) in possession of my marbles.
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