Natural Herbal Beauty

Bacon’s classic essay Of Gardens captures a leisured appreciation that is in contrast with our streamlined days. Perhaps it was partly that like some genius of the lamp he had only to command, and his cool alleyways and trimmed hedges would be planted and tended for him. One likes to feel akin to him when he suggests the planting of water-mint, thyme and burnet in paths.

In Elizabethan and Stuart days, knot-gardens, laid out with a clipped pattern, were favourite garden features. Savory, santolina, lavender and marjoram were amongst the plants used; and living sundials were also fashionable during the period. (more…)

You will have had the experience of instinctively taking deep breaths when you have passed a cistus bush, giving off a warm, incense fragrance, or a sweetbriar on a sunny day after rain. With the deep breathing and the contact with reality outside yourself will come a relaxing of tension and feeling of well-being. Recently, I found that I had the same experience with the impact of surprised pleasure at the season’s first sight of the cool, celestial blue of Plumbago capensis. It comes, again, on entering a greenhouse, aromatic with pelargoniums, giving forth a blend of citron, pines, rose, peppermint and balsamic incense on a February day, holding all the promise of spring. Again one breathes deeply and restfully, and well-being is renewed. (more…)

This poetry brings the wise king close to us in sensitivity and appreciation, for it is an experience now to go into a vinery in flower, when the first trusses of grapes are forming, for the unique and exquisite fragrance.

Ahab, that hard and ruthless king, had a single-minded wish to own Naboth’s vineyard, to turn it into a herb garden, and the resulting conflict of interests led first to cynical crime and then to tragedy foretold to Ahab, ironically, in his projected place of peace, the herb garden, where the prophet found him. (more…)

The story of herbs is as old as history. In the early pages of Genesis we read ‘Even as the green herb have I given you all things’, a statement once again placed early in civilization by the discoveries of ancient writing at Ur of the Chaldees. In the Psalms, considerably later, there is the pleasant comment ‘God who maketh the grass to grow upon the mountains, and herb for the use of man’.

These quotations imply that in earlier times all green plants were considered herbs, and it is as the practical use declines that the number of plants regarded as herbs is reduced also. (more…)