Twenty years ago I looked at a horizon of slums: shanties of cardboard and corrugated iron and plaited plastic bags and gardens in tin cans, red geraniums, bright and wonderful, and herbs.
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With the addition of herbs a cupful of rice can have a hundred flavours. With a scatter, oregano (torn not chopped) with a base of bread dough with cheese and tomato becomes pizza. Adding basil to the puréed tomatoes I froze last summer made the concoction one of the most delicious I have ever cooked with measured by the number of guests who reached for a sixth helping.
Herbs are the refuge of poverty, and the luxury of wealth.
And then there is their scent. Subconsciously, I've planted herbs where I have to brush past them as I walk around the garden. To get to the clothes line you need to climb the steps past the lemon verbena, about 35 years old now, one of the oldest plants in our garden. Its trunk is knobbly, the scent glorious.
Lemon verbena is supposed to be a small shrub and it is, for the first decade or two, and then it doubles in size again. Ours is now about 2.5 metres high and wide, and the scent beats any perfume in a bottle when your brush against it. It has strongly lemon-scented, pointed leaves, dark green on the top and paler below and long spikes of small white flowers, insignificant and even a bit messy looking.
Lemon verbena needs well-drained soil and full sun, though it tolerates semi-shade in hot areas. In cool areas it is deciduous while in hotter areas it bears leaves all year and is much taller. In very cold areas it needs to be protected from heavy frost for the first year but after that is sturdier and will survive anything from a blanket of snow to a four-year drought.
If you are trying to tempt someone to try herbal tea, lemon verbena is a good one to start with, along with peppermint tea. (Not culinary mint but the richly scented peppermint that is best for teas rather than accompanying roast lamb or chops.)
Lemon verbena is said to be mildly relaxing though I've never noticed any effect. The leaves can also be added to equal parts of ordinary tea leaves for a lemon-scented tea – delicious if you like a scented tea like Earl Grey; a waste of good tea leaves if you are strictly an Irish Breakfast type. A jug of cold lemon verbena tea is an excellent resource for the fridge en route to your desk in a long, ice-filled jar.
Lemon verbena leaves can be picked at any time but are most fragrant in the early morning and just before flowering. They can also be dried and kept through winter in a sealed jar. Dry them as quickly as possible in a well ventilated, dark place so they don't lose their fragrance and seal them in a jar as soon as they are dry.
Fruit salad and pineapple sage are on the track up to the pumpkin vines and lemon trees. Both sages are frost sensitive and died back in winter for the first five years or so, then decided to survive and bloom instead. Pineapple sage is a tall, wide sage bush with fragrant, pineapple-scented leaves. It flowers with masses of brilliant red flowers through most of summer and into winter. Birds and insects love it (the birds also help clear the aphids and mites off our roses near the sage bushes). Grow pineapple sage near climbing roses, under fruit trees and between fruit bushes, to repel pests and attract predators. Use it to flavour cold drinks, fruit salads or use young tender leaves in sandwiches and wraps. Don't cook with it though – it turns bitter.
Fruit salad sage has very large, bright pink flowers and paler green large leaves. It's equally frost sensitive and equally comfortable in cold weather if you can keep it alive long enough to get used to frosty feet. Very tender young leaves can be added to salad sandwiches but make sure they are young, or they will add far more roughage to your diet than you intended and also dental floss.
We also used to have allardii lavender growing down the driveway, but it grew too woody-stemmed after about twenty years and I haven't got around to replacing it. If I'd pruned the poor things more consistently they might still be alive. A light scatter of lime each spring might have helped too. Allardii is the most drought and heat hardy of lavenders, fast growing, and the leaves as well as flowers are fragrant. But even allardii lavender has needs.
Snap off some wood whenever it's not frosty or during a heat wave (at this time of year we just need to trust that mild weather will return), take off all but half a dozen leaves; plant it about 30 cm deep in sandy moist soil; keep moist in a semi-shaded spot and don't plant out for a year as it will sprout and grow new leaves long before it has viable roots.
And every one of the above can be grown from a cutting if you know someone with a bush - or even knock on the door of someone who has them growing, smile and ask politely. Most gardeners are friendly types who adore to share, especially when it comes to 25 kilograms of zucchini.
In other words, these plants are free. As long as you have some old tin cans to plant them in, before you plant them out.
This week I am:
- looking out the window at the 35°C garden and thinking, 'Are you kidding? I am not even picking the tomatoes in this weather';
- making a half-hearted resolution to sneak out before 8am tomorrow to pick tomatoes, cucumbers, apples, plumcots, peaches, cucumbers and any lettuce that are determined enough to survive and are still edible;
- watering the almond tree we used as a Christmas tree till it is cool enough to plant it out with reasonable chance of survival when I forget to water it for a few days;
- envying the wombats who can sleep deep down their cool holes till 2am;
- knowing it is truly hot when the wallaby has given up eating the geraniums and dahlia flowers, and just lopes out come midnight, munches the most lush grass around the fruit trees then goes back to sleep behind the rugosa roses; and
- waiting for rain. And cool days. And even more rain please.
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