Hyssop Misstep

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Chopped in salads, the plant was not pleasant. Cooked with pork, which an old cookbook recommended, it was worse than no seasoning at all. At this point, I gave up trying to like the flavor of this plant and just left it alone. “Why does anyone grow hyssop?” I wondered.

The next spring, my nursery friend came to my farm for a spring festival. As we walked on the lawn and visited, she inquired about the patch of gorgeous blue flowers at the edge of my herb bed some distance away. “That’s the creeping hyssop you gave me last spring,” I said.

“I didn’t know there was a creeping hyssop,” she responded as I went off to greet other guests, leaving her to wander through the garden on her own.

An hour or so later, she found me and asked me to come to the garden with her. “Is this the plant you were talking about?” she asked, pointing to the low carpet of deep blue.

When I replied that it was, she said, “This is that old-fashioned veronica you got from me last year, not a hyssop.”

I told her I was glad to learn that it wasn’t a hyssop. I explained about all the ways I had eaten the plant during the previous season and of my disappointment in hyssop. “I don’t think veronica is edible,” she said with a laugh.

As often as I have taught wild-plant workshops, given garden tours, and conducted herb classes here and elsewhere, I’ve never failed to warn my students or tour members to be absolutely sure of the identity of any plant before eating it. Yet I had not heeded my own advice. I had taken home boxes of plants without labels, assuming that I knew what each one was. Because my friend and I had been discussing hyssop at length, I’d assumed that the plant in her hand at the time was a hyssop. I should have checked in a good herb reference book before eating the plant.

The veronica still creeps along the border of one herb bed, its bright Blue blossoms a reminder of my foolish ­mistake. Thankfully, veronica isn’t poisonous.

Jim Long is an herbalist and the owner of Long Creek Herb Farm in Oak Grove, Arkansas.

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