From The Herb Garden: Sunny Gardens
(Page 2 of 5)
June/July 1993
By Frances Bardswell
As to aspect, it does not matter what that is exactly so long as there is enough sunshine. Southeast or southwest are both excellent aspects. The site must be absolutely clear of trees, but the shelter of a wall, or hedge, or bank is good.
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Our own herb garden looks mainly to the southwest. The most southerly and hottest border is filled with marjoram and several sorts of thyme that creep and spread among the stones along the edges. A bank with a hedge on the top of it protects the enclosure all the way round, and protection is needed, for behind it comes a field and then the wild North Sea. Certainly, herbs like plenty of air, and air in movement; they drink it in as if with joy, and breathe it out again in fragrance.
Very often, a piece of kitchen garden is portioned off to make the herb garden. If possible, this plot should come between the flower and kitchen gardens, where it will be a sort of debatable land between the purely useful and the purely ornamental. The sunniness of it would suggest a sundial. At the foot of the sundial, thyme of different sorts might be planted. It is an excellent plan, where there is room for it, to arrange one side or end of the garden with ups and downs, like a rock garden, so that the rock-loving herbs can root and spread about as they do in nature. A good depth of earth must be given them, quite 3 feet of it, into which the roots can dive.
The size and shape of the garden are points which no one but the owner can decide. It may be said, however, that no herb garden is too small to be interesting and none too large to be easily filled. A garden of herbs—there is savoriness in the very name. And yet, often the most unsatisfactory things in gardens, especially small ones, are the herbs. Scattered here and there all over the place, they have mostly a ragged, neglected look, and are very often not to be found when wanted; and if they are, time and patience are probably exhausted in hunting them up when wanted in a hurry for flavoring. Quite a pleasing feature might be made in even a small garden of the herbs were they only brought together and arranged in order.
The best position for herbs is in beds, and these may be made 2 or 4 feet wide, with foot alleys between them, and the length at the least one-third more than the width. This disposition in beds is so much more convenient and better in appearance than rows at regular intervals, Enclosed and special gardens are now a fashion of the day.
“The garden,” says the writer we have quoted at the head of this chapter, “should be something without and beyond nature, a page from an old romance, a scene in fairyland, a gateway through which imagination, lifted above the sombre realities of life, may pass into a world of dreams.” More than any other kind of garden does the herb garden lead us into a region of romance, of mystery and sweet remembrance, yet withal there is a common-sense side to it whose usefulness is not to be denied.
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