About

Why we started Our Herb Garden

A few years ago, once the days began to turn warmer, our family began considering what wonderful things we could grow in our garden. I suspect that it would be safe to classify ourselves as advanced hobbiests in our gardening knowledge. That year we decided to get more adventurous, both in the garden and in the kitchen, and add a selection of herbs to our growing list of garden essentials.

We started with lettuce. Yes, I know that’s not an herb. But, it is also a crop that likes a little chill in the air. What better way to use herb-infused oils than as a salad dressing?

We reviewed a number of vintage and modern opinions and ideas on herb growing and in the process ended up creating an extensive notebook of information.

We thought others might be interested in what we found. Our garden will not be playing host to the entire list but we included our research along with a few extra herbs that we thought others might be looking for.

We hope you find our little site useful and share it with your friends and family.

Our Herb Garden Reference Materials

When we first started putting together Our Herb Garden, we thought about putting full citations into each of the articles much like Wikipedia does. We opted not to do that for a myriad of reasons but thought folks should also see how much research and effort goes into a site like this one.

Below is a list of the works we have utilized.

George Borrow.

The Bible in Spain, 1843.
 

G.W. Septimus Piesse.

The Art of Perfumery, and Method of Obtaining the Odors of Plants, 1857, Linday and Blakiston.
 

Fearing Burr, Jr.

The Field and Garden Vegetables of America, 1863, Crosby and Nichols.
 

William Thomas Fernie.

Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure, 1897 edition, Boericke & Tafel.
 

T.F. Thiselton-Dyer.

The Folk-Lore of Plants, 1889.
 

Neltje Blanchan.

Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors, 1900.
 

M. G. Kains.

Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation, Harvesting, Curing and Uses, 1912, Orange Judd Company.
 

Alice M. Coats.

Flowers and Their Histories, 1968 edition (2nd), McGraw-Hill.
 

Roger Phillips and Nicky Foy.

The Random House Book of Herbs – How to grow or gather herbal plants and use them for cooking, health and beauty, 1990.
 

Sarah Garland.

The Complete Book of Herbs & Spices – An illustrated guide to growing and using culinary, aromatic, cosmetic and medicinal plants, 1993 edition published by The Reader’s Digest.
 

Sally Roth.

The Successful Herb Gardener – Growing and Using Herbs – Quickly and Easily, 2001, Country Living Gardener.
 

USDA Website.

Illustrations for several of the herbs and their seeds appearing on Our Herb Garden are from the United States Department of Agriculture website. All of these images are used in accordance with the copyright restrictions as stated on their website and under US Copyright law as it relates to government owned images and illustrations.
 

sxc.hu.

The Stock Exchange is a stock photo exchange website where photographers share their work and allow others to use them without attribution or royalties. Many of the beautiful photos appearing on Our Herb Garden were found on that site and our family would like to thank all of the generous folks who make their images available there without restrictions.
 

Wikipedia.org.

A number of our written materials included references to people and places but failed to include dates and other information about those references. Wikipedia proved invaluable in ensuring that when blending a variety of sources for our Herbal Histories we maintained a correct chronological order or events and were able to add further details about the people and places involved.
 

Major Health Organizations

We consulted the Mayo Clinic, World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health websites in our discussion of Angelica Sinensis.