Also a tomato plant
I will admit to being lazy about gardening, which in my case means herbs. I try to winter a few over, but even lavender and rosemary generally don’t make it through the cold on my mountaintop. And then, what with one thing and another, I’m never out with my hands in the dirt early enough to grow from seeds.
You know those folks you see out in the garden shops in May, (and June,) furtively buying pot herb plants? And overgrown miserable pot-bound tomatoes. That’s me.
So I’m transplanting my little herbs into larger pots in an apologetic way. I’m saying, “Look. I know your toes are cramped. I’ve been busy. Okay? Let’s just start over again, shall we?”
Their names are mint, sage, flat parsley, rosemary, lavender, oregano.
I have a gift pot of herbs, too. just yesterday.
Hello, lavender, lemon verbena, peppermint
I am very happy to see you.
I keep my herbs in pots on the back porch because the ground I live upon is not suited to growing anything but big trees and short grass. Mostly, it grows big ole rocks, being a very old mountain. I satisfy any mad urge I have to grow plants within my tasteful selection of pots.
Garden containers have an ancient and honorable history.
The trifecta
Lookit here, left and right. Pots in the garden. They can be terracotta, plain brown but of interesting shape, like the ones on the left. Bruegel painted those. Click on the pic to get a better look.
Pots can be colorful and lovely in their own right. See the marjoram pot below which is there to delight the eye as much as to hold marjoram.(You can always click on all the pictures in my posts to get a closer look. You don't have to squint.)
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century paintings are full of pottery holding splendid flowers with the odd pretty girl thrown in for those who are not interested in flowers. This one to the right also has one heck of a hat and what is almost certainly a fan. I stand in awe.
as one does
Plants, sometimes sizeable plants, can be put in pots so they can migrate inside and outside with the seasons.
The folks in Regency and Georgian times did this large plant migration with orange trees, which they found wonderfully ornamental and sweet smelling and exotic. Orange trees weren’t kept in pots, but in huge white boxes. I think of this as equivalent to my own garden containers but I fool myself a lot of the time.
Right back through paintings and miniatures of the Middle Ages, we see herbs — very much like the ones I am currently apologizing to — in containers and elevated beds. I have pondered on why this should be so.
I think it might be that many herbs are smallish and they’re picked little by little, just the most delicate leaflets at the end, rather than dug up all at once in a thorough manner like turnips and cabbages.
So folks raise herbs up a little to allow selective plucking.
What herbs are you plucking or planting these days? Are you like me? Do you go out and grab a dozen random leaves to add to a salad?