Gordon Thorburn - The Classic Herb Garden

Many thanks to Sue Thorburn for her illustrations and to Sarah Cuttle for her help with plant identification. And thanks for the garlic, Fiona Cutting.

Photography by the author.
Special photography by Sarah Cuttle.

Authors note: this book is aimed at those who would grow herbs and who are interested in herbs in a general way. It is not a medicinal herbal. Any medicinal uses of herbs should be under supervision or with expert advice and proper research.

We know what the ancient, literate civilisations did with herbs. They very kindly wrote it all down for us. But people had been aware of the properties of certain plants long, long before writing was invented. We can only speculate about the first, specific uses of herbs by the earliest humans, but we can say that herbs, as food, medicine and special helpmeet, were so closely intertwined with human evolution and development that we could never have got where we are without them.

Even the word has progressed in a fairly straight line through all that time, always with a b. The earliest written evidence is from around 1500 BC. In Sanskrit, the parent language of Greek and Latin (and many, many others), the root of our word herb is bhar- , to nourish, which morphed into the Greek phorb and the old Latin forbear , meaning grass. By the time of classical Latin, the word had become herba , with a broader meaning including green vegetation, springing growth of leaf, green crop, and herb as we think of it now.

After the Latin word came the old French erbe and so into English, still with a more embracing meaning than now. In medieval times, an ordinary garden might have fifty different plants cultivated in it called herbs, pronounced erbs until the nineteenth century, which explains why the Americans say it that way. All of the fifty, or more, were considered either essential or very important to nourishment and wellbeing, rather than merely decorative or flavoursome.

Today we tend to define herb more narrowly, as a plant that has a use but is not one of our main food plants. We would say marjoram and St Johns wort were herbs, but not cabbage. Would we call ground elder, nettle and chickweed herbs? We should, and later in the book we shall, but in our modern era we dont actually need to grow, for ourselves, any of these useful-but-not-mainstream plants. Why is that? What has happened to our relationship with something so intertwined with our own process of civilisation and so vital to it?

Now we are used to doctors who have medicines that work. If we feel unwell, we go to our general practitioner in expectation of the correct, functional, safe and preferably instant remedy. If we cut a finger we go to the cupboard for the Dettol and the Elastoplast. If we have backache from hard work, we get our beloved to rub on some Ibuleve. If we have toothache we call the dentist, make an appointment and meanwhile take a painkiller, such as paracetamol or Teachers Highland Cream. If we pick up athletes foot from the squash club showers, we go to the chemists and buy the latest super-powerful fungicidal powder.

Assuming we are in reasonably good shape, we might decide to cook something for supper. In the kitchen, if we then find something smells a bit off, well throw it away. Some of us throw perfectly good food away on the day it passes its best before date. We might even throw away a little jar of dried marjoram, and go and buy another. If theres a fly buzzing about, or a stale smell in the dining room, we get out the spray can.

None of these are matters of life and death. These, and a hundred other minor inconveniences, occur to everyone all the time and are put right by easily available, inexpensive means. Now, imagine a world where you had no recourse to any means, inexpensive or otherwise, beyond what you and your family could provide for yourselves.

Like Lily the Pinks medicinal compound, Dr Brownes patent medicine, which he actually neglected to patent, seems to have been most efficacious in every case. Of course, in those days you didnt have to list the ingredients on the label, otherwise Doctor Browne and all the other original inventors of the first and only true chlorodyne, such as Teasdale or Freeman would have had to admit to opium, chloroform and cannabis, in solution in alcohol. No wonder folk thought it did them good. Eventually, publicity and legal action concerning widespread addiction and a number of fatal poisonings caused a modification of the formula.

Prodigality in the food department would never be tolerated, or even considered, in ordinary homes. If the meat was of doubtful freshness, a handful or two of the correct herbs in the pot would resolve the matter satisfactorily. Insects and smells were repelled and disguised by strewing fragrant plants about the place. You would have to make your own Ibuleve out of herbs and, probably, pig lard, and your own Elastoplast and your own Dettol. You would have to make your own diagnosis of your illness and treat it accordingly. Would you know how?

Well, if you lived in such a world and you didnt know how, you probably wouldnt last long, and such worlds are not far away historically. This writer was born in 1946, at the beginning of the age of antibiotics. Father had been brought up to believe in the powers of patent medicines: Carters Little Liver Pills, Beechams Powders, Beechams Pills, Doctor J Collis Brownes Chlorodyne, Scotts Emulsion, Andrews Liver Salts, Fynnon Salt remember Wilfred Pickles on the television, selling Fynnon Salt in that lugubrious, rumbling West Riding voice? Do you suffer from rheumatism, fibrositis or lumbago? Not much fun, is it.

The writers maternal grandmother was born in 1888, a time when Jesse Boot, son of a poor Nottinghamshire farmworker who was also the village herbalist, was making his Lobelia Pills and starting on the road to a thousand branches of Boots the Chemist, which, almost a century and a half later, are once more selling herbal remedies.

Before Jesse Boot and his pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap approach to medicines, doctors and pharmacists served only the wealthy, not that doctors knew very much anyway, and the pharmacists remedies were mostly based in the old herbal practices and/or quackery con tricks. So, although the poor had to shift for themselves with herbs and folklore, the rich were basically getting the same thing but paying lots of dosh for it.

Going back to medieval times, if a poor person could not help herself, she went to the hospital that was run by monks or nuns who were more knowledgeable than the surrounding peasants but still had nothing beyond their herb gardens for their drug supplies.

So, what did they grow, those herb gardeners of yore, and why? Those monks and nuns mostly relied on whoever had studied and practised before and had written the knowledge down. Books were very rare, all hand-written of course, and so whatever was in them tended to be granted respect. The accepted instructive authorities were the ancient Greeks and Romans, plus a very few, slightly more recent experts such as Charlemagne, AD 747 814, King of the Franks and creator of a vast Christian empire in Western Europe.