Mediterranean Herbs
I issued one last insane command: never water these plants again.
This morning, students shielded themselves under three-ring binders and jackets while they darted into school under a wild late-winter rain. Driven north by warm southern wind, the rain is dripping from the eaves, running off the fence posts, and spilling from the copper roof of the newly installed wrenhouse in the vegetable garden. Pausing for a moment at the Rhetoric School door, I watched the gray downpour soaking the brown sticks and russet grass of the whole surrounding landscape: a strangely desolate kind of beauty.
It’s been a warm February. If the general predictions are correct, the ground will thaw slightly earlier than normal this year so that, barring a catastrophic early-spring freeze like the one that killed all of New England’s peach crop last year and murdered the two ornamental cherries out in front of the school, we should be able to plant hardy salads and herbs on an aggressive schedule. This idea is a balm to my soul, since one or two February days that rocket up into the fifties are enough to make me profoundly restless to get started in the garden.
It hardly seems like the time to be thinking about Mediterranean Herbs, whose flavors evoke the opposite of today’s brooding northern weather: rocky shores beyond which blue light glints on water, the smell of lemons and the feel of the late-evening sun on your shoulders. But many of you have told me that you plan on planting some herbs this year and there is no better place to start than with stalwarts like thyme, sage, rosemary, and lavender. Though they don’t encompass all of the flavors we might want from our kitchen gardens, planting these varieties makes a great beginning, especially because they are all perennial and therefore, given proper planning and management, they will come back every season yielding years of deliciousness.
I am an amateur gardener, not a trained horticulturalist. I can offer enthusiasm and even advice based on my experience, but nothing like an expert take on anything in the complex world of vegetables and landscapes. It’s strong evidence of this amateur status that I wasn’t able to grow thyme successfully in my garden for years. Each spring I’d plant a new batch, enjoy a brief bounty, then watch it yellow and fade by the end of August. Never a flower in sight. What could be the issue? Frustrated, I fertilized and watered it more frequently, only to watch its decline tip into a free fall. Like a madman, I repeated these follies year after year without ever asking the right questions.
As I’ve mentioned before, the great adage of gardening, coined in the 60s by Beth Chatto, is “Right plant, right place.” Like all great maxims, this one captures a truth so simple it often eludes us. We like plants. We want them to thrive. But we tend to forget that not all soil is created equal, that not all places receive the same kind of light and that, just as it goes for children, what helps one flourish might wither another. You have to pay attention to the needs of the creature you have in hand.
In the case of these herbs, I was forgetting to ask myself where they came from. The answer is the impoverished, sun-baked soul of Medeterannian Europe. Having been lucky enough to travel there, I should have remembered what I’d seen, namely heaps of wild thyme growing in the heat-blasted rubble of Roman ruins, purple sage flowers nodding from where they hung from cliffs, and lavender springing up from cracks at the base of whitewashed stone walls. If I’d reflected on these memories, I would have realized that these plants evolved to thrive in conditions very different from those that benefit tomatoes, potatoes, or parsley.
Accordingly, when we laid out the Classical Roots Veggie Garden and selected a location for the Medeterannian herbs, I did something that deeply confused my students. After all the trouble we’d taken to double-dig our in-groud beds, all the hours we spent hauling well-rotted horse manure to campus and mixing it in, all the pains we’d endured to mulch them with homemade organic compost, I fished two bags out of the school basement, one of pea gravel and the other of sand, and ordered my students to mix every stone and gain into the herb beds. “Is this enough?” they kept asking, with pained expressions. “No,” I insisted. “All of it.” And like soldiers under the orders of a mad general, they obeyed. After it was done, a process that effectively reduced the nutrition of the soil by eighty percent and meant that water would drain out of it like a sieve, we planted the sage, the thyme, the rosemary, and the lavender and watered them in. I issued one last command: never water these again.
By the end of the summer, the plants had doubled in size and burst into aromatic flower. Honeybees bustled around them constantly and the leaves were spicy and rich to the taste. They have thrived ever since, with no other maintenance than that I cut them all back nearly to the ground in early March each year, prompting a green and leafy revival. The lesson here is simple: you need to know the origin of your plants. Only then can you understand their needs. Any of these herbs can be bought from a big-box hardware store or nursery for a song—though I’d recommend that you support a smaller organic grower since they will have more exotic varieties on hand and will have treated them better. But it’s not just the quality of the Medeterannian plant you buy that will make it thrive: it’s the poverty of the soil where you plant it.
If you plant such herbs this spring, choose the sunniest spot you can for the plot or the pot, and mix in thirty percent or more of stone, sand, or vermiculite to ensure brutally sharp drainage. Avoid play sand since it retains water. If you’re planting in pots, water them once a week or so when it’s been very sunny and hot. Otherwise, try to leave them alone. Fertilize potted Medeterannian herbs maybe once a year, and in-ground specimens not at all. These herbs might be used in the most refined cuisine in the Western world but, like all great foods, their deliciousness originated in desolation and want. They want bad soil and they want it badly. Give it to them, and you’ll get to enjoy their paradoxical goodness for years to come.
