My Herb Garden

My herb garden has no herbs growing in it. I have a small crescent of garden space right by the back door that gets full sun and is next to the hose faucet for easy watering. It's inside the fence, away from hungry wildlife, and two steps from the kitchen.

How perfect to pop out the kitchen door on a summer day and snip some herbs.

Some cilantro for posole soup or basil leaves for a caprese salad. How convenient to cut a little parsley for dinner or pick a few chile peppers in late summer. Adding dill sprigs to potato salad would be a snap. Maybe a tomato plant for fat slices for sandwiches.

It was all a fragrant, sunny dream. And none of it got planted. The gardener lost control.

First, I thought having flowers mixed in with the herbs would be nice. So I planted speedwell (veronica) with its purple spikes for structure, and some Mexican Hats (ratibida) for color, and a Red Cascade rose in the corner. A Kintzley's Ghost honeysuckle vine to climb the fence for background. A yellow flowered sulphur buckwheat plant looked so sunny blooming in spring and it needed a home, so it went in the middle.

A low growing 'Little Trudy' catmint seedling (nepeta) had to go somewhere and there was the open sunny space for it. Soon the real estate left for herbs became smaller and smaller pockets in between more and more perennials.

I did plant a chamomile -- technically chamomile is an herb, right? The leaves are used for tea. But I planted a decorative cultivar, (Anthemis 'Susanna Mitchell') just because the daisy-like flowers are cute.

The second reason I have no herbs in my kitchen herb garden: the nurseries had nothing this spring. With store closures and lockdowns, they couldn't sell anything and when they opened up they had so little inventory. Finally, at the very end of May, Lowe's stocked herbs but by then my herb garden intentions had wafted away.

This area between the kitchen door and the garage is our usual entry. It's what we see every day coming and going. It needs to look attractive, and herbs, while they can be interesting, fragrant and lush, can also get big and weedy looking and because they are mostly annuals there is nothing at all to look at in spring or winter. I want something more colorful, long lasting and decorative here.

So I have no culinary plants in the space by the kitchen door. None at all. I still call it the "the herb garden" though, because that's what I planned for. It apparently wanted to be a flower garden instead.