Diana Henry’s Three Best Recipes Using Fresh Herbs Wine News

I tried. There was an attempt 25 years ago, but I only had enough sorrel to put in a salad, and a little salad on top of that. Most cilantro leaves were brown and stringy before I could even use them, and don’t even ask me about the chervil, the main reason I started this whole futile business. I had failed to grow an herb garden.

Then fifteen years ago, when I moved house, I started gardening again. I love scented geraniums and floral ice creams; in fact, I love that you can take herbs and leaves and extract their flavors by adding them to sugar syrups or hot cream or vinegar. How many more flavor ribbons does this make available in your kitchen?

I have trouble falling asleep some nights wondering what I can do with all of this. So I bought some lovely scented geraniums with lots of notes on how to care for them and for a while I did. I used these leaves for a summer bread and butter pudding with raspberries, rose geranium flavoring cream and milk.

But at the end of the summer, I forgot all about them, I forgot to watch them, I forgot to move them inside. One day I looked out the kitchen window and they were dead. Except maybe they weren’t – they could have just been sleeping. Wintering. Or fall, or whatever they do. I knew so little about gardening that I couldn’t even tell if my plants were dead or alive.

Now – powered by flavor, the thing that keeps me awake at night – I have another herb garden stab. There is no problem with the main herbs. You can just buy parsley and mint. If you live near a Turkish or Middle Eastern store, you can buy it by the load.

But the most common herbs are not enough. I want some angelica, which I discovered in Iceland (they make a jelly of it to eat with smoked lamb, in fact a lot of sheep in Iceland graze on wild angelica). I want lovage and lemon verbena and I still want aniseed chervil.

And then there are all the unknown herbs I encountered in Vietnam. I can go on to tell you how wonderful herbs are; I could make you hungry. But I want to be practical. About 25 jars of herbs arrived two weeks ago. I had made a shortlist of twelve, thinking that if I kept my gardening ambitions small, I might succeed. Then I started shopping online, and common sense left me. The names of the herbs sounded soothing and incantatory when I said them to myself – aniseed hyssop, sweet cicely, summer savory – the herbal equivalent of expedition forecast.

I checked out my book on herbs by food writer and gardener, Mark Diacono. There’s a thin section up front on growing up so I read it – using a red pen to mark all the major points – then contacted Mark to make sure I was of the other side.

First, he assured me that perennials were the thing to go for. They never stop growing, unlike annuals which must be planted every year. As a general rule, although herbs vary, water every other day and water around the base of the plant, not the top. In the spring and summer, give the plants a liquid fertilizer every few weeks. Don’t pick enough to strip an entire plant of its leaves, but pick enough to promote growth.

My pots are outside on the terrace. I visit them every morning before I open my laptop, picking up a weird leaf and rubbing it between my fingers, though you can smell the different notes just by walking near the jars. The herbarium, with its alphabet of plants, is open on the kitchen table. I feel like it will work this time. This time I really don’t care.

Linguine with Pesto Pazzo

This pesto is not Italian, in the sense that it came out of my head, not from an Italian. Pazzo is Italian for “crazy” as it’s quite unorthodox. Sometimes I even add a few anchovies, others a little chopped fresh chilli.

I find basil a bit cloying on its own – it’s so fragrant – that’s why I do it with other herbs too. It’s still quite rich but not overwhelming.