Chives have a milder flavour than onion and a few leaves can be snipped over potatoes or potato salad or added to omelettes to enhance the flavour. Buy a small plant and grow it in a sunny box and it will soon increase in size. In winter it will die back and may perish altogether; if you divide the plant up at the end of summer and pot the small bits individually you will increase your chances of having a survivor. Bring one pot into the kitchen at the beginning of spring to force it into growth for an early supply of leaves.
Sage you will need only infrequently unless you are mad about sage and onion stuffing. It makes an attractive plant, however, if you have the space. There is a purple-leaved variety that is colourful and well flavoured and you may also see a yellow and green one—Salvia officinalis ‘Icterina’—or the variegated white, green and pink form known as ‘Tricolor’, but these are perhaps best grown for decoration rather than flavouring. Sage likes plenty of sun and should be picked over regularly to keep it bushy; replace it when it becomes too gnarled and woody, again from cuttings tucked in beside their mother in the spring.
Basil is one herb I cannot be without and as it is rarely available fresh in the shops it is well worth finding space for in the window box. If you want enough for pesto sauce you will have to devote an entire box or other container to it. Otherwise a couple of plants should supply leaves for snipping over tomato salads. Basil is an annual that grows easily from fairly large seeds that can be spaced out neatly in a small pot. Surplus plants can be grown indoors to provide thoughtful gifts for a hostess or even extra supplies for yourself. Keep the plants bushy by removing the tips and don’t on any account let basil flower—pick off buds as soon as you see them—or the plant will pack up and die, its life’s work fulfilled.
Mint is an essential herb if you like it with new potatoes or as mint sauce with Iamb. Yet I doubt the wisdom of planting it in a window box as it will take it over in no time. Grow it in a pot on its own, as large and deep as you have room for, and you will have the best of both worlds, a good supply of mint and no harm done to your other herbs. For culinary use buy the large woolly-leaved Mentha rotundifolia ‘Bowles Variety’. Alternatively, leave a bunch of well-flavoured sprigs in water, changing this before it turns sour, and before long you will see them throwing out tiny white roots. Plant a few in good compost and you will soon have plants for picking. Mint suffers from rust in the garden, especially if it is in an old neglected colony. If you see the characteristic orange spores on your plants pull them up and get rid of them and the compost and start again with new clean plants.
In garden centres you will see an increasing number of different types of mint: eau de colognewith purplish leaves, pineapple with white edges, ginger, green striped with yellow, and other exotica. People fall on each new variety with cries of delight and home it goes to send its creeping runners throughout the garden, strangling every plant it meets. These strangely scented mints have little culinary worth but can be grown in individual containers for their novelty value and for their scent. Plant them in the open garden at your peril.
Rosemary can reach up to 6 feet in a warm spot in the garden but as it is not a fast-growing plant can easily be accommodated in the window box. One small plant should be enough to provide occasional snippings for roast Iamb; it should be used judiciously as too much rosemary makes things bitter. It likes the sun and can be cut down by frost in winter, although it is often the older bushes which succumb while the young ones survive. Buy a small plant, pick off the tips rather than removing branches and bring it indoors in very bad weather. A fully grown bush of rosemary such as R. officinalis ‘Miss Jessup’s Upright’ in an 8 or 10 inch pot beside the kitchen door makes attractive and useful decoration, pleasantly aromatic to brush past or rub between the fingers as you go by. The blue flowers appear in spring and then intermittently through the summer.
After the first flush of flowers trim the plant into a neat shape, reserving the trimmings for kitchen use.
These are the herbs I find useful and that I think warrant a place in the limited confines of a window box or other container. In any well-stocked nursery or garden centre you will be sure to find many others, often enthusiastically recommended for serving with broad beans, fish, rhubarb, or whatever. Whether you need these depends, I suppose, on your intake of broad beans, rhubarb, etc. If you are inordinately fond of broad beans you could grow summer savory, an annual that should be giving you shoots for cutting in June along with the first of the beans.
Herbs are something of a cult at the moment and it is all too easy to get carried away and end up giving tender loving care to a coarse unlovely weed. The same commodity, tic, expended on good culinary herbs to go with your favourite dishes is another thing entirely.
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