A Curious Garden of Herbs

Book excerpt: "A Curious Garden of Herbs is a richly-illustrated collection of herbal fact and lore that illuminates they "why" rather than the "how" of the historical kitchen garden. Rather than offering a how-to of gardening methods, Moss and Simmons trace herbs and their uses back to earlier times and places. In addition to sixty historical illustrations, A Curious Garden of Herbs is peppered with reflections and observations from manuscripts and herbals to detail the historical uses and fascinating stories surrounding plants of documented interest in the early American South and mid-Atlantic. Practicality and necessity were the guiding theses for gardening in eighteen- and early nineteenth-century rural and frontier settlements in the Southeast. There were plants for food, for seasoning, for medicine, for dye, for insect repellency, and for scent. While many of these plants were also decorative, utility was dominated the rationale of backcountry gardeners. The gardens detailed in these pages are generally of the "middling sort"-of townspeople and farmers, of "housewives," merchants, and artisans. These are not those experimental and exotic collections of Thomas Jefferson and other wealthy gentleman botanists. In addition to including the well-known parsley, lavender, cucumber, and asparagus in its wonderfully illustrated catalog of more than a hundred plants, this book also reveals new ways to enjoy violet, rose, and nasturtium and persuades readers to invite the lesser known wild purslane, mullein, and woodsorrel into their gardens and conversations"--