When The Going Gets Tough

Dry, hostile and barren don’t sound like ideal conditions for growing herbs, but lavender and rosemary love to be treated mean

I seem to learn most about gardening through a combination of accident and negligence. Two years ago almost to the day, I sowed a packet each of rosemary and lavender seeds. The rosemary was a white-flowering variety, Rosmarinus officinalis var albiflorum, and the lavender was your bog-standard ‚Munstead‘, chosen through laziness and lack of inspiration and because it is compact and we had a place for it along the base of a sunny hedge along the back of the newly extended herb garden. I reckoned that putting it under the hedge was a cunning plan, as the lavender would thrive precisely because the hedge was taking most of the available moisture and nutrients. The rosemary was to flash white-flowered and silver-leafed through the primarily blue flowers of the herb garden.

They both germinated well and I carefully pricked out the tiny inch-high seedlings into 3in pots, slotting into the plant-caring mode that I can do with my eyes shut, yet which I try and do well each time. All grew. All prospered. Sarah duly planted the lavender out in their allotted place in the September. But the lavender has never really taken to the project. It has clung on suspiciously to life, refusing to grow with anything like enthusiasm, canting away from the hedge. It doesn’t like it there. I couldn’t quite work this out, as it faces south, is dry(https://lavenderblueflowers.com/) and ought to work.

The rosemary did not even get the chance to perform. Things being as they inevitably are, I never got round to planting them at all and the more I didn’t do it, the more guilty I felt and the more of a hurdle it became. So I did what I always do in that kind of situation and ignored all 22 pots of them. Winter, spring and summer rolled by, and still by last winter they were untouched. Despite this, the rosemary got quietly bigger. I never watered or attended to it. The frames were opened and closed around it, and it shared the same space for a week or two with passing beans, sweet peas, tobacco plants and what have you, but otherwise it acquired a curious rosemary status quo. However, I could not help but notice how healthy and vigorous the plants looked – despite their neglect, their upper leaves have that sticky sheen peculiar to rosemary and the undersides of the pine-like leaves radiate a silvery health.

A Few Tender Lavenders

You can use the flowers or the leaves, the only caveat being to ensure that you have a pesticide-free plant – something most florists cannot guarantee. A few tender lavenders, like Lavender canariensis , L candicans , L pinnata , L dentata and L viridis can taste of eucalyptus, so if you are uncertain, simply crush and sniff a leaf before buying.

Given that the lavender flowering season is short, cooks are left with two choices. Either, continue by using the leaves – in which case, treat them like rosemary – or preserve the flowers. The latter can be macerated in vinegar, infused into apple or rhubarb jelly or simmered in a syrup.

Gordon Ramsay – clearly a lavender man – argues in his book A Chef for All Seasons (£25, Quadrille) that dried lavender has a more intense flavour than fresh – but beware if it is too old – like any dried herb, it can impart a slightly musty flavour to a dish. He recommends using the dried flowers rubbed from their stems in shortbread, scattered on bread dough, or infused into chocolate ganache. I wonder if cake and a side-order of lavender ice cream would be too much of a good thing?