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It seems only yesterday that our
grandmothers were saying that to be kissed by a man without
a moustache was as insipid as roast lamb without mint sauce,
cream cheese without chives, or a salad without leeks. No
country in the world has failed to find among plants some
essence or flavor that adds piquancy to dishes or even disguises
the fact that, quite often, meat or fish, in the days before refrigeration, was often a bit high.
Long before our ancestors landed on that bleak New England
shore, the Indians were gathering various aromatic herbs to
spice their foods. The drab monotony of hominy they spiked
with the native wild ginger, which was also used to kill the
flavor of over-tired meat and fish.
The modern urge to grow herbs harks back to the days of
the Greeks and Romans who well knew the virtues of rosemary
and thyme. Much later, girls of Italy, where herbs are an
essential in cookery, succumbed to the traditional lore that
surrounds so many of our aromatic herbs. Basil, like the balm,
was used not only for flavoring, but also for its heavy fragrance.
Like so many perfumes, it became a symbol of love. Hence
the placing of a vase of basil on the Italian girl's window-sill
when she expected or hoped for her lover-immortalized in
The Pot of Basil.
Today there are less romantic, and much more practical,
reasons for growing herbs. The chemists have not yet been able
to imitate the extroardinary galaxy of flavors and essences that
Nature has scattered among some plants. We use them in
cookery, as we do the tropical spices, because they supply
piquancy to food, and sometimes whet the appetite of people
whose taste has become jaded by the synthetic commonplaces
of the market.
Botanists, however, are a little disturbed by the word "herb"
as used by the gardner. To the latter herb is generally re-
stricted to fragrant, culinary, medicinal, or other plants of
special interest. But to the botanist (and he is right about this)
an herb is any plant without a woody stem that dies down to
the ground over the winter. To him this is the great distinction
between herbs and all the woody plants like shrubs and trees
which, instead of hiding their buds below ground during cold
weather, leave them exposed on bare twigs.
Hereafter, in this book, the term herb will be used in the
garden sense-not forgetting, however, that it is a restricted
and somewhat vague one. Some heretics have even scoffed
at herb gatherers as equally vague but benevolent old gentle
men with glasses, an umbrella, and the unquenchable optimism
of the visionary who thinks all plants are good for something if
we only knew what.
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