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For relief from the brown grass in the fields, it is always nice to enjoy beautiful plants, especially ones that can care for themselves.
Most Herb plants are drought tolerant, with a low need for water once they are established. They like a well-drained location, and prefer the sun. Herbs provide interesting texture, often year-long as many are perennial; fragrant scents in the breeze; and dainty to full blast blooms. Even if you never use the culinary herbs in your kitchen, their wide variety of leaf and size make them a fascinating, low care addition to your gardens and foundation plantings.
Here on the farm, one of my favorites is Salad Burnet (Sabguisorba minor). This low-growing culinary and medicinal herb forms an oval to round area 12-24” wide of fern like leaflets that stay green all winter in the mid to upper south. The flowers in the summer are clusters of rosy purple on a thin wavy stalk. The plant is dense and low growing. The flower heads that are held about 12” high wave in the breeze, or can be nipped off for just the foliage. Salad Burnet has a slight Cucumber taste, so it is useful in Salads for those who cannot tolerate Cucumbers themselves. It resembles Parsley, and can be used in a similar fashion in soups, stews, salads, and in main and side dishes, and as a garnish. The tender new leaves are the most flavorful, especially when used raw. But you can utilize the older leaves in a cooked dish. Medicinally, it is claimed that the root can be used as a wound herb to stop bleeding.
This versatile Herb looks great in the garden too. It is non-invasive; self-seeds, if you leave the flowers go to seed; forms a neat compact mound; and doesn’t mind the lack of rain.
Its best drawing attraction though is the fact that it provides fresh greens all year long. We always have plants of Salad Burnet available for purchase; and it can be planted anytime, as long as the ground is not frozen. It can even stay outside in a container all winter.
In front of our Antique Shop, which is dark brown in color, with a sloping garden, we have numerous herbs that attract your eye on the way in to the Shop. All summer long the area is a feast for butterflies and bees. There is not an irrigation system, and we rarely if ever water the area. The garden relies on rain, and has no difficulty with drought conditions.
In the garden are plants of Upright Rosemary; several varieties of Lavender; Bronze Fennel; Catmint; Echinacea; Daisies; and Red Hot Pokers, as well as Thyme and other herbs and spring bulbs. This garden is about three years old and looked well established by its second year. All these plants are amazingly drought tolerant. Of course, the Mediterranean Herbs like Lavender and Rosemary totally approve the growing conditions. We usually have pots of varying sizes of all these herbs in stock year round.
While not Herbs, several drought tolerant Perennials grow along the driveway to the Antique Shop.
German Iris, of named and unnamed varieties, is a particular favorite of family and visitors. They are well known for being vigorous growers and drought resistant. Ours vary from lovely solid colors to unique and unusual multi-hues. We generally will dig a portion of a blooming plant of the customer’s choice. Or you can take pot-luck with non-blooming, field/garden grown varieties. Iris loves a sunny well drained location, and provides interesting leaf texture prior and post the blooming period. They can grow in place for several years, before thinning of the rhizomes is required. When the rhizomes form a full circle, and growth in the middle of the plant has slowed, they can be uprooted, divided and the baby rhizomes can be used in new beds or given away.
Daylilies, also of named and unnamed, varieties also grow along the border to the Shop. Again the variety of colors of the blooms is remarkable solid colors to multi-hued blossoms which can also vary markedly in size. They bloom for the most part at a different time period than the German Iris, and their foliage is a gleaming accent in the garden.
Foliage, as well as blooms, has become an increasingly important consideration when designing a flower bed. This long driveway border also does not have access to irrigation, and needs to hold its own in the drought conditions we’ve been having. These and other Herbs and Perennials, all of which we have for sale, have proven themselves over the recent years as companions that grow and thrive under stress.