Designs for Your Herb Garden
Many questions come to mind when thinking about how to design a herb garden.
The first question to answer is where to put the garden. Look out your kitchen window for inspiration. You probably already trek back and forth between the herbs and the kitchen every day of the growing season. You can cut that trekking down by siting your garden near the kitchen door. You will need a sunny spot with good air circulation and easy access to water.
Next, consider how much time you have to devote to maintenance. This will determine how big the garden is, whether to make it formal or informal, and what kind of plants to use. Your gardening budget plays a big part in this, as well. If you’re new to herb gardening, it will be easiest to design, plant, and maintain a small space. A 6 to 8 foot square or round garden will be plenty large to begin.
Designing a Formal Garden
Formal herb gardens are geometric, usually subdivided into symmetrical spaces by gravel or brick paths or low hedges. Herbs are planted in the spaces, with a pattern in mind. You can grow a different culinary, fragrance or medicinal herb in each section, or perhaps plant herbs of a single color in each space. Your garden shape could be circular, diamond, a square within a square, or shaped like a wheel.
Imagination, and planning are essential in designing a formal garden. A formal herb garden should be planned out on graph paper. It should be 6 feet square or larger. For inspiration, find patterns of knot gardens in herb books. A formal herb garden is best planned as a feature or centerpiece of your main garden, or as a stand-alone feature. A piece of garden sculpture such as a fountain, a statue or a sundial can be used to create a focal point with herbs and flowers encircling it.
Informal Gardens
Most herb gardens seem to be very informal, and the herbs sprawl and creep all over the place. They are a little bit untamed, but this makes for a nice mix of textures, foliage and flower color, and plant heights. A little bit of planning goes a long way, so do pay attention to the mature spread and heights of your herbs. You don’t want that rampant mint to choke out your chives, or the tall rosemary bush to shade your sun-loving basil.
Pay some attention to foliage – plant some fuzzy gray-green herbs among the green or some ferny-leafed ones with the broad-leafed ones. This will make your garden more visually interesting. As you gain experience, you’ll see just where to add a sage here or a chive there. Mix it up!
Your can plant your herbs as a theme garden devoted to culinary uses, potpourri mixes, or tea herbs. Other types of theme gardens concentrate on bloom color, an all white garden or one with only shades or purple, yellow, red. You could go with themes around use of herbs: one for Italian cooking herbs, or herbs just for enhancing health, or edible flowers and salad herbs.
If you live in a hot dry area, consider planting Mediterranean herbs such as lavender, thyme, sage, rosemary and artemisia. If your yard has more shade than sun, suitable herbs would be any of the mints, valerian, foxglove, sweet cicely, sweet woodruff, angelica, and lady’s mantle. If you are planning to grow annuals and perennials, group all annuals together to make taking care of them easier.
Low growing herbs are especially suitable for rock gardens. Make your rockery with local rocks you’ve placed and dig them in so they look as natural as possible. Plant low herbs among them. Start with chives, Roman chamomile, bush basil, dwarf oregano, dwarf sage, winter savory and the creeping or upright thymes. Prostrate rosemary, golden marjoram, lady’s mantle, parsley, and saffron crocus are good rock garden plants as well. Throw in a few marigold and calendula seeds for color.
These are some ideas for planning and designing your herb garden. Study photos of herb gardens in herb books, look them up on the internet. See what catches your eye, and what you draw away from. Then think about what types of herbs you ill use, where you can locate them, and how far your budget will stretch, and have some fun. This will be an investment of your time, imagination, space and money that will repay you for years.
