A few years ago my neighbor arrived at my door wearing rubber gloves and carrying a bundle of stinging nettle she’d pulled from the edge of her garden. She was grinning. We blanched it, made soup, and spent two hours talking about every herb either of us had ever grown, cooked with, or steeped into … Read more
My aunt Karen has kept a pot of chives on her kitchen windowsill for as long as I can remember. She didn’t plan a herb garden. She bought one pot, put it near the sink where she’d remember to water it, and it never stopped producing. She snips from it most days — into eggs, … Read more
My neighbor Rob spent two summers losing a battle with a patch of bare clay beside his driveway. Grass died. Mulch slid down the slope. A ground cover sedum lasted one winter and gave up. A garden centre employee eventually handed him a tray of red creeping thyme and told him to plant it twelve … Read more
My friend Priya grew up in a household where cilantro went into almost everything — dal, chutneys, scrambled eggs, rice dishes finished with a fistful of leaves. When she moved in with her partner, who describes cilantro as tasting like soap, she assumed she’d have to give it up at home. She didn’t. She learned … Read more
My neighbor Petra is Polish, and dill herb shows up in everything she cooks — soups, salads, fish, the sour cream she puts on more things than seems reasonable. There’s always a handful of fresh fronds somewhere in the process. When I asked her once why she uses so much of it, she looked at … Read more
My grandmother kept star anise pods in a jar above her stove, wedged between the cinnamon sticks and a bottle of fish sauce. As a kid I thought they were decorative — those eight-pointed brown stars, each one almost geometrically perfect. Then she dropped one into a pot of simmering pork broth and the whole … Read more