Book Review: Restoring American Gardens: Interesting Book

» Kirk_Johnson - Interesting Book

This book sounds quite interesting. One of the members of the garden club that I belong to is involved with a local historic home that is now a museum. This home was built in the 1890s. She wants to create an herb garden. This would be fine if she was trying to reflect British gardening fashions of the period. The late 19th century was the period that herb gardens actually date from. In earlier gardens culinary herbs were grown along with vegetables. This made sense from the cook's point of view and those herbs also helped to protect the vegetables from insect damage.

It is possible that herb gardens were being created on the southern Oregon coast during the 1890s, but a mixture of herbs, vegetables and some flowers seems more authentic to me. This area was very isolated before the 1930s when the highway was constructed. The garden of an historic home should reflect that reality.

Part of the reson why herb gardens were fashionable in the 1890s was because people were buying patent medicines and having pills precribed by doctors. They weren't using herbs for medicine the way that people in earlier centuries had used them. Gardeners in earlier centuries were careful to not mix medicinal herbs with culinary herbs. They didn't want to accidently season their food with a poisionous herb that used for medicine in carefully measured doses.

If people in this area were still using herbs for medicine in this area during the late 19th century, there was probably one person in the community who had a real apothecary garden where a wide selection of medicinal herbs were grown. The rest of the community would not have been growing herbs for every ailment. That would not have been a practical use of their time and they had plenty of chores to do.

-- posted by Kirk_Johnson