The best way to design an herb garden is with an open mind. After you check parsley, thyme and basil off the list of essential culinary plants for your new garden, keep going. An herb garden needn't be limited to plants you can cook with.
"Herbs are a great, diverse group of plants," says Jim Adams, curator of the 2.5 acre National Herb Garden at the National Arboretum in Washington. "For the purpose of this garden, an herb is any plant that has a use. Annuals, perennials, trees, shrubs, vines and aquatic plants can all be herbs."
The National Herb Garden is a vast and fascinating collection of useful plants of all kinds. Visitors are reminded that roses have culinary uses and that larkspur, alliums, zinnias and many other familiar and beautiful flowers are properly regarded as herbs and look great in herb gardens.
One area is planted in a distinguished, formal knot garden of Japanese holly, juniper and arborvitae. Ten theme gardens demonstrate the uses of plants through time and in different cultures.
"We hope to teach people," says Adams, who wants visitors to be "blown away by this garden."
Each area has its own horticultural character. The Colonial Garden is filled with plants brought to North American from Europe and Asia. The Native American Garden, which includes coral bells (Heuchera americana), trillium and rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium), demonstrates how much American Indians relied on plants for medicines; their knowledge was passed along to the European settlers. In many cases, we no longer depend on these plants in our daily lives, but they are part of our history and culture.
"This garden really tells the history of humankind's relationship with plants," Adams says.
Your own herb garden
Whether they are practical or instructive, herb gardens should be beautiful, Adams says. In your own backyard, an herb garden can take any shape or form.
The Herb Society of America, which helped to establish the National Herb Garden and maintains a display garden of its own at its headquarters in Kirtland, Ohio, provides a number of sample designs on its Web site (www.herbsociety.org).
A circular herb garden, defined with bricks around the edge and divided into four pie-shaped sections, can be laid out in any sunny spot. There are also designs for an herb garden with raised beds, a formal garden with clipped hedges, and a square garden with a handsome flagstone path bisecting the beds.
