The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing Herbs

The best-selling guide to growing garden herbs.

From the world-renowned Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this book introduces the 80 best herbs to grow in your garden and teaches you how to cultivate each one. With 12 easy and inspiring projects and beautiful botanical illustrations, this is part of the best-selling series of Kew Gardener’s Guides, now available in paperback.

Herbs provide flavour, scent and healing benefits unlike any other plant, and the hand-picked herbs in this book are a living trove of fresh flavours and amazing medicinal remedies.

Find out how to grow herbs in beds, pots, borders and window boxes, how to plant and how to propagate and harvest your herbs, as Kew expert Holly Farrell equips you with all you need to create a flourishing herb garden of your very own.

Eighty of the most important and exciting herbs are identified, illustrated and their uses explained. This is accompanied by 12 projects which show how to develop a herb garden and use herbs in the most interesting and creative ways, from planting a herb roof to making herbal oils.

Herbs can be used as seeds, flowers or leaves; cooked and eaten themselves or used to infuse a dish or drink. They are high-value ingredients for foraged dishes, and must-have crops for the best restaurants as chefs realise that often the only way to capture their elusive flavour is to grow and harvest fresh herbs on their doorstep. With this book these intense flavours can now be a reality for gardeners and home-cooks with any size of garden, from an acre to a window box.

Underpinned by the authority of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the expertise of Holly Farrell, this book combines practical elements with inspiration and beauty. Perfect for beginners and experienced gardeners alike.

This book is from the Kew Experts series, in which the top gardeners and botanical scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew offer up advice and information as well as suggesting handy projects on a range of gardening topics. Other titles available: Growing House Plants, Growing Bulbs, Growing Fruit, Growing Orchids, Growing Vegetables, Growing Roses, Growing Trees, Growing Cacti and Succulents, Growing Perennials, Growing Shrubs, Growing Alpines.

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world famous centre for botanical and mycological knowledge. Over the past 250 years Kew has made innumerable contributions to increasing the understanding of plants and fungi with many benefits for humankind.

HOLLY FARRELL is the author of Planting Plans for your Kitchen Garden (2013, How To Books) and RHS Plants from Pips (2015, Mitchell Beazley). She contributes to gardening magazines such as The Garden and Kitchen Garden, and has a blog at www.hollyefarrell.com. Holly trained at RHS Gardens Wisley where she gained the Wisley Diploma in Practical Horticulture and the RHS Certificate and Diploma, both with Commendation. After working as Head Gardener on a private estate she now combines her career as a garden writer with freelance work as a consultant on (kitchen) gardens for private clients and Tom Stuart-Smith Ltd. Holly has been growing her own fruit and vegetables for many years, in a variety of settings from allotments to container gardens. Holly is also a keen and experienced baker, and while she’s happy to produce wedding cakes for friends or hundreds of biscuits for a Christmas market stall, she doesn’t need a reason to bake!