One of my favorite sixties songs was The Outsiders Time Won’t Let Me. I always thought that playing on the word Time with Thyme would be a fun title for an herb shop, but that’s about as far as I got with the idea. Today the concept of time plays more into my garden design than I would like to admit.

There’s too much to do and only so many hours in the day so the formal herb gardens I might aspire to are just going to remain an aspiration. Plus, I just can’t do eight hour days in the garden anymore - my back won’t tolerate it. Also, I live on what’s left of the family farm, which is more suited either to agricultural row growing or informal gardens than it is to creating a formal bed.

To grow anything edible I end up doing battle with deer, with bunnies, with fox and raccoons, all of whom love the tasty grapes we grow as well as herbs I might add to our landscape.

So I look longingly through the pictures in Ethne Clark’s classic Herb Garden Design and enjoy every one. Then I return to the sections entitled “A Movable Feast: Herbs in Containers” and “A Planting of Pot Herbs” and “A Planting of Thyme.”

Clark’s fabulous designs - the less formal ones - do inspire the layout of my perennial gardens. She’s a master at creating amazing color patterns and she mixes her art with a lot of good, practical information.

Do you want a scent garden? I used this book to plant one when we lived in an urban environment where the noise and smells of the city needed to be offset with something more natural and more esoteric. Did it screen out all smells urban? No, but it provided me with some peace and tranquility while living on a lot and a half.

If you’re interested in herbs this is definitely a book that offers something for everyone, no matter what your taste. Clarke walks readers through planning and planting including choosing plants that suit your site, choosing a design and your garden’s structure. She also talks you through herbs and their growing habits and how they can integrate into your garden as a whole. Probably my favorite section is on colour (Clarke is American by birth but lived and gardened in England for many years so you’ll find many British spellings in this book). As you’ll see in this section and several others, herb gardens are not devoid of color.

Her designs range from formal to “beside the kitchen door” in style, truly making this a book that offers readers guidance on any type of a garden they might grown. And if you’re not good at visualizing, the spectacular photography in this book will help you envision what an specific style of herb garden may look like on your site.

While the book was originally published in 1995, which is about the time my fascination with herbs began, it is in my view a classic well worth reading again and again.

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