New and unusual herbs

We went to Wisley Gardens today. It's a huge and beautiful garden near the A3, just outside the M25. It's also my favourite garden in London (more or less – being outside the M25 pushes even my definition of London, but it feels local to me). Aside from being full of different gardens, from rose gardens to vegetable plots to orchards to ponds of water lilies, it's also run by the Royal Horticultural Society, which uses the place to test various varieties of plant to see which ones grow best and produce the best results. It also has a pretty big garden centre selling a wide variety of plants  – I hope the ones that came out well in the tests. I decided to use the opportunity to buy some of the slightly more unusual herbs (the ones you can't pick up from the living herbs aisle from the supermarket). So I got a curry plant and some purple sage...

curry plant and purple sage

...a green fennel...

...a common rosemary (OK, not technically an unusual herb, but I wanted one for cooking purposes and of all the varieties available at Wisley, it was the one that best fitted what I wanted, including blue flowers and tasting like I expect rosemary to taste)...

common rosemary

... and chamomile.

chamomile

I'm going to plant them in pots for now, as I haven't got a proper plan for the garden yet, and I think if I stick them in the ground I may have trouble moving them later.

The only one I have got fairly definite plans for is the chamomile. It turns out that "chamomile lawn" isn't just the name of a book, you genuinely can make a lawn out of chamomile, and I don't think you have to mow it either, as it only grows to 8 cm. I've been looking for something to go under the washing line other than grass (something useful that I don't have to mow) and chamomile's going to be at least part of it, although I think I may need quite a bit more than I can produce from the one pot. I might grow some thyme there as well, as you can walk on thyme too (and hopefully accidentally drop clothes without them getting too dirty too).

I also think I'm going to copy this London park and use clover (great for the soil as it adds nitrogen and already a large constituent part of my existing lawn) and pennyroyal, as anything that repels the insects currently overrunning my garden is OK by me . But unlike in the park, there won't be any mint going straight in the ground in my garden, as if you let it out of a pot it spreads everywhere.