Their culinary use is renowned but in addition growing Italian herbs will make a fantastic contribution to the delight of your landscape design. These herbs can be displayed both for color and for aroma and by planting the strongly scented Italian herbs amongst other plants, you will be graced with the sweet scents that would give the illusion of being in Italy, while you admire the lovely flowers.

Growing Italian herbs is a fascinating specialisation on herb gardening and gives many variations in growing culinary herbs. It is no surprise that some of the best cuisine comes from Italy, undoubtedly because the most famous and tastiest herbs in the world all seem to come from or have been adopted by Italy.

Although there are so many to choose from when starting to grow Italian herbs you really need to consider which herbs you will use. Also it is necessary to think about the growing conditions each plant needs and work out if you can or can’t provide them.

Basil is a well know Italian herb used in many Italian recipes as is parsley which is a relatively hard herb plant to propagate, but it is so useful as a garnish on a variety of meals, and of course eating fresh raw parsley after a meal eradicates the offensive breath left after eating any type of spicy food, as well as garlic.

Oregano when it is fully mature it will sprout pretty little purple flowers. It is best not harvested until it has flowered because then the plant will have developed most flavor, unlike many culinary herbs grown for their leaves, such as fennel, which loose their flavor as they mature.

Rosemary, just like basil, offers very beneficial help to the garden by attracting bees. It grows into a large tough evergreen perennial shrub that sprouts pretty little blue flowers. Rosemary must be harvested regularly to provide the needed young tender shoots.

No Italian herb garden should be without probably the most used herb in Italian cuisine. That is garlic, which will thrive in just about any garden with very little attention so is an ideal choice for the novice gardener.

New shoots of the sage plant contain the most flavor so new shoots should be encouraged to grow by continual harvesting. Sage is used in a variety of Italian dishes from meats to salads.

The variety of dishes that can be created using Italian herbs is almost limitless and the continual harvesting of these plants will give you an endless supply of fresh herbs with which to enhance all your cooking

By: John Beaver

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