Our friends at Knocklofty Press have released the first in a new series of eBooks about herbs.

Kitchen Quartet #1 tells you all you need to know about growing and using coriander, basil, dill and oregano, as well as some of the fascinating folk wisdom and myth that has collected around these important food plants.

It includes botanical information, recipes and advice on cultivating and preserving the herbs in an attractive, easy to read format.

Read it on screen or print it for your kitchen and garden libraries.

Download it now for just $9.95.

By one definition a herb is “a useful plant.” These “uses” can be culinary, medicinal, cosmetic and even poisonous — hopefully only for garden pests and insects..

The herb enthusiast could probably find every plant useful in some form or other. I like to constrain herbs to that collection of plants that are “life-enhancing” — those delightful plants we use to enhance our cooking, the simple plants that resolve a multitude of common ills, the fragrant plants that perfume our day to day lifes, and the curious group of plants that provide us with dyes, soaps, resins, gums, insecticides and pesticides.

It is a long list, and provides a lifetime of study for the enthusiast.

While not providing major plant products — timber, staple foods (grains and rice) or textiles — and seldom life-supporting, herbs quietly enrich our daily lives. Imagine cooking without herbs, for example?

The history of herbs stretches back through time ever since man (and woman) first harvested wild plants for food, medicine and creature comfort, and continued as they learned to farm plants.

Today our knowledge of herbs is enjoying a resurgence as modern scientific research into their nutritional and health benefits continues to support historical reputations.

A garden without birds, bees or butterflies is not really a garden — it tells you there are no flowers to attract them to their sweet nectar, and a garden without flowers would certainly be a dull place.

Thyme honey from Mount Hymettus in Greece has been famous for thousands of years and there are other honeys distinctively flavoured by certain flowers — for example, rosemary honey from the south of France and Spain, leatherwood honey from Tasmania and clover honey from Canada.

Most honey, however, is an amalgam of flavours from a mixture of sources, and the flowers of aromatic herbs in particular.

A third group, although producing less nectar, are hardy and reliable, and they include borage (which produce masses of grey-white pollen when it is particularly needed by bees), lavender, lemon balm, oreganum, rosemary and all the basils.

You don’t need your own hives to attract bees to your garden for their valuable job of pollinating your vegetables and fruit, they will travel several kilometres to a good source of nectar — and on a daily basis, except during bad weather. A garden designed specifically to attract bees and butterflies should be planted in full sun as this helps stimulate the production of nectar by the herbs.

Historically, hives were rubbed with lemon balm to attract swarms and the scented oil can be added to the syrup used for introducing queen bees to the hive. Stored with honey, wormwood stems and foliage discourages wax moth, and stroking a swarm of bees with bruised branches will encourage the bees to move on.