On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 12:01:15 +0100, ajr wrote:

Good King Henry
Hamburg Parsley
Sorrel

[a book mentions] that they were a staple of most herb gardens
until supermarkets became common - is this true?

IMHO, there's a lot of urban myth-making and falsification of the
historical record where herbs are concerned. Just take a look at
a copy of the original Mrs. Beeton and you'll see that most herbs
are rarely mentioned, if at all.

Perhaps what's happened is that famine and poverty foods have
been mistaken for everyday foods. Certainly, here in the Pacific
Northwest the Indians were often reduced to dire straits by late
winter when the previous summer's stash had been consumed and
would end up eating, inter alia, the young shoots of thimbleberry
(Rubus parviflorus) for lack of anything better.

It's easy to see how "oh yeah, our folks used to eat those in the
late winter before the white man arrived, but now we go to
Macdonald's when we're hungry" could get translated into
"Thimbleberry shoots were a late-winter delicacy among the
Indians" by an uncritical author.

Someone in another reply mentioned Good King Henry's penchant for
seeding around. You may want to reconsider growing it at all;
many of the plants denoted "herb" by the enthusiast turn out to
be pretty weedy.


--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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