Dave Hill wrote:
On 19 Mar, 17:51, (Nick Maclaren) wrote:
In article ,"Joe K"
writes:


Can anyone advise how I can identify a culinary Bay tree please or
distinguish the culinary from the non-culinary varieties? I have
a number of Bay trees in the garden and I am reluctant to use the
leaves for flavouring as I believe use of the non-culinary type
can be dangerous.

Crumple a leaf and smell it. A bay smells like, er, bay. The main
thing it could be confused with is Portugal laurel, which will smell
very different.

Bay also has small yellow flowers fairly soon, which are very
different
from the small white Rosaceae flowers of Portugal laurel.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

If they are about 2 inches long, are tough and smell of Bay then use
them.

If they don't smell of Bay and are soft then don't use them.

I can think of nothing you could mix up with Bay

I think it's more a linguistic problem than a horticultural one. Some
old cookery books use "laurel" for what we now call "bay"; and, of
course, they're technically correct -- when the ancient victor was
crowned with laurel, it was with _Laurus nobilis_, "Sweet bay". Other
shrubs including "Portugal laurel" and "Spotted laurel" picked the name
up later from various real or fancied resemblances: I imagine some kind
of back-translation of these is behind Joe's worries.

--
Mike.



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