Loving it here

Do you have a plant in your garden which just thrives and does well, no matter how little you care for it? (And that's not counting weeds, of course!).

Here in Garden Amateurland our happiest little person is that humble herb, thyme. Several years ago, it was almost taking over the joint, spreading across the pathway and loving life in a most fragrant and deliciously useful way.

This photo was taken back in 2010, and at least two-thirds of the plant is actually sitting on our pavers. Just the small portion on the far left had roots in soil. It's a good example of how in the wild thyme spreads itself over rocks on sunny hillsides. It's a sunbather of a plant.

Well, in 2012 we dug this herby marvel up and planted one remnant in a pot. It had to go as this is where our succulent patch is now located, and that big bush really was enough thyme for a thousand families, and there's just Pammy and me here doing the cooking and eating.

The wide, shallow pot of thyme still loves life here just as much as when it was in the ground, and it has spilled over the side of the pot and its roots have managed to find some soil in the gap around the base of our clothesline (that green thing poking up on the left side of the photo). 

It might just be my imagination but I think the thyme growing in the ground, around the clothesline, is a bit more fragrant than the pot-grown herb.

The pot-grown thyme is a bit more lush and green than the in-ground stuff, and that's because I do water the pot regularly. I guess the thyme in the ground must get some extra water from splashes and the moisture leaking through the drain holes in the pot, but it's just a tough plant that is doing great with hardly any help or encouragement from me.

I probably use thyme in the kitchen as often as I use parsley or basil, which is a lot. So all my regular harvesting of leaves does constitute pruning, and it certainly does make the plant bushier. Every now and then, if I haven't been cooking a lot lately, I do give the plants a very quick and crude haircut, grabbing handfuls and shearing them off with the secateurs. Into the compost it goes, and the aroma of the whole exercise is sensational.

I wish I could tell you the secret of keeping thyme thriving and lush, but I think that would mean that somehow I can take some of the credit for the fact that this little herb just loves almost everything about this backyard, but I suspect that least of all, it's me.

Just the right amount of oregano

If you like growing herbs, as I most definitely do, I'm sure you will have encountered the minor problem of having too much of a good thing on your hands. That's especially true if all your herbs are growing in the ground, rather than in pots.

When I had my oregano, thyme, sage and rosemary plants growing in the ground, I had far too much oregano, thyme, sage and rosemary, up to 100 times more of each herb than I could ever sensibly use in the kitchen. The benefits, however, were that these herbs were lovely garden citizens. They flowered their heads off, they sent up delicious scents as you brushed past them, and they really didn't need much help from me at all. And they flavoured hundreds and hundreds of delicious meals as well.

But they did take up a lot of space, and in my tiny garden I decided a few years ago that I'd grow all these herbs in pots, and it has proved to be a good move. The same herbs are all still happily here and enjoying the spring sunshine. The oregano in particular looks a treat at the moment. It's just the right amount, one pot-full.

What a pleasing mound of green it is in this wide, shallow pot.

The only thing it's not doing this spring is flowering, and that's
because my oregano plant pays a visit to the barber's shop
four or five times a year, and that clumsy barber called Jamie
cuts off all the flower buds in late winter.

This is what its flowers look like, little pink clusters which pop
up on stalks in late winter and early spring. I took this photo
a few years ago when our oregano was growing in the ground,
spreading like mad and flowering its head off. Back then I
had far too much oregano but it was a delight to have around.

This is another "from the archives" shot of the oregano trying
 to take over the succulent patch, back in its in-ground days.

If you read my most recent posting on sage, I recommended it as a garden plant, and I can easily do the same for oregano. It makes a good, easy-care ground cover provided it's in the sunshine most of the day, and the soil doesn't suffer from sogginess. It'll eventually misbehave, like the stuff pictured above, and will take over neighbouring beds if allowed. However cutting it back isn't an especially tough chore, nor is it needed more than once or twice a year at worst.

In fact, one of my early successes as a "learner gardener" many years ago was the way I slowly "marched" a patch of in-ground oregano from one spot in the garden to another spot a metre or two further away. All I did was cut off the left-hand side of the oregano patch regularly, but I let the right-hand side keep on spreading. After about 12 months the whole patch had "moved" to its new spot. I felt like I was getting there as a gardener with that little selective pruning ploy!

So if you're looking for a ground cover, oregano might do the trick. It's easy to find seedlings in garden centres, but you can also buy seed. In fact my potted oregano patch is seed-grown. I think that's part of the reason it's so lush. There's probably half a dozen plants in that one little pot, and that's a lot of youthful, pent-up energy in there.