Herbs for Christmas dinner can be grown in Caithness – with the right protection
Gardening on the Edge by Diana Wayland
The midwinter festivities are still to come, but winter has bitten early this year. This calls for the richer dishes flavoured with strongly aromatic herbs often associated with the December celebrations.
This year the winter herbs have come into their own. These are evergreen shrubs which do not die back so can be picked fresh as well as used dried.
These are bay, rosemary, sage and thyme, all natives of the Mediterranean region. And there is more to sage and thyme than just stuffing.
These plants have strong flavours and, while they can of course be used all year round, are particularly suited to the stronger-flavoured dishes of winter.
Bay is the only culinary herb that is a tree. Its rich, slightly sweet flavour is stronger when dried. Whole bay leaves can be added to stews and casseroles, usually removed before serving. With thyme, it features in Mediterranean cuisine.
Rosemary, whose botanic name Rosmarinus means “dew of the sea”, can grow to a tall, spiky, evergreen bush, with small pale blue flowers in spring. It has the most resinous flavour and goes well with potatoes, especially sautéed with garlic as well. It can also enhance sweet dishes and goes particularly well with oranges.
Thyme is a small evergreen sub-shrub. Its scent is spicy and camphorated, and goes well with cheese dishes, tomatoes and roasted vegetables. Its tiny leaves can be stripped off the stem, or the whole stem placed on a tray of vegetables before roasting. It features especially in Italian dishes.
Sage is the least evergreen of these plants. It can and often does shed its leaves in harsh weather. Sage’s spicy, musky flavour goes very well with fatty meats. But it also associates extremely well with some vegetables, such as squashes. I add it to roasted butternut squash and traybakes. It goes well with rosemary in nut roasts.
Of these, bay tolerates cold winters the best. A very harsh one can cut it right back to ground level, but is unlikely to kill it completely and it will regrow in spring. I have grown bay here since 2016. It can get badly scorched by our Caithness breezes, but I have not lost one yet and it will cope in less well drained soil than the others.
Rosemary is a coastal plant. However, although it can tolerate some low temperatures, it utterly dislikes wet, which makes it difficult to overwinter in coastal Caithness without some protection and very well-drained soil.
Sage really cannot tolerate Caithness winters unprotected. I have tried. One survived in a bottle cloche for one winter, then succumbed in spring.
I have grown thyme and brought it successfully through the windy winters for as long as the bay, in a raised bed sheltered from the north-westerly winter gales. I am trying it in a different bed now, protected on all sides, but getting less sunshine in winter. I lost a third during last winter, but not all.
All of these plants can be brought indoors for winter, but they will grow long and leggy due to the short winter days.
In my herb garden I experimented by protecting sage, rosemary and lavender in their well-drained raised beds under home-built giant cloches from October, lifted in May. It worked. All survived the very wet winter. I am confident they will survive again given this protection.