Basil

One of the rapturous pleasures of summertime is the carefree use of basil - in salads and all kinds of dishes. It's that smell! Some think it catty, but for me it's grassy, minty, Mediterranean, fresh, zingy. We usually grow a few different varieties in the little walled garden here - purple-leaved, Greek or small-leaved, and the usual soft-leaved bright green annual.

This is the kind which you can buy in supermarkets. Unlike the other herbs on supermarket shelves, which frequently have no taste AT ALL, such as mint and chives, basil always comes up trumps with its unique fragrance. It continues with its powerful gifts for weeks just growing in its little plastic pot despite the cramped planting, and the lack of nutrients once you get it home. How often have you given your poor basil plant any fertiliser? Would you even know what to give it?

Unless we just eat all of it, our potted basil plants usually succumb to a blackening of their main stems and then wither and die. Then we have to go and buy a new one. But there are two alternatives. One we saw outside a small local supermarket in Greece this summer - a basil plant growing in a large pot like a shrub - about a yard high, robust, I should think a year or more old, and very happy as a perennial. It shows that we are forcing our basil plants to remain infantile, crammed altogether into one tiny pot when they would like to spread their roots and grow up. The other idea comes from Australia, where no-one buys basil in supermarkets. Instead, they root a few cuttings and plant them out in new pots. It takes about 2 weeks in summer, about a month in the cooler months. These cuttings are ready to plant out and I hope to keep them going all through the winter, each in its own largish pot, as long as I don't let them get too cold.