Do you remember when Vervain was the Gods’ herb of choice, carried up to Olympus in the beaks of the Peristeros,  doves of the  divine Aphrodite?  Or when under the name “hierobotane” it grew on  the Hesperidean islands and provided the high octane fuel that blasted Helios’ magical horses across the heavens on their daily  transit of the firmament? Or again, as Pliny said, the plant both conferred invincibility upon ambassadors and made banquets go with a swing. Actually even I am too young to remember any of these things, though the French, presumably influenced by Pliny, still drink Vervain tea for breakfast. That said, I can still remember when vampires belonged, as my grand mother would have said, to “a better class of people” meaning toffs or at the very  least, the sort who go to work in a suit and a stripy tie.

So it came as a considerable shock, when for want of better things to do (Radio 3 having spoilt us with the glorious Handel/Purcell/Haydn anniversaries last year are now making us pay  for it by “celebrating” the vapid plunking of Chopin), I turned on the telly to look at a well-reviewed vampire series. Oh dear! There were lots of  American girls, massive on silicone, short on clothing, washing cars (why?) and quacking away in that incomprehensible manner common to adolescents the world over.  The screen then switched to a jaundiced looking youth in a cellar wittering on about Vervain. If I read the subtitles correctly Vervain is now the essential dietary constituent to get your average American vampire functioning in the evening.  Personally I prefer my vampires living in draughty Transylvanian castles, it was bad enough when Dracula crossed the North Sea, but now they have turned up in droves in the USA, they are just a pain. I wouldn’t mind so much if they promoted our Vervain sales, but they don't.

Again on the telly, they had Monty Don advising a pair of grower/florists on how to set up a commercial business. This had a certain resonance as I had just come back from the Corbières where I had been advising my youngest daughter on getting her herb nursery off the ground. See, - I don’t watch the telly all the time, I get out and grow things occasionally.  I have been performing this consultancy role for years but it is the first time I have had to put my own money where my mouth is, so I hope I have got it right.. Anyway Don told them to do something about  their image and to give the customers what they were looking for instead of treating the enterprise as a hobby. Much of what he said made good sense. Obviously in a superficial programme, he couldn’t look at the alternatives in detail but what  if, like the programme’s protagonists, like me and like my daughter, one is more interested in the plants and thus not customer orientated? In spite of a friend groaning “Oh god, another effing customer” every time she hears the scrunch of tyres on her drive,  her success is almost legendary. Don however, not unreasonably you might say, seemed to think such an attitude was incompatible with commercial glory and slapped  it  down. Nevertheless  without people like us, rare plant nurseries wouldn’t exist and the public would be forever doomed to buying soul-destroying bedding plants and cabbage seed from garden centres. Don did flit briefly past the subject of  maintaining a rare plant list and ignored mail order altogether (admittedly not really appropriate to the wedding-flower context  of the programme), but a rare plant is rare because not many people want it and thus a mail order department is essential. Then again, people are willing to pay a price for them which reflects their rarity, unlike the twelve basic culinaries. (We still get the odd geriatric customers who remember when the fishmonger used to give them parsley for free and still expect to get it for nothing)  Popular herbs are popular because although everyone buys them, the competition to sell them is intense, particularly from supermarkets, and I have seen scores of  pretty little populist herb farms set up and wither within a couple of years. What Don did not mention is that the cost of maintaining an ornamental garden, which he regarded as essential, has to be balanced against the spend of the punters it brings in. When costed out, the results can be frightening….and when you bung in a tea shoppe, you are on a rapid spiral to hell. The horti-week bulletin had a thread a few months ago on how to deal in a non-offensive manner with punters who will occupy a table in the café making a single cup of tea last the whole morning. No one could come up with a satisfactory answer. Incidentally two of my favourite US Herb farms have splendid display gardens, - how do they manage it?

I think with its inaccessibility, remarkable natural flora and unusual micro-climate, -the sun shines for eight hours a day through a gap in the surrounding mountains,  my daughter’s operation will definitely go  down the “rare herbs by mail order” route. It will also cater for the ex-pats who are always ringing me up  asking why they can never find Horseradish and French Taragon in France.  The site is utterly stunning and as a bonus, one can purchase her mother’s gold medal-winning sheeps’ cheese at the far end of the drive.

For the second time in a few months I have picked up a magazine, one foodie, the other herby,  containing the “fact” that the Romans introduced Chervil in to Britain. The evidence for this has no more validity than that supporting the contention that  they introduced Lavender. I know horti-hacks plagiarise one another all the time, but who starts these daft stories? Why Roman anyway? Why not Rumanian economic migrants taking advantage of Ethelred the Unready’s slapdash entry controls, why not  a prehistoric wave of Japanese tourists anxious to get some glamour shots of Boadicea? why not some peripatetic Martians, none of whom makes any less sense than the Italians. “Roman” Chervil took quite a bit investigation since there were so many plants that it could have been and neither Pliny nor Apicius, the two obvious starting points for research in to a food plant offered much help. However, yes I have done it and no I am not going to publish it yet. At least not unless someone offers me a substantial bribe for doing so. More curious than the plant itself are the reasons for crediting the Romans with all these spurious introductions. My suspicion is that either the writers think a classical reference will add a veneer of erudition to their articles, or, more likely, they have to find another sentence with which to make up the thousand words they have been commissioned to write

I had intended to write about the woman who bumped off her ex-fiancé with an aconite curry. But sadly it will have to wait. The case came to court the week I told an indignant punter that our insurers would have a fit if he was allowed to wander round the tunnels, which contain four species of the genus, unattended. Good timing there!.  

Remember you (probably) read it here first. Global warming, now  referred to as “Climate change” is a scam dreamt up by meteorologists funded by governments to publish data to enable said governments to screw us for ever greater tax revenue. In my young day we were all terrified by our spiritual pastors warning us that God was watching our every move and  keeping a score card on our activities. The deity, we were told,  would personally wave it in our faces during the Last Judgement before consigning us to the eternal flames. The force of this message has been rather diluted  by the surveillance cameras everywhere so instead we are now told that  the polar bears are going to be punished every time we drive the car to get a pint of milk, rather like the entire class being kept in for one boy’s misbehaviour. In spite of The Establishment’s best efforts, this winter has consigned the sweaty polar bears to the same bin of incredulity as the poor old God of Wrath. If people aren’t frightened stupid by the fears of a “higher authority” what do they do? Grow herbs and shut out the world, I suppose