The herb garden gives flavour to food, scent to the air and nectar and pollen to the bees. And it must be about the easiest plot that any gardener – or non-gardener – can grow

Lavender, rosemary, marjoram and curry leaf. A mixture of high and low, frondy and hardy. The herb garden can be beautiful as well as functional

Flat-leaf and curly-leaf parsley growing in abundance

The scene is timeless and generic, one steeped in the most contented part of the unconscious memory. Feathery fronds moving silently on a warm evening, the smells of lavender, rosemary and mint heavy in the air, floating in through an open window. Something is bubbling on the stove, but it could use some thyme; or a keen, colourful salad, freshly cut, is crying out for some chives, mint or marjoram. The cook wanders a few steps into the garden with a pair of scissors and returns seconds later with a handful of green, vibrant herbs to complete the act.

It’s been said that good cooks are often good gardeners, but life usually gets in the way of one or the other. The kitchen and the garden should be places of creative contentment and relaxation, but the truth is that many of us are afraid of at least one of them, due to the body of knowledge needed to gain a thorough competency. For years, I grew woolly tomatoes, flowers that died, trees that grew lopsided and more. My only success was courgettes, in the sense that they did grow, and plentifully. There was a pleasure in watching them reach an enormous size, then harvesting them for the table, the pleasure felt by a gardener, but culinarily, they were no better than the supermarket equivalent and probably more expensive. All the time, I was overwhelmed by the varieties of plants and their Latin names, and nearly settled for life with a suburban lawn. Until, that is, I planted a herb garden in a single afternoon. I’ve no idea what the PH of my soil is, or the track of the sun across the ground, other than that it rises in the east if it rises at all, but my herb patch has been a success.