Herbs and Edible Flowers: Gardening for the Kitchen

Pleasance Crawford, a Canadian landscape and garden-history writer, is
the co-author of The Canadian Landscape and Garden History Directory and
Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing.

Lois Hole is not only a prolific horticultural journalist and the author
of many bestselling books about gardening, she is also a trained
musician, a past member of many boards, a recent chancellor of the
University of Alberta, a Member of the Order of Canada, and, beginning
in February 2000, the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta. In 1979, when she
and her husband founded Hole’s Greenhouses & Gardens Ltd. (now one of
Western Canada’s largest retail greenhouse operations, yet still a
family enterprise), they had already been in mixed farming and vegetable
production since 1952. The combination of long experience and up-to-date
information gives Hole’s writing its perennial feeling of
authenticity.

From 1997 through 1999, on a three-week rotational basis, The Globe and
Mail’s Focus section published garden columns by Lois Hole of Alberta,
Marjorie Harris of Ontario, and Des Kennedy of British Columbia. The
Best of Lois Hole presents a selection of her contributions to this fine
trio of Canadian garden voices, together with small black-and-white
photos and Hole’s retrospective comments on each piece. It is a
collection well worth reading; the only thing better would be a volume
combining the best columns of all three writers.

Herbs & Edible Flowers is a different kind of book altogether,
combining as it does descriptions of Hole’s “25 Favourite Culinary
Herbs,” each followed by one-paragraph introductions; comments about
varieties; growing, harvesting, and preserving suggestions; and recipes.
A second section, “For the Adventurous,” presents briefer comments
on 75 more edible herbs and flowers. The pages are colorful and
attractive, the horticultural expertise is vintage Hole, and the recipes
(by John Butler and Joyce Pearson) are all worth a try. For readers
wearing their gardening hats, the “Index of Species” provides easy
access to the featured plants; for those wearing their chef’s caps,
the “Index of Recipes” lists the 86 items on the menu.