When I was entering my glory years, learning about myself, becoming independent and setting up my own homes my favourite perfume was Helena Rubinstein’s Herbal Essence. I wore it throughout my student years, I absolutely loved it.
When I bought my first house I didn’t have a garden but I had a back yard which the kitchen overlooked. It wasn’t long before I got started with my pot gardening and trellises up the walls. Of course herbs are the ideal plants for restricted areas and grow happily in pots so that was my main choice of plant. I loved pottering around in my secret little garden and continued my love of herbs from there on. Their versatility is immense and they bring a sense of well being on many levels.
The scents and colour they brought to my first house is something that I’ll always remember – it was like having that perfume around me all the time. Naturally as I learnt more about the plants my interest deepened and I tried new varieties and found out more about them as individual plants and their properties.
Over the years and in my different gardens I always had a selection of herbs. Eventually we came to France to live and even then I brought as many of my herbs as I could with me. Now they are an integral part of our life in France. We set up a nursery selling herbs and specialising also in Penstemons (another favourite range of plant). However it is a very seasonal business and the selling season is quite short here as the French have their, quite rigid, thoughts on what to plant and when, etc. They are not the same as the gardeners in England in many ways and we find that the buying side of the season is somewhat shorter and probably partly to do with the extremes of weather conditions that we have.
We had to diversify and find something that we could bring in more income and being very tied to the work here it had to be home based. We looked at our assets and were almost led, again by the herbs, to our next venture – natural products, many of them herb based. And so we launched our second or as I like to think of it sister, business that works hand in hand with the nursery and we think they are perfect companions.
Life is very busy, often hectic and always challenging so I just want to thank the many people that have encouraged us, believed in us, shared ideas with us and generally supported us from the beginning. If you want to follow us we are on Facebook and have links to many other like minded and interesting sites http://www.facebook.com/pages/Naturally-Progressive-dried-natural-products/288770431801.
Just goes to show nature won’t let us have it all - good colour, not so good a smell, never mind, like you say you can enjoy them in the garden!
Thanks Jacqueline! I have to be most honest though and confess that the best smelling roses we have at present don’t dry so well, they lose colour. Still they are lovely in the garden:-)
Herbs are lovely - one of the first things I grew too. You have some lovely things on the site - I can almost imagine the smell of the rose petals from here.