“My garden reflects who I am,” claims Maryann Readal, secretary for The Herb Society of America.Maryann has been gardening all of her life, it seems. As a young girl she remembers gathering mint leaves from her grandmother’s garden, making medicinal and culinary concoctions out of them, and then trying them out on her unsuspecting younger brothers.
Relatively new to serious herb use and gardening, she thanks The Herb Society for that recent addiction. A librarian by profession, her garden reflects her natural and learned tendencies to collect things. She loves collecting and planting different species of herbs.
“Just because it is not supposed to grow in my zone 8b garden,” she says, “I am not deterred from trying to grow it, thinking that my garden is different.” However, her garden falls short of reflecting her profession in its organization, she claims. Her garden is a jumble of colors and different plant types—herbs mixed in with annuals and perennials. And this year a few tomato plants found their way into that garden jumble.
