Basil and Rosemary

We don't keep a garden, except for basil and rosemary. They grow in pots in the backyard. That's the honest size of the outdoor growing in this house, and it's enough to write about because it's real.

Basil and rosemary will not cool a July afternoon in Anthem. They will not turn a Valley lot into a garden essay. What they will do is live in pots out back, close enough to the kitchen to show up in the cooking.

The backyard is nice and sunny in the morning. I wrote a short piece about that in The Backyard in the Morning. We have no indoor plants. The growing we do happens out there, in those two pots.

This is not a deferred garden, waiting for the right season or the right raised bed. We cook almost every night, we eat only organic, and the food in this house comes from stores we already use, and from the grains I source online. I wrote about that in What I Mean by Eating Well at Home. The herbs are a small exception: something we grow, rather than something we only buy.

I like that they are kitchen herbs. Basil and rosemary belong to dinner. They fit a house that already cooks, already packs lunches, already sits down at a candlelit table most nights. They do not ask us to become gardeners in order to eat well.

Arizona is not a year-round garden in the way a wetter place can be. Summer here is a heat problem first. Official heat guidance, and the ordinary habits that keep this house livable, are in An Arizona House That Stays Livable in the Heat. The herbs live in a smaller register. A sprig of rosemary or a handful of basil is the kind of small thing a full house can actually use. It does not have to be a harvest. It has to be close enough to the cooking that someone reaches for it.

What we grow is basil and rosemary, in pots in the backyard. If that sounds modest, it is. Two herbs, used in a kitchen that already cooks, are the growing I can describe from here.