Herby Turns Ten - Mother Earth Living

We’re in our tenth year and proud of it! The Herb Companion staff is celebrating all year by paging through our past, remembering the good times, laughing at our mistakes, and sharing some highlights from the many writers, gardeners, craftspeople, and artists with whom we’ve worked over the years.

Model Ice Cream

In every issue, starting with the first one in October 1988, our food pages have featured the striking studio photography of Joe Coca. Our photo sessions are always fun because we photograph real food–no tricks, just good food fixed the way you’d fix it at home. We know our recipes are excellent because after the last shot is done, we eat.

For the August/September 1996 issue, we were doing the photography for a story by Theresa Loe on herbal ice cream. It was luscious stuff, and we sampled it a number of times as Joe and his assistant, Lisa Rabold, worked on a photograph of three ice cream cones. For hour after hour after hour, they tinkered with the setup and played with the floral background and subtle lighting to get it exactly right.

It took us a few hours to notice that the ice cream wasn’t melting. Joe finally had to admit that he and Lisa had substituted canned vanilla frosting for the cream in the recipe (while giving us the real stuff to sample). The result was unmeltable ice cream.

Table Traditions

“During the Middle Ages, spiced and seasoned food was a status symbol, a delight to the palate, a celebration of God’s abundance, a means of honoring visiting dignitaries and beloved friends. As we moderns bring out our best white wine or our most delectable paté, so did our medieval ancestors serve forth the capon with pomegranate sauce or the jellied eels in aspic.”

–Robbie L. Cranch, “Herbs for a Medieval Feast”, December 1990/ January 1991

From Our Readers

The Herb Companion has been my companion for ten years. I have every issue, and it’s the only magazine I’ve ever saved. Just this year, on my fiftieth birthday, another woman and I took over an herb/gift shop. It’s been a dream of mine. I am able to use many of your neat ideas. Thanks, and happy tenth birthday!

–Dana Pascale
The Secret Garden, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

In the spring of 1986, my husband, Norman, and I moved to a beautiful small community in the Ozarks of northeastern Oklahoma. We purchased an overgrown property including terraced gardens and a small area of woodland, and we set about restoring the garden areas and combating the jungle of weeds below tall sycamore, oak, hickory, persimmon, dogwood, and other native trees and shrubs. We soon discovered a wild garden of beneficial, beautiful plants.

Now the small garden spaces on the terraces are filled with beautiful, beneficial, fragrant, tasty plants. Black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars eat parsley and dill. The environment is filled with birds, reptiles, small mammals, insects, spiders, fungi, moss, and lichens. Our property was recently certified as an Oklahoma Wildscape. Herbs are good companions.

–June Smith
Spavinaw, Oklahoma

Have you grown and used herbs for ten years or longer? Tell us your story briefly. We’ll share readers’ comments throughout 1998.

A Way with Flowers

The dramatic watercolor of poppies on this issue of The Herb Companion was done by Karmen Effenberger-Thompson, of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Karmen has done four other covers for us, starting with the December 1988/January 1989 issue. The one shown here, a bouquet of herbs and flowers mentioned in Shakespeare’s works, graced the April/May 1995 cover.