How To Keep A Kitchen Herb Garden

Wine glass made up of herbs and flowers

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Fresh from her Gold medal win at the Chelsea Flower Show, Dr Catherine MacDonald has chosen five must-have plants from the garden that you can use to create some tasty mocktails.

With less and less people choosing to reach for a bottle of wine, Catherine created the Seedlip Garden – based on the journey of Seedlip; the world's first non-alcoholic spirit – at this year's show.

With a nod to 17th-century apothecary origins and modern-day pioneering approach to distillation, the Seedlip Garden, built by Landform Consultants. championed plants and botanicals famed for their flavour, beauty or medicinal properties. The garden celebrated an era where plants were an essential ingredient to supporting our health and wellbeing.

Seedlip Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show - designed by Catherine MacDonald - built by Landform Consultants. Artisan Garden.

The Seedlip Garden

RHS / Tim Sandall

Now with summer on the horizon and more outdoor entertaining and alfresco dining to come, Catherine has chosen her top botanicals to create the perfect mocktails. Take a look at what herbs you can pluck fresh from your borders or pots to instantly enhance your drinks this summer:

Rosemary

Use as an attractive swizzle stick or crush/muddle the leaves with the desired liquid to release the oils, then strain.
Rosemary has a distinctive piney flavour that is also slightly peppery. It works well with citrus flavours and is surprisingly good with apple too.
Try infusing it in a syrup (1 cup of sugar dissolved into 1 cup of water) with sprigs. The addition of ginger makes a particularly good accompaniment too.

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Spearmint

It's just as well that spearmint grows like a weed as it's one of the most used fresh herbs in cocktails and mocktails. Make sure you grow it in a pot or it will swamp a border in no time.
Spearmint has a crisper, cleaner flavour than its more peppery cousin.

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Thyme

Not many people know that thyme is a member of the mint family, it is gentler in flavour, more aromatic, and so makes a good foil for most alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks.
It works well with citrus especially if it's made into a syrup with water and honey (1/2 cup of each with 4 thyme sprigs).

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Pea shoots

These are one of the main ingredients in Seedlip's Garden 108. They are seven times more rich in Vitamin C than blueberries, they taste like the essence of summer and can be served as an attractive (vitamin rich) garnish, muddled with the liquid or combined into a syrup.
Pea shoots work particularly well with mint.

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Fennel

This feathery fantasy not only looks good it tastes great. Its aniseed, liquorice flavour adds a dimension that is unique. It's a classic accompaniment to citrus and the absolute bonus is that it looks great in a flower border.
It will self-seed like a weed too so once bought you'll be supplying friends and family for life.

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Olivia Heath Executive Digital Editor, House Beautiful UK Olivia Heath is the Executive Digital Editor at House Beautiful UK where she's busy uncovering tomorrow's biggest home trends, all whilst delivering stylish room inspiration, small space solutions, easy garden ideas and house tours of the hottest properties on the market.

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