STYLE : GARDENS : Spreading the Herb
On a third of an acre in the Hollywood Hills, herb-garden designer Carole Saville has planted perhaps her finest landscape--in her own back yard. Perfectly arranged with a low hedge of Korean box and a central brick planter of variegated myrtle, the garden features culinary herbs of all kinds: lavenders, scented geraniums, thymes and a few Asian sprigs--rau ram, culentro, kaffir lime--not commonly listed in herb books.
Saville wasn’t always a green thumb, though. She describes herself as a “Memphis girl who never planted anything” before moving to New Jersey and experimenting there. “When I moved here from New Jersey, I pulled up things bare root and brought them on the plane in a duffel bag,” she says. Soon Saville, then a food writer, had re-created her East Coast garden on a smaller scale, but not so small that Angelenos didn’t notice. “People started asking me if I would design their herb gardens,” she recalls. “So I decided to take my hobby and make a business out of it.”
It’s fairly easy to identify a Saville herb garden--look for the small, white fraises des bois , or Alpine strawberries, not found in any market. “They taste exactly like the ripe red berries, even though they don’t look ripe,” she says. Borage with edible white flowers (blue flowers are more common) is another tip-off.
One of Saville’s gardens, complete with tansy, hyssop and a plot of bronze fennel, marches up a hill under an oak tree in Studio City. Nearby, in a mini-garden owned by two TV stars, Saville planted sweet woodruff, seasonal lettuces, marjoram, salad burnet, two parsleys, basil, chervil and sorrel. And at a drop-dead mansion in Bel-Air, buck’s horn plantain, scarlet runner beans, violas and nasturtiums were arranged in existing raised beds along a steep, terraced slope.
When Saville meets with clients, they usually are familiar with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. “But they are often unaware of lovage, costmary, lime balm, sweet cicely. So I tell them about the possibilities,” she says. “If they really want just the basics, then I will bring Clevelandii , purple and ‘Tricolor’ sages, different kinds of rosemary with white, pink and blue flowers; they’ll get ornamental as well as culinary.” And if clients have no idea what they want, Saville plays her herbal ace. “I go to my own garden and pick them a bouquet of all those plants and let them smell. By the time they’ve sniffed everything, they are really excited. This never fails.”
