Sage Advice--It’s Thyme to Use Herbs : From Chairs to Stairs, Living and Dried Herbs Add Color, Fragrance to Home

Dried and living herbs of all colors, shapes and smells add ambience to your home.

Organic decorator and author Sue Kirby says the lavender, mauve, soft green and blue colors of herbs are infinitely preferable to dyed artificial products.

“These are real colors, real fragrances, real products,” says Kirby, who has been decorating with herbs for 10 years. “The minute I found sage, rosemary and spearmint, I began using them all the time.”

Kirby decorates mantels by putting little pots of herbs across the top with a topiary tree of thyme or rosemary at each end.

“I might put in something else like a small early American birdhouse or an upside-down pot to give it a little height,” she says, “so the mantel itself becomes a scene of herbs, not just artifacts and not just green.”

This treatment works effectively on breakfront cabinets, bookcases and shelves as well.

Another Kirby specialty is to decorate the backs of chairs.

“Everybody does everything, but not the backs of chairs,” she says.

She makes a garland using a base of honeysuckle--”a very flexible vine”--and glues dried herbs along it in a half moon shape, then attaches it with brown wrapped wire to an edge of the chairback. She then puts streamers of raffia down either side “so each chair back has a crescent-shaped garland of herbs with raffia streaming down.”

When she plans a dinner party, she decorates with herbs that complement the food. “When people come in they say, ‘What smells so good?’ I think it’s the combination.” The herbs enhance the taste of dinner and “give a warm feeling to the home in general,” Kirby says.

Kirby also makes wild wreaths with herbs, and says “you can decorate the sides of stairs with cascades of twigs and branches and herbs for fall.”

For Thanksgiving, Kirby will be eating dinner on an unusual tablecloth. “I took preserved oak leaves and glued each leaf over an ordinary brown tablecloth and made a whole tablecloth of leaves. It’s just wonderful. It’s so rich.”

You can also make place mats with the leaves just around the edge.

She made a cornucopia of vines to replace “those wicker ones that we’ve seen forever” and filled it with herbs.

Mary Lou Heard of Heard’s Herb Garden in Westminster says that in Victorian times women used what was growing in their gardens to make their decorations, perfumes and many of their gifts. “When they gave a gift they tied an herb on it or they gave a gift of herbs,” she says.

Today, people make herbal vinegars, jams and jellies to give as gifts, Heard says, and each herbal gift “has a touch of the person who made it and a touch of a gentler way of life.”

Other herb stores are Thyme in San Juan Capistrano, Le Herbier en Provence in Costa Mesa and J & T Imports in Solana Beach.

Sue Kirby will teach an organic decorating class at Heard’s Herb Garden in Westminster in December. For information, call (714) 894-2444.