Rosemary

Rosemary puts out beautiful lavender colored flowers in spring

Our next herb is Rosemary.  I can't say enough about this plant.  It survived our severe winter and came back with a vengeance in Spring!  That's right...Rosemary will grow in Tucson all year round and is used in our landscape!  In fact, my school has used this plant in a repetitive pattern as you will see in the pics below.  The plant is SUPER fragrant and I love walking past it rubbing my hand on the evergreen needles.  It's very very low maintenance and thrives in our Tucson sun.  You can put this plant right into our clay soil and it will grow with the proper ground and hole prep.  This eventually becomes a larger plant/hedge and can be slow growing. I neglected this herb in our garden last summer and it did fine without the extra water.  It's extremely easy to grow and I recommend using it in mass plantings or just by itself.  If you are a beginning Tucson gardener, who wants herbs but doesn't necessarily have the time to fuss over plants, this is the one to get.  Of course, you'll have more Rosemary than you'll know what to do with and even though I don't use it in my cooking, I do rub my hands over it everytime I'm in the garden because I love the smell.  I also love how this plant grows as it has a very bushy habit.  It should be watered regularly during the summer to keep it healthy. It enjoys mostly all sun, as it is a Mediterranean plant, but perhaps a bit of protection from our brutal summer afternoon sun for its' first year. After that, it doesn't matter:) This is going to sound extremely geeky on my part, but I notice that our plants, generally speaking, love the sun.  However, around the  3PM-6PM hour time frame...especially on the Southern and Western sides of the gardens in the downtown area, the plants are exhausted from the heat in the dead of summer and look like they are wilting......well except for the bamboo and cacti.  Rosemary can take the sun, but if you are just starting the plant out, you may want to consider a bit of relief from the sun for the first year or so to let it get established. But it does love sun and it will take more of the brutal light as it gets older. Rosemary is considered one of the best herbs to grow for Zone 9 and one that I highly recommend for your garden or landscape. Until tomorrow.....

Outside the front of my school, these Rosemary bushes get brutal sunshine and continue to grow!