One hundred and one herbs, each one followed all the way through: seed selection, planting, what it wants through the season, when to cut it, and how to dry it so the flavor and the medicine survive. Tammi Hartung has grown herbs for more than forty years and cultivates over eighteen hundred varieties on an organic farm in Colorado, and the book reads like someone who has lost plants and learned why.

The second half is what you do with the harvest, which is where most herb books go thin. Cooking, home remedies, salves and body care, and craft use, with the garden design chapter at the front showing planting plans you can copy rather than admire. There is a foreword by Rosemary Gladstar, who is as close to an authority as American herbalism has.

A 256 page Storey trade paperback in a large format, color photographed throughout, and equally usable whether this is your fortieth herb bed or your first pot of thyme on a step.