Fantastic resource that provides planting, harvesting, and use information on many "common" herbs (mostly culinary, a few medicinal) without overwhelming the reader with too much detail. Helpful photographs, drawings and latin names make it easy to find the specific plant at the garden shop. Also includes creative planting ideas.

I just want to get my hands in some dirt!
The Kew Gardener’s Guide to Growing Herbs was so informative - breaking down all the types of herbs. Culinary, medicinal, etc.
The photos were excellent and really aided in the desire to get out and garden!

This title would be a welcome addition to any gardeners’ library.

A very good book if you are interested in how growing and using herbs.
It's full of ideas, advice and information.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC

This is a great resource for growing herbs! The information was concise and to the point without unnecessary fluff. Beautiful illustrations were included throughout the book. Along with tips of growing herbs, the book featured all of the major herbs along with details of how to use them, how to grow them, and how to harvest them. Definitely a book I will reference again!

Another winning guide from the experts at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew.
This one covers growing herbs and is a very comprehensive guide to getting the best out of the plants that you grow. Comprehensive and packed with useful information.

I received a free digital copy of this book for an honest review after I put it on my wishlist for books on NetGalley.  Luckily, the company came through and this gem was on my NetGalley shelf!

I love plants; I mentioned this a few times in the previous book review.  As someone who does has this affection and is pretty good and growing things, I have always loved growing herbs.  I feel like I always have some sort of herb growing around.  My favorite is rosemary because, for some reason, growing rosemary just gives me such a sense of fulfillment.

The first thing that I noticed about this book is that it is aimed for someone who does either love herbs and wants to grow them for real.  I appreciated the little lists of necessary herbs for five different sets of people or subjects, including bakers and drinks and places like windowsills or large containers.  It's nice because if you get kinda lost about herbs and what you may need or want to get started, these lists have stuff that is pretty easy to find either as plants, seeds, or seedlings.

I also love how helpful this book is when it comes to buying plants and selecting them from the store or nursery you buy them at.  If you've been plant shopping, it can be a little intimidating when you are faced with a huge selection of plants and you see other people carefully selecting which plants they want and you have no idea!  Regardless, this book is a nice one to read beforehand to get ready.  Along with this, this book gives instruction on keeping plants in shape and doing maintenance.  With herbs, especially if you are going to harvest herbs and use them regularly, you have to also take special care of them to encourage certain types of growth.

Once again, the photography for this book is gorgeous!  I love how bright they illustrate the topics perfectly.  So many of these would be perfect for prints and art.  It makes me so jealous and inspires me to plan some outdoor planting when I have space and maybe up my own photography game!

Like the houseplant book, this book also goes through several different types of herbs that are either really beneficial and/or easy to grow or find.  And, it includes peppers!  I also like how for certain varieties of herbs that grow well, it provides different types of garden styles, such as a vertical garden for chives and green roofs.  Along with this, it goes over different ways to use herbs such as in oils and alcohol and as tisanes.  Also, with the basics about herbs, this book also goes over when to plant herbs and how to care for them through the seasons, dealing with pests and infestations, and even how herbs are named.  I really appreciate non-fiction books that go into depth for their subject and seem to try to teach their readers something.

A small problem I had with this book specifically is that the types of herbs are not alphabetically arranged.  I am sure that the author had some sort of ulterior motive for the arrangement, but I feel like as a reference book it would have been easier to use if it was alphabetical.  But, it does have a well-done index to help with that.  Overall, I am going to give this one four stars, mainly because of the issue or order and because the ending feels really abrupt.  Otherwise, this was a fantastic book for a beginner or even a seasoned herb grower.

A good primer for selecting and growing herbs. I didn't realize when I picked this up that it would be primarily about growing plants outside--for some reason I thought it would be growing herbs indoors. This is a significant point to note because it's a UK publication and, as such, the varieties and hardiness zones, etc. are all geared toward UK readers. There's still a lot of good information and photography in this book, but if you're a US reader and are looking for a guide to planting herbs outside you might want to try a different book.

Kew Royal Botanic Gardens are world-leaders in gardening and plant science, so any book published under their auspices is a useful book to have. The Kew Gardeners Guide to Growing Herbs is a very good introduction to growing and using more than 70 herbs. For those who might be daunted by the comprehensive listing, there is a useful selection of must-have herbs for cooks, bakers, drinks, florists and wildlife. In a further section a list of easy-care herbs would be a great starting point for a novice gardener.

The format of the book makes for interesting reading, and for follow-up reference. The initial chapter covers choosing herbs, sowing, buying and growing herbs indoors, outdoors, or in containers. This is not a detailed guide, but would serve as an initial introduction for anyone interested in setting up a herb garden. It includes useful suggestions such as ways of controlling the spread of invasive herbs such as mint and horseradish – too many authors skip this critical point!

The largest section covers the details on the specific herbs. I thought the order of the herbs in this chapter was unfortunate and would be confusing to readers as the common name heads the chapter, whilst the order is alphabetically according to their Latin name. However, the content and layout of the information on each herb is excellent. Easy to read layout includes: Latin name, short introduction, table giving plant family name, height, spread and hardiness. Then: how to use, how to grow, how to harvest. The information is concise and valuable. I enjoyed the useful snippets of information or fun facts at the end of each herb section. Another useful addition was the heading classifying each herb as herbaceous perennial, annual, biennial etc. Each herb is well illustrated for easy identification.

Interspersed within these pages are twelve projects with instructions and good photographs ranging from creating a vertical herb garden, to harvesting seed and fennel pollen, to creating herbal wreaths. There is also a very useful note on the naming of herbs – including a warning that common names vary widely, so it is good to know the botanical Latin name when selecting herbs.

The final chapters cover troubleshooting pests and diseases and disorders and “What to do when”, seasonal guidelines for work to do in the herb garden. I found these chapters a little skimpy, but it does provide a starting point for someone interested in creating a herb garden.

For some time I have a wish to grow my own herbs In my back yard and this guide helped me a lot. I love the photos and descriptions altogether with the illustrations so no one will mistake one herb with another. i
Simply wonderful and useful, I just wish it was longer because I finished it in one sitting.
This guide is a wonderful thing to have in personal library and as a gift to friends and family that love plants

This is a brilliant short book about herbs. One of my goals for 2019 is to start a herb garden as I always think they look colourful, smell brilliant and I like that they can be more useful than flowers. I found this book immensely helpful to start my gardening adventures. It contains information on how, where and when to grow the herbs, what you can do with them, when to harvest them and general information about the herb itself. Brilliant for beginners to herbs and more experienced gardeners alike. What really sold the book for me however was all the photographs and drawings scattered throughout the pages. They were all really colourful, bright and clear and even if I was not to attempt to grow these herbs myself I would have appreciated the book for the photos. I can tell already this book is going to be used constantly as it seems great for dipping in and out of to get ideas, know what to do and of course admire the photos!

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’m very impressed with this book. It is authoritative, beautifully illustrated and extremely useful.

Pretty well everything you’d want to know about growing and using herbs is here. Holly Farrell’s text is readable and refreshingly free of waffle, so it’s accessible and tells you what you need to know concisely and clearly. There are some very interesting ideas for growing and using herbs, as well as all the necessary info about each individual herb.

It’s very nicely presented, with lovely photographs and some very beautiful botanical illustrations. (I can’t find any mention of who they’re by, but they look rather like Ehret’s 18th Century illustrations to me.)

In short, this is a very useful, readable and attractive book. Warmly recommended.

(My thanks to White Lion for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Wow! I didn’t expect this much information packed inside such a small book! I do a fair amount of container gardening and enjoy cooking with fresh herbs, so I decided to get a copy of this book. I am glad I did. This book includes information on herbs for bakers, cooks, crafters, gardeners and herbal tea drinkers. It is easy to read, informative and peppered with beautiful pictures on its pages. I plan to create my own vibrant vertical herb garden on my patio with the tips I found in this book.