Grow Your Own Herbs: The 40 Best Culinary Varieties for Home Gardens

Following their well-received The Culinary Herbal, which covered 97 herbs, coauthors Belsinger and Tucker offer this slimmed-down version featuring 40 favorite herbs typically popular in home gardens. Written for beginners, the strong chapters about growing, harvesting, preserving, and using herbs in the kitchen have not been significantly reworked but have moved to the front of the book ahead of the herb profiles, which reuse some of the portraits from the previous work. However, a new layout design has moved quick-reference cultivation information into a small box on most portrait pages, detracting from the full-page, stylish photos. Arranged alphabetically by common names familiar to American cooks, this volume is more authoritative and easier to use than David Squire’s Herb Gardens Specialist Guide, which is similar in scope but arranged by botanical names. Curiously, though growing things indoors is surging in popularity, this gives only cursory treatment to indoor herb gardening.