Where Imagination Takes Root
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is a garden of the mind — beautiful, imaginative, and completely without soil. An herb garden happens in real time. When imagination and soil meet, magic happens. Not in a book, not on a screen. Right beneath your feet.
Why Herbs?
The herb garden engages all five senses simultaneously — unique among garden types.
Each child comes with their own interests, personality, and talents. Some children want to eat what they grow. Some just want to dig in the dirt. Others are curious about the creatures living under the rocks. The key is matching a child’s age, interests, and experience with what they love in their garden and the plants they choose — and herbs are a good fit for almost every child.
A Garden of Herbs
Crush a mint leaf and smell your fingers. Run your hand across borage and feel the fuzziness. Stand beside lavender in full bloom and listen to the hum. Taste a nasturtium flower straight from the garden. The herb garden is sensory, immediate, generous, and endlessly surprising. Herbs make friends easily — and they require less care than most flowers and vegetables, and are more resistant to pests.
When buying plants and seeds for your garden, keep in mind that some herbs are best raised from seed, while others are best grown from starts. Annual herbs like calendula, dill, basil, and nasturtium grow fast from seed and catch and hold a child’s attention until the slower-growing plants catch up.
The Sixth Sense
There is something beyond the five senses. The herb garden cultivates a sixth sense — observation and action. You watch the basil long enough to know it’s about to flower. Because you want the leaves, not the flowers, you pinch them. It branches. You harvest, you pinch, you leave the caterpillar alone. You let the dill flower. The butterfly emerges. The garden moves forward.
Most of childhood is the opposite: act first, observe later, if at all. The garden quietly reverses that.
That sixth sense — call it botanical intuition, a gardener’s eye, or simply the ability to pay attention — is the real gift the herb garden gives a child.
Research in child development shows that children who garden develop stronger attention, better nutritional habits, and deeper connections to the living world.
The herb garden is one of the best places to start.
Herbs are remarkable multitaskers – in the garden and out
The same plant that attracts bees and butterflies also ends up in your tea, your medicine cabinet, your kitchen, and your history book. Culinary, medicinal, aromatic, and ecological — herbs move between worlds without effort. Children who grow them move between those worlds, too.
Plants do not care where you come from. They are already part of your life. Every culture on earth uses herbs in its foods, celebrations, remedies, and rituals. Sharing those plant stories builds empathy, knowledge, and understanding — one garden or plant at a time.
Many herbal activities involve tasting, smelling, and nibbling. Make sure children understand not to put anything in their mouths without first checking with an adult.
10 Herbs to Grow — A Cast of Characters
1. Mint – Mentha spp.
Perennial | Full Sun to Partial Shade | Grows up to 2 feet | USDA Zones 4–9
A large group of delightful aromatic plants known for their rambling growth habits, square stems, and wide assortment of fragrances. Mint’s clean, sharp, instantly familiar scent is why it ends up in everything from your toothpaste to your cup of tea. Mint hybridizes freely, and nursery labels can be unreliable. Most herb lovers agree that the best way to select a good plant is by the nose rather than by the name.
2. Lemon Balm – Melissa officinalis
Perennial | Full Sun to Partial Shade | Grows up to 2 feet | USDA Zones 4–9
A cousin of the kitchen garden mints, lemon balm has a rich history of cultural, medicinal, and culinary use. One of the most sweetly scented of all herbs, lemon balm’s crinkly heart-shaped leaves release a pleasing lemony-mint fragrance when gently brushed. For centuries, people have used it to calm nerves and invite sleep. Its Greek name, melissa, means honeybee. Ancient beekeepers rubbed fresh lemon balm leaves inside their hives to encourage bees to return and bring their friends.
3. Chives – Allium schoenoprasum
Perennial | Full Sun, rich, moist, well-drained soil | Grows 12 to 24 inches | USDA Zones 3–10
Chives are members of the onion family — one of the world’s most popular culinary flavorings. Marco Polo brought chives to Europe in the late thirteenth century. Cut them, and they come back. That is the first lesson chives teach a child: some plants respond to harvest not with defeat but with renewal. Snip the hollow green stems from the base, leaving an inch above the soil, and within days, new growth appears, like a reliable friend. Let them flower. The globe-shaped purple blooms are among the prettiest things in the herb garden, and the bees will agree.
4. Chamomile, German – Matricaria recuttia
Annual | Full Sun, loamy soil | Grows 1 to 2 feet
Brush against chamomile, and it smells like apples. The small daisy-like flowers have calmed children for centuries, steeped in tea and handed over in a warm cup. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Rabbit gives Peter chamomile tea to soothe his tummy and calm him after his scary experience in Mr. McGregor’s garden. Once established, chamomile self-seeds freely, reappearing each spring like a good friend. Hoverflies and small native bees find the open flowers irresistible.
5. Sweet Basil – Ocimum basilicum
Annual | Full Sun, loamy soil | Grows 18 to 36 inches
Basil has a fascinating history and an intriguing range of varieties. The herbalist Nicholas Culpeper declared the smell of basil “good for the heart and the head.” The highly aromatic leaves release their scent the moment you touch them. Colors range from dark purple to pale green, solid or mottled, and may be serrated or smooth, glossy or crinkly. Pinch growing tips to encourage bushiness and delay flowering. Allow flowering, and soon the bumblebees arrive to work every bloom.
6. Calendula – Calendula officinalis
Annual | Full Sun, loamy soil | Grows 8 to 24 inches
Calendula, sometimes called pot marigold, is one of the most cheerful and generous herbs in the garden. Its bloom colors range from pale yellow to deep burnt orange, and they keep coming, week after week, as long as you remember to deadhead them. This is the herb that teaches a child the simple discipline of tending — pick the spent flowers and the plant responds with more. Bees find the open daisy-like blooms from the first warm days of spring and return all season long. The flowers aren’t just pretty — they add a delicate flavor and bright color to salads, eggs, and cheese.
7. Nasturtium – Tropaeolum majus
Annual | Full Sun to Part Shade, loamy soil | Vining or mounding
Nasturtium is one of the most rewarding herbs for children to grow. Its flowers invite bees, and both leaves and blooms are edible — peppery, bright, and completely surprising to a child tasting a flower for the first time. Climbing types scramble up fences or trellises with enough vigor to please impatient gardeners. Bloom colors range from buttercream to burgundy and everything in between. Plant the seeds directly in the ground, step back, and let the plant flourish.
8. Borage – Borago officinalis
Annual | Full Sun, loamy soil | Grows 24 to 36 inches
Once you plant it, borage self-seeds freely. Its star-shaped blue flowers are a striking color in the garden, irresistible to bees. Borage’s continuous nectar renewal encourages bees to return throughout the day. Both the cucumber-flavored flowers and young leaves are edible. Float the blue blossoms in a cold drink or toss them into a fresh salad — one of summer’s delightful pleasures.
9. Dill – Anethum graveolens
Annual | Full Sun, loamy soil | Grows 18 to 48 inches
Plant extra dill — pollinators love it. If you find a fat green and black striped caterpillar on your dill, don’t move it; it’s a future eastern black swallowtail butterfly. Dill is feathery, graceful, self-seeding, and free-spirited. Its umbrella-shaped flowers attract bees, wasps, hoverflies, and butterflies. Let some flower, some go to seed. Goldfinches will thank you in autumn.
10. Lavender – Lavandula spp.
Perennial | Full Sun, loam, well-drained gravelly loam | Grows 1 to 3 feet | USDA Zones 5-8
Stand next to lavender in full bloom and listen. A single plant can hum with dozens of bees at once — honeybees, bumblebees, small native bees — working the long fragrant purple spikes with a focused intensity that is one of the great sounds of summer. Lavender takes patience — it is slower to establish than anything else on this list, and it wants good drainage and full sun without compromise. But a child who tends a lavender plant through its first quiet year and comes back to find it alive and growing in spring has learned something about the rewards of waiting.
Read the Plant
When a plant shifts from growing leaves to making flowers and seeds, it sends everything it has — all the energy from every leaf — toward that one purpose. Flavor concentrates in leaves before flowering and diminishes after. This is why you pinch basil, why you harvest mint before it blooms, and why dill tastes different once it has flowered.
No single set of rules applies to all herbs. You just need to watch a plant closely and follow its life cycle — whether it grows for one season, two, or returns year after year. If you know a simple fact about how plants grow, you can usually figure out the best time to harvest the leaves, when to gather flowers, and when to collect seeds.
What the Garden Gives Back
The real beauty of herbs emerges when you look closely. Herbs connect us to the past, root us in the present, and give us reason to tend the future. A child who grows herbs learns to watch before they act, to notice before they harvest, and to see something beyond themselves that is quietly, persistently alive.
As Jane L. Taylor — youth advocate, horticulturist, and educator — wrote, the garden is “a place where children can acquire a hands-on appreciation of our environment, and skills to better understand our world and the people around us.”
Written by NGB Member: Susan Betz
Author: Neighboring with Nature / Native Herbs for Pleasure & Purpose and
Herbal Houseplants
About National Garden Bureau
Founded more than 100 years ago, the National Garden Bureau educates, inspires, and motivates people to grow home gardens. National Garden Bureau members are horticultural experts, and the information shared with you comes directly from these experts to ensure your gardening success.
“This post about Native Herbs is provided as an educational/inspirational service of the National Garden Bureau and our members. Please credit and link to National Garden Bureau and author member when using all or parts of this article.”
