I also make bee balm ice cream. Ms. Lawton is also growing a few fragrance herbs like Florentine iris and lavender and catnip for her two cats. She also partially dries herbs and burns them as incense in her house. Florentine iris, also known as orrisroot, features a root that develops a violet fragrance while drying. It take two years to get the best effect.
Devotees praise it as a rinse that restores hair color and removes dandruff.
Ms. Lawton, who majored in history at the State University of New York in Purchase, says most of her interest in growing herbs is historical. In literature about the John Jay garden, she learned, for example, that such a commonplace cooking herb as rosemary was burned in medieval times as protection against the plague called the black death. And up to the middle of our own century, rosemary leaves were combined with juniper berries to fumigate hospitals in France. A brochure handed to visitors at the garden recalls that tansy was used by early American housewives to discourage ants and was hung in kitchens and rubbed on tabletops. And pennyroyal was relied upon to chase away fleas.