Rosmarinus officinalis "Miss Jessop"

Among the upright rosemaries, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' stands as the tall, columnar backbone of the herb garden, sending stiff, aromatic branches skyward in a narrow plume rather than the low sprawl of the creeping kinds. The cultivar carries the name of Euphemia Jessopp, an Edwardian gardener whose plant the great plantsman E. A. Bowles selected and passed into wider cultivation, and the shrub has been grown under her name for more than a century. Botanists have lately moved rosemary out of the old genus and into Salvia, so that the plant now answers to Salvia rosmarinus as often as to the familiar Rosmarinus officinalis, though gardeners and cooks are in no hurry to give up the older word.

The genus name comes from the Latin ros marinus, the dew of the sea, a nod to the way rosemary hazes the dry Mediterranean coasts in pale blue where the salt spray reaches. Rosemary has walked beside people for at least two thousand years, woven into wedding wreaths and funeral rites alike, burned as a fumigant in sickrooms, and pressed into service as the herb of remembrance that Ophelia names in Hamlet. Mediterranean households have long kept a bush by the door for the kitchen and the medicine shelf, stripping the resinous, camphor-scented needles for the roasting pan and steeping them for a tonic tea believed to sharpen a tired mind.

In the garden, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' earns a place wherever a narrow evergreen exclamation point is wanted: clipped into a low hedge along a path, trained as a single-stemmed standard in a pot, or set at the sunny back of an herb bed where the fine, dark, needle-like foliage reads against silver lavenders and gray santolina. Give the shrub the lean, sharply drained, faintly alkaline soil and unbroken sun of the plant's native hillsides, and the reward is a haze of small, pale blue flowers along the stems from late winter into spring, worked over by the first bees of the year.

Reputed to be one of the hardiest of the upright rosemaries, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' holds evergreen through a good deal more cold than the tender cooking sorts, especially where drainage is sharp and winter wet is kept off the roots. Site the plant beside a warm wall, a doorway, or a well-trodden path, so that a passing hand or sleeve releases the scent, and keep the shears busy after flowering to hold the column tight. Few plants give back so much for so little: kitchen herb, medicine-chest standby, pollinator lure, and year-round structure, all on a single fragrant, undemanding shrub.