10 Perennial Herbs I Recommend
Perennials are one of my favorite topics when it comes to gardening. I love being able to plant something once and enjoy it for many years. And, as a bonus, many perennials will spread over time, meaning you can dig up portions of them to put elsewhere in your yard or share!
And when it comes to perennials, there is nothing better than perennial herbs. Not only do they come back every year, but they are also generally very pest resistant and incredibly useful. Here are 10 of my favorite perennial herbs I grow in my garden and recommend for low-maintenance, practical gardens.
1. Thyme
First up is thyme. I have thyme all over my garden. It smells great, is super useful in the kitchen, and helps to fill out bare spots very well as a ground cover. Most of my thyme was propagated from a single plant—it’s super easy to take and root cuttings.
I also love the plant’s tiny flowers when it blooms. I have some with purple flowers and some with white. Regardless of the color, they attract bees and butterflies, which is always a bonus!
2. Sage
Sage is another go-to perennial herb for me. It’s up there with thyme as far as the number of plants I have goes. I believe the variety I have in my yard is Berggarten sage. I really can’t remember because I got my first sage plants as cheap clearance plants, and then I propagated the rest.
Pests never seem to bother this plant, and the leaves have a distinct smell that can be a helpful pest deterrent when it’s around raised garden beds. It also stays quite low to the ground and mounds, making it a really nice plant to fill in space around taller plants or to plant in the front of a perennial bed.
3. Sorrel
Sorrel might be more of an acquired taste, but it’s one of my favorites. It has a tart lemon flavor that I absolutely love. And it produces gorgeous green leaves through the worst of the summer heat, continuing to grow even after the first frost.
It is super high in vitamin C, and while I haven’t done much cooking with it, I love chopping it up and adding it to salads. The lemon flavor complements a simple olive oil dressing really well. Plant common sorrel, which is all green, or red vein sorrel, which has striking deep red veining on its leaves. Both are great.
4. Rosemary
Rosemary is another classic that I use for so many things. Cooking is an obvious use, but I also just really love the smell of rosemary. I love cutting the sprigs for flower arrangements, drying the leaves, and even adding it to things like baking soda carpet powder.
Rosemary also grows like more of a shrub than many other herbs do, so it’s a nice focal point in the garden. Prune your rosemary in the spring after it flowers, cutting back about 1/3 of its size. This will help encourage bushier growth and prevent your plant from getting floppy and having a bare center.
5. Mint
If you’ve been gardening longer than a few minutes, you’ve probably heard that you should never plant mint in the ground. I’m not going to tell you what to do…but I am going to tell you to plant with caution. That’s because mint spreads prolifically, and once you plant it in the ground, it’s very hard to get rid of.
This goes for all types of true mints (you’ll know a true mint because it has a square-shaped stem). Like the catnip pictures below. I like planting mints in large pots or in my Greenstalk, where they stay contained.
6. Lemon balm
Lemon balm is closely related to mint, and I could have just folded lemon balm in when talking about mint. But I love lemon balm so much that I just had to give it its own spotlight. I have lemon balm planted in my elevated garden bed, not in the ground.
You can do lots of things with lemon balm, but I like to use it for teas. I also like to just walk by my lemon balm and give the leaves a little rub to smell the strong lemon scent. It’s sooo delicious!
7. Oregano
And speaking of delicious, if you do any cooking at all, you probably know how useful oregano is in the kitchen. I’ve had the below plant in the ground for a few years, and it started off as a tiny plant in a 4″ pot. So you can see that it spreads pretty prolifically!
The good news is that it’s pretty easy to pull it out of areas you don’t want it in. It grows very low to the ground—a fantastic and delicious-smelling ground cover—and has a super shallow root system. I’m actually not sure what variety of oregano I have in my yard. It has much smaller leaves than the Greek oregano I’m used to, making it a bit harder to harvest, but it’s still lovely!
8. Lavender
Lavender is such a classic scent, and the lovely flowers make great additions to arrangements. I find that it’s somewhat challenging to maintain happy perennial lavender plants where we’re at in Maryland zone 7, probably because I often neglect pruning.
They also thrive in hot, dry air, and our summers here are extremely humid. So I don’t get too bent out of shape if I see a lavender plant declining. If it isn’t looking so hot, I’ll take some cuttings to propagate and start over. It’s pretty easy to root.
9. Comfrey
Next up—comfrey! If you’re into medicinal herbs, you likely grow comfrey or at least are familiar with it due to its topical uses (it is not safe for human consumption). I grow it because it has a super deep taproot that pulls up nutrients from deep in the soil.
You can chop down comfrey and use it as a green mulch since the leaves are packed with all the good stuff the roots drew out of the soil. The plant will grow back readily, and it’s super easy to propagate from even a tiny root cutting. Comfrey also makes a great low-growing ground cover, but snip the flowers before they go to seed unless you want comfrey sprouting up everywhere.
10. Parsley
And finally we have parsley. While parsley is technically a biennial because it completes its life cycle in 2 years, I’m including it here since it lives through the winter. In fact, the picture below was taken just before Christmas after a few inches of snow melted.
I love things that hold their lush color through colder temperatures. And in the spring and summer, parsley is a favorite for swallowtail butterflies. It’s a host plant, so you’ll find lots of caterpillars feasting on it before becoming butterflies!
