Bill Sittig: I'm Bill Sittig, chief of the Library Science, Technology
and Business Division, and this event is one in our series
in which we learn from important practitioners and writers
in the various fields of science, technology and business.
These events also enable us
to showcase the library's immensely rich and broad collections.
I hope you'll find some time to look at the books that we have on exhibit
on fragrant plants and herbs which have been assembled by my staff.
Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to mention just a few
of our upcoming programs.   On Tuesday, October 13th, John Beck,

president of the North Star Leadership Group is going to speak
on his book, Got Game: How a New Generation
of Gamers is Reshaping Business Forever.
And on November 9th, Sir Harold Evans, historian, publisher
and journalist is going to speak about his new book,
They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine,
Two Centuries of Innovators.
And on December 7th, Barbara Ehrenreich, well-known essayist
and social critic will talk about her work experiences which led
to the publication of her book, Global Woman, Nannies, Maids,
and Sex Workers in the New Economy.
I hope you'll be able to attend some of these programs
which I think you'll find interesting and enjoyable.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Connie Carter
and Alison Kelly of my division for all their good efforts
to make today's program possible.
Connie and Alison assembled the books that you see here on exhibit,
and they provided the treats using herbal ingredients,
which I hope you will get a chance,
I think most of you already have, had a chance to sample.
They've also brought a selection of herbs
which will be raffled off following the presentation.
So stick around not only to speak to our speaker but also to see
if you win some plants in the raffle.
It is now my great pleasure to introduce
for the second time this year today's speaker, Holly Shimizu.
Many of you will probably recall that Holly was in the middle
of her highly informative and visually exciting presentation
on herbs in the garden this past May when we were abruptly evacuated
when an amateur pilot accidentally intruded into the air space
in Washington, D.C. Given that Holly is not a stranger to us,
I will dispense with my usual lengthier introduction
by just mentioning for those who were not in attendance last May
that Holly has been executive director of our neighbor,
the U.S. Botanic Garden since November, 2000.
In that position she has been responsible for renovations
and innovations and has received numerous horticultural awards
and honors.   She is a media celebrity,

having hosted PBS's Victory Garden television show for 12 years.
And she and her husband are some who were featured last year
in Southern Living magazine for designing the gardens
at their home at Glen Echo, Maryland.
And now to learn more about herbs and fragrance in the garden,
it's my honor to once again welcome Holly Shimizu
to the Library of Congress.   [ applause ]

Holly Shimizu: Thank you very much.
It's my pleasure to be able to be a speaker here for many reasons.
I am very devoted to this particular branch of the Library of Congress
because they are so helpful and the service
that is provided is absolutely the best ever.
And so I'm more than happy to come also,
because it's a five-minute walk for me to get here and I don't have
to drive and I don't have to get on any kind of transportation.
And we are sister/brother organizations here
because both the Library of Congress and the U.S. Botanic Garden are
under the joint committee on the Library.
And we do exchange a lot in terms of these references
that have been put out here for you.
I put my top favorites here on the shelf right on the right.
Those are three of the herb books that I use on a regular basis.
So I decided to regroup my lecture based on some of the things
that the audience specifically asked me the last time I was here,
and that is to talk about shade herbs.
And then I also thought I would talk about the fragrance of many
of the herbs that I'm going to show you.
And we have a slide list so that you have the names of the plants,
which always makes it a little bit easier
if you see one you particularly like and you want to go out and buy it.
Also I encourage you to ask me questions as I go along.
I prefer the more informal style of presentation,
and if you have something that occurs to you, feel free to bring it
up as we move through the slides.
I think using fragrant plants, whether they're in the sun
or whether they're in the shade is very important in terms
of the placement to think about a courtyard, an enclosed space
where you might want to sit down.
So I am particularly focused on the areas that are near the windows
of my house so that in this kind of beautiful weather when you open
up the windows, you can get the wafts of these fragrant plants,
and also in the places where I'm going to sit outside.
On my porch I grow a lot of fragrant plants in containers
because I know I'm going to sit out there.
And then I do plants for the nighttime also
because so many plants have fragrance during the night.
For example, the moonflower.
I brought some for you, except they've already closed up.
They're not offering their fragrance, but they offer
that fragrance at night because they are pollinated
by night flying moths.
And so the whole pollination factor of fragrance is very interesting
and you're able to extend the fragrances in your garden by knowing
when they open and when they're in bloom and who they are attracting.
And the other factor as well is to extend the season
of interest in our garden.
We're very lucky in the mid Atlantic region
because we have great extended spring and fall.
Sometimes we take our fall all the way to mid December,
and I've had tender annuals in bloom in December.
And that's why you want to think a lot about season extension,
because we really are able
to maximize the enjoyment of spring and fall.
And I have a few samples of things that I will pass around as I talk
about them because how can you really focus on fragrance
if you don't actually smell things as we go along.
But I want to begin -- here we go -- with my shade garden talk,
continuing on some of the herbal plants that grow well in shade.
That's what so many of us have.
I know I have a shade garden at home because so many
of my trees have grown together, and I grow all of my sun-loving herbs
on my roof garden, and I have large containers that do very well
on the roof and, in fact, I only have to water them about once a week
because they have a special holding area for the water
so that you don't have to get up there and water them every day.
But in the shade not so many of the culinary herbs are going
to perform well because most of the herbs we consider culinary are
from the Mediterranean region where they receive full sun,
absolute full sun, which here in this area means
at least six hours of sunlight.
So here, a few of the herbs I'm going to show you are plants
that will take dappled light, not 100 percent shade,
but they will take overhead shade from trees.
And one of the things that's very beautiful
if you have a shade garden is for you to think about the layers
of the plants that are in that shade garden.
And one of the herbs that grows in my heavy shade
and grows quite well is this very important medicinal herb called
goldenseal, hydrastis canadensis.
And if you're interested in herbal medicine, I know you've seen it
in many of the over-the-counter medicines.
It's a wonderful plant to grow here because it is quite easy to grow,
and it is also significant because there's a group of herbalists
in a group called the United Plant Savers who are working very hard
to educate people to know that you don't need to dig herbs in the wild
in order for them to be effective.   You can grow them.

And goldenseal is their main sample herb for that.
You can produce these herbs, even ginseng,
and their quality will be equal to the wild crafted.
So that breaks that myth.
You probably recognize this beautiful native herb,
and this is one that you see
if you hike along the C&O; Canal here in Washington.
It's bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis,
a wonderful spring ephemeral that comes up in the early spring
with these beautiful flowers.
And if you are a gardener who likes to have the really unusual
and very special, you might try to get the double flowering form
of bloodroot, because they will cost you about five times as much
but they're very beautiful.
Now bloodroot is an herb and, in fact, it is in the poppy family.
And from these leaves, if you crush these leaves you get the color,
an orange red color.
And so historically they have been used by Native Americans
for the dye that they provide.
And currently bloodroot is an important ingredient in mouthwash
and toothpaste to prevent gum disease.
And so it's in big demand as an herbal product.
And you can see the yellow dye that comes from it
if you break the leaf off.
So it's a good plant for you to grow here if you're interested
in native herbs, and you have that dappled sunlight.
It does like to grow in the woodland kind of soil, so you always want
to try to recreate the sort of soil that you might see
where a plant is growing in the wild.
Now comfrey is an herb that will grow in some shade.
This is one of the woodland comfreys;
it's quite a beautiful plant.
I do like to caution gardeners if I think a plant is really vigorous,
some might call it very happy and other people might call it invasive.
So it really depends on your frame.
I like comfrey but I do dig it up periodically
because I find that it's so vigorous.
I mean, we were just talk about French tarragon,
which is an herb I absolutely love, and if I'm not careful,
one of these aggressors like comfrey will just take it over.
And the next thing you know, you know, the French tarragon is gone.
So beware, it is considered a medicinal herb,
although it is considered risky because, you know,
some studies have shown that it can cause cancer.
So you have to do your research clearly if you're going
to be using these medicinally.
I am really referring to it more or less
as an attractive shade herb here.   The one I love and just saw

in the wild is this Cardinal flower, lobelia cardinalis.
And I have one; I took a little piece from the Bartholdi Park.
Here, want to just pass it around.
This is the Cardinal flower, a lobelia,
which will grow extremely well here in moist soils.
Only grow this if you have moist.
I actually took this slide recently while going through Homestead,
Virginia, and I saw it along the river in the wild,
which is always the most exciting way
to see herbs, lobelia cardinalis.
If you want to attract hummingbirds to your garden then you do want
to think about red flowers
because these red flowers are particularly attractive
to hummingbirds.
Now this is one I hope you might not have seen before.
This is the low flowers of the mioga ginger or Zingiber mioga.
And unlike other gingers, it's completely hardy here,
and these are the flowers.   I see someone smiling.

If you are Japanese, you know mioga ginger and mioga --
my husband is Japanese, so we're always excited
when these little flowers come and we go out and we harvest them
and we chop them and add them to salads or sushi.
If you want to extend their life you can put them up in vinegar.
They are delicious.
They have a bite of ginger; they're flavorful.
It's a beautiful plant, too, because here it is in my own garden,
and look at the sort of tropical look that it has.
It's a gingery sort of look, and if you give it moist soil
and some shade, it is happy.
I can't ever think of it as an aggressor.
I just think of it, this particular one because I love it
as a very happy and wonderful plant from which I
like to give people divisions.
And if you're one of those gardeners that love variegated plants,
I was recently at a garden fair where I saw a variegated version
of this Zingiber mioga, and it was selling for about $50 a plant.
So that's what the connoisseurs will get
for a slight variegation on a plant.
Now the other herb which I love in the shade
or plant are the maidenhair ferns.   I really love all ferns.

They grow very well here.   But one of the reasons

that maidenhair is particularly beautiful is the shape of the leaf
and the black stem, so I want to you look at that.
And if you have the conditions for it, moisture and shade,
maidenhair is, in my mind, the most beautiful of ferns.
It's delicate looking, and it's got movement to it and so it's not
as tough as some of the others, I will say, but it is certainly,
I think, the most beautiful of them.
Now a plant that I grow in shade, this is in my garden
that I used to have in Virginia.
In the foreground is the rose bee balm.
Now this is a bee balm, but it's different from other bee balms
because it has a chemical difference.
The flavor and fragrance of all parts
of this taste and smell like roses.
And so this often happens with plants that we get a variation based
on the chemical constituents, and this one was found
in the wild up in Canada.
And I love it because I can, you know, use the flowers
for the rose flavor, add them to salads.
Also you can use the leaves to make tea.
You can make potpourri.
Bee balm is just a very beautiful and useful herb.
Yes? Female Speaker:   [ inaudible ]

Holly Shimizu: Powdery mildew?
It is, but I haven't had a huge problem with my bee balm.
Now if you get a lot of powdery mildew what you should do is cut
them back to the base and new leaves will emerge.
There are some that don't get powdery mildew as much.
One called Jacob Cline.   You might want to write it down.

And we grow that one down the street in the Bartholdi Park.
And that is equally good.
In fact, this is -- it shows the flowers that I harvested
and young leaves of a Jacob Cline monarda that I use for making tea
and for making beverages of different sorts.
So it's a great native plant that also will attract hummingbirds,
and it has a wonderful fragrance.
It's in the mint family, so it has a little bit of a minty flavor to it.
And if it's really happy, you know, it will spread generously.
In the shade one of the plants that is great
for adding architecture is the Angelica.
This is garden Angelica.   It likes to grow in moist shade.

You see it naturalized along waterways.
And in bright sun if you grow it, what happens is it burns and so
if you want it to be very beautiful you really ought
to grow it in some shade.
Now Angelica gives a fragrance off that is even more potent to insects,
and it attracts all sorts of beneficial insects to your garden,
including beneficial wasps.
So I used to have a lot of scientists coming to my herb garden
at the National Arboretum studying all the different things
that were attracted to Angelica.
In addition, if you've ever had candied Angelica,
that very powerful flavor comes from candying the stems of Angelica.
And one that you might consider for its really beautiful purple,
rich purple color is the Korean Angelica, Angelica gigas.
And this Angelica can be a perennial but often is treated by a biennial,
meaning that the first year you get leaves produced.
and the second year you have flowers and seeds.
And if you do get seeds, you can sow them back in the soil
and then you can carry on with the production of your Angelica.
So it's very beautiful, and it is also used in flavoring beverages.
I personally don't like the flavor of it but I grow it
because I consider it very statuesque.
And it likes the conditions that I have.
Yes? Female Speaker:   [ inaudible ]

Holly Shimizu: Yes, the Korean Angelica also draws beneficial
insects to the garden.   It has a lot of powerful fragrance.

In addition, in Korea where it grows in the wild it's considered one
of the most important medicinal plants.
Now here's one of our natives.   This is the Acorus calamus,

one of the plants we see growing along the roadside.
Very fragrant, and it does prefer growing in moist shade.
Calamus -- let me see if I can show you the whole plant.
That will give you an idea of what it looks like --
has a nice grassy texture to it.
It looks a little bit like the leaves of iris,
but it does have a potent fragrance, and in fact, the root
and rhizome are used for making candy, and they're also used I know
by Native American tribes who take the piece of root, and they put it
around the neck of children at night
so that they'll have good dreams, to prevent nightmares.
And Ruth Smith, who is one of my herb friends who first introduced me
to Connie, who is here, has done a lot of research
about all the uses of calamus.   Easy to grow and it's beautiful.

And there's some dwarf forms of it as well which are equally beautiful.
And it's fragrant, but in order to get the fragrance from it you need
to break it so that the smell comes out.
And that is true for so many of these plants
that I'm going to show you.
Now, if you really love the fragrance of mint,
I think this is a plant for to you grow because this is Corsican mint.
For many years I was not succeeding with this beautiful miniature mint
because I thought, well, it's from Corsica so it likes heat and dry.
Wrong. It likes moist and shady.
Corsican mint, I like to grow it under things
and let it spread like a ground cover.
And then in the winter I put some light pine needles over it
which tend to help it make it through the winter.
But when you rub this, it does smell like the liqueur,
Crme de menthe, and it's beautiful.
If you know baby's tears, this is quite similar to baby's tears
in its look but its fragrance and the power
of its fragrance is very distinctive.
So I can grow it, you know, as well in a container but I do have
to watch the water because it doesn't
like to get really dried out.
Not quite as tough as some of the other mints.
Now I want to jump into some of the fragrance plants.
And of course, trees are herbs.
And so I have one -- I was thinking of this particular time of year.
Right now the Katsura trees are becoming golden.
And these golden leaves, just at this point as they're beginning
to fall off the tree, they smell like cotton candy or strawberry jam.
And it's a wonderful smell.
And the power of smell is so important to us.
It controls so many of our decisions, when we want to eat.
It controls who we select as a mate.
Probably, you know, if you're wondering if you like someone,
you know, you might go up and go sniff-sniff
to see are you compatible with their fragrance.
And that's certainly the way of the world for most living creatures.
And the power of smell, once you tune into it,
you start to become aware of, of how much it affects us.
And I have a good nose, so I really smell and respond to fragrances,
and in fact, I can identify plants by their fragrances
and their chemical compounds.
You will find that if you, if you start using your nose
that you will recognize how powerful it is,
and also that there is no replacement for the nose.
In all of the perfume and food industry,
there is nothing like the human nose.
We can detect more smells.
We don't have a huge vocabulary though, to describe smells.
I'm going to try to describe some of the fragrances to you,
but I'm going to be whole hard pressed to find good smells.
Now this is my kaffir leaf.
It's not showing up well but it's the leaf of a citrus, kaffir.
If you like Tai food you have probably eaten this lime leaf
in Thai food.   It's delicious.

And this leaf is chopped up and used fresh or frozen in Thai food.
And it's closely related to this citrus, which is growing
down in the Bartholdi Park at the botanic garden,
also fragrant but not used in cooking.
It is actually the fruit of this citrus, which is called Poncirus,
or bitter orange, that is very fragrant.
And so it's one of the fruit that oftentimes people gather
up in the fall and bring inside and put it in a bowl just
to give off its wonderful fragrance.
Now, one of the perennial herbs that you might want to consider growing
because it's one of my favorites, it's really easy
to grow, is this garden valerian.   It smells like cherry pie.

And it's similar smell to heliotrope,
if you know the real smell of heliotrope.
You know, in many cases you do have to get the older varieties
of perennials or annuals that have this smell.
This is the Valerian.
Why? Because in some cases the fragrance has been bred
out of the plant.
You know, in the rose, of course, being the prime example.
In getting the perfect rose for a cut arrangement,
breeders lost fragrance, and they also lost disease resistance.
So that's why some of the plants I'm going to show you, really you've got
to be very careful that you get the right one.
And if you're not sure, your nose knows,
so you've got to check it out.
You know, pinch it or, you know, make sure with the nursery
that it is the plant with the fragrance.
Now herbally this garden valerian is used, the root actually,
which is dug in the fall, is used as a sedative to help people sleep.

Now some of the mints are very beautiful and very fragrant.
And this one I often call it the beautiful mint
and it's a type of calamint.
And if you look at the combination here, it's growing with Caryopteris,
which is a beautiful blue flowering sub shrub,
and it gives off this wonderful mint fragrance.
Here it is later in the season, and look how it opens up and falls out.
And you have to think a lot about not only the smell of the plant
but the texture that it will give in the way
that it's combined in the garden.
And so I think that this gives that fine almost baby's breath texture
to this garden while it gives off this wonderful fragrance.
And it's not invasive, which is an added benefit
to growing calamint, beautiful mint.
Now I'll show you some of the kind of Mediterranean
or sun-loving herbs, and this is a typical kind of way
that you might want to grow them.
This is a kitchen garden and the soil has been prepared with material
to make sure it's got fine drainage.
And how do you do that because we tend to have heavy clay here?
Well, you do that by adding chicken grit
or something called PermaTill or Isolite.
They are materials that you can add into your soil to break
up the heavy clay and add that aeration
because these plants need air around the roots.
And if you don't have air, they rot.
And that's why, you know, aeration is one
of the most important factors.
Plus you need to add good organic matter.
And if you're using manure, make sure it's been composted
because otherwise you're just going to add weed seeds
into the garden, so good compost.
And you dig that in before you plant it.
Now this is a potager, a French kitchen garden.
And within the kitchen garden are many, many herbs that you want
to grow because they keep it very beautiful
as well as being harvestable.
And they often will give it the structure that it needs
because any good garden design really does need structure.
And one of the plants that you might grow in there would be fennel.
Fennel is very beautiful.
It's very easy to grow and it has a feathery texture
and beautiful flowers.
And it is a short lived perennial, so you can grow it again from seed.
There is a bronze version of it which is particularly beautiful
if you like that bronzy color.
And remember that that feathery texture looks so great next
to a different texture whether it be, you know, something bold
like a cardoon with the feather.
That contrast really gives you a great, great beauty.
And it's got the flavor and fragrance of anise.
So the sweet licorice taste is what we use it for.
The seeds are delicious.   I harvest them now.

You are supposed to eat them after a meal to improve your digestion,
and of course, using the leaves for flavoring fish, for example.
Now people say what's the difference between this
and the fennel vegetable?
Well the fennel vegetable is a close relative,
but it's base is actually the fennel that we use as a vegetable.
We refer to it as fenokio   [ spelled phonetically ]

. And so it's a close relative but different.
This is the herbal version of fennel
with that sweet anise flavor and fragrance.
Basils have really, really proliferated in the last five years.
You have got so many to choose from now.
I like African blue because it grows very well and gets tall
with this purplish tinge to its leaves.
If you cut it back then you will encourage more leaves to grow,
of course, but you can also grow it very well in a container
and let it bloom if you want to attract bees and other pollinators.
For really great flavor, though, I think this is one
that I have enjoyed using a lot this year.
This is Thai basil.
And Thai basil has that Thai flavor which is a little bit more spicy
and so it's a combination of flavors
from regular basil to a little bit of Thai.
And look at the purple flowers;
I think they are particularly beautiful.
If you want to grow a fragrant herb in the cracks and crevices
of a stone walkway or a stone wall, this is the plant for you.
This is caraway thyme.
And it's very durable and we have tried growing it
in our rock walls in full sun.   It's very happy.

It smells like caraway and thyme in combination.
And the beauty is you can even walk on it.
If you have been to England and you see thyme lawns and thyme seats,
they're made with this caraway thyme.
Here it is in flower.
It's fully evergreen, which is a really important consideration
if you want to get out and extend that beauty in the winter.
So we use it in the little walkways, that's another place
or in conjunction with chamomile or some of the creeping mints so that
as you walk upon them you get the different fragrances.
It's wonderful.
Some of the sages are very powerful in their fragrance.
This is a Greek sage.
It was imported from Greece and it has incredibly potent fragrance.
It's so potent that when you dry it to use it in cooking,
you want to use very small amounts.
Because you get the Greek genotype of the sage is very different from,
say, one that you would get here in America.
It's got very different compounds in it.
So you could smell sage and come up with 10, 20 different fragrances.
And one of the books that deals with that is the book
by Art Tucker called The Big Book of Herbs, because he gets a lot
into the chemical compounds of these herbs.
And also many of the sages because of their potency are used
for incense, and in particular are the Western sages.
They are used as an incense by Native Americans.
And, you know, that before we closed the botanic garden conservatory
for renovation, I actually didn't work there at the time,
but I'm told that the staff were able to get a Native American chief
and other Native Americans to come and take sage sticks and go
through the whole conservatory before it was completely torn
down to get rid of any of the dark spirits,
so to cleanse it and purify it.
I know that when I was moving into a new house, someone brought one over
and said, we're going to go through this house and we're going
to purify it with a sage stick.
These fragrant herbs were the original incense in ways
that those incense were used by grounding them up and pounding them
and then making incense and burning it.
It's the glands within these herbs and on these herbs
that give them fragrance,
and the glands you can't see usually with the human eye.
Sometimes you can see them
with a magnifying glass if you have good eyes.
But to get the fragrance out of them, for the most part,
you do need to crush them.
And that's why you want to chop them up before you use them
and you have dried them and you want to use them, you don't want
to powder them too much until just before using them,
because they're volatile and they'll dissipate into the atmosphere.
Why do some fragrances come out after a rain?
Well because they wash off some of the fragrance
that comes out of these glands.
The glands can be on the flower, the leaves, the roots,
the stems -- varies with the plant.
And the time of day, the fragrances will vary with the time of day.
Generally there's more fragrance in the morning and evening.
And when is the maximum time for fragrance?
As a general rule of thumb, but it does vary,
just as they're coming into bloom.
And that's when you would want to harvest
if you're maximizing the flavor and fragrance.
Now what do you do if you extract some of these fragrances?
Well there are a number of ways you can do it.
It's normally done by steam distillation,
but this is actually true rose oil which came from Bulgaria.
And it's worth more than it's weight in gold.
And it is so precious because it's very hard to get people to go
out into the fields to collect the rose which blooms only once
and then gather the petals and then extract this oil from the petals.
It's an amazing smell, and it's very important in certain perfumes
as well as in skin ingredients
because it's very healing to the skin.
Here is a picture of the Four Seasons rose.
It's a Royal Four Seasons Damask rose.
And you can -- I took this in my own garden.
I grow it because of this amazing smell that it has.
It smells while it's in bloom, the petals smell once dried
and it does have a long blooming period.
It was the prized rose to the Romans and Greeks, because it continued
to bloom and it had the ultimate rose fragrance.
So I brought a rose.
This is not the rose in the slide but it's,
it's one of our favorite roses at the botanic garden
because it's ever blooming, and we never spray it.
Now in our new national garden we're going to be growing a lot of roses,
but we're not going to spray them with toxic chemicals.
And this is called Heritage.
Now this rose has a lot of the qualities of the old roses.
It has many petals.   It has wonderful fragrance.

And so you can use it just for the beauty as a garden plant.
You can use the flower petals.
You would take the petals like this, and you could dry them
or you use them as a wedding and you would just, you know,
sprinkle the bride with them.
So if you have an interest in fragrance, you can find roses
like Heritage that really do extremely well.
So I want to pass this around because so many gardeners fail
with roses because today a lot of the roses are chemically dependant.
They don't grow unless you spray them every 10 days.
Well forget those and try some of these great ones.
I mean, I like to get roses from the Antique Rose Emporium in Texas
where they get roses from the roadside.
My favorite one is Highway 290.   [ laughter ]

-- and it's a great plant and it -- you don't have to care for it.
And cemeteries are a great source of old roses
because they have survived for years with no care.
So I just love the fragrant roses.
And here is one of the ones that I got from the Antique Rose Emporium.
This one is called Marie Pavie.   And she's small.

She's only about three feet tall.   She's a beautiful hedge.

She's very fragrant, long blooming beautiful little pink buds opening
to white flowers.
So if you want a fragrant rose and you have a small space,
you might want to consider Marie Pavie.
And I mentioned Heritage, and here it is growing
to give you an idea of its form.   It's quite beautiful.

It has good foliage and does not really need care.
Now, of course, if you want it to keep blooming,
it's always a good idea to deadhead it.
That is, to cut off the old blossoms, and that is always a way
for the plant -- you save energy
in producing seeds by removing the flowers.
Roses also look beautiful in combination with a lot
of other fragrant plants.
This is a fairy garden up in Maryland where roses when out
of bloom are adorned with things like the
[ unintelligible ]   . Here we go, let me get my planner.

Here's lamb's ear, which is a great ground cover, silver, and foxglove,
which is also a wonderful companion.
And the other companion that is so good
with fragrant roses, of course, is lavender.
And I brought a lavender here
because it's such a potent fragrance.
So it's a perfect match with the rose to grow lavender around it
and then you really get quite the smell.
If you like the rose fragrance but you don't want to grow roses,
you can grow rose geranium.
This is a pelargonium, and these are native to Africa.
And they're fabulous plants here because they like our summer heat.
They're not hardy here so you bring them inside in the winter.
But there are so many incredible smells they offer us.
The rose fragrance is great in the garden.
If you bring it inside, put it on a windowsill.
I make a rose geranium cake with this.
You can make a tea with it.
There are lots of ways to use it and very easy to grow if you have lots
and lots of heat and sunlight.
So there are if you want to experiment, others to try,
my favorite, is this one called Mabel Grey.
Mabel smells so intensely of lemon
that when you smell it, your mouth will water.
It's almost more lemony than a lemon, if you can even imagine that.
And it's being researched now as a potentially wonderful,


I mentioned the nighttime gardens, and this is on my roof garden
where I grow a lot of fragrant tobacco.
Tobacco, of course, is an herb.
It has lots of uses, primarily for cigarettes, but it has a lot
of good uses as well, including the fragrance.
And so if you have an area where you might sit out in the evening,
try to -- they're easy to grow from seed to get some
of the truly fragrant tobaccos.
They come out at night just about dusk, beautiful time of day,
and the perfume just travels far and wide on these fragrant tobaccos.
And so always put them, as I mentioned, near where you're going
to sit and read because you'll be amazed at their power.
Now it's interesting for some of the garlics
because they have this combination of fragrance.
This is garlic chives, a great herb for cooking.
And I know the flat leaves give you this flavor
that combines onions with garlic.   It's delicious.

It's used in many Asian soups and salads.
If you like the garlic flavor, it's the best.
And the flowers then in contrast, have a rather sweet fragrance.
They're fabulous for honeybees.
But be a little careful because as the plant begins to make seeds,
where those seeds fall, little baby garlic chives will come
up everywhere.
So if you're concerned with that, you might want
to cut off these seeds before they start to fall.
But I love this herb both for its flavor and fragrance
and for its ornamental value -- very tough and very easy to grow.
And a close relative is the one that we call society garlic.
And the reason it's called that is because if you eat it,
supposedly afterwards you won't have garlic breath.
But the other thing about it that's so great is
if you eat these individual flowers, they give you a bite of garlic,
so you add them to salads and other things as a fresh sprinkle,
and they have a very delicious flavor.
And it's a heat-loving plant.
This will only make it as a hearty perennial in warm spots.
In the Bartholdi Park because we are very warm downtown,
it usually survives.
But out in Maryland where I live it's a little bit harder
to get it through the winter.
Garlic is a wonderful plant for, I think, the architecture that it has
in the garden as well as for the flavor and fragrance.
If you have not tried garlic greens, they're very delicious too.
But I think it's very beautiful, don't you, because of the shape
and the way that it grows.
Now garlic is not considered one of the great fragrances,
but it has a benefit because it is thought to keep away many
of the problem insects that we have in the garden.
So I've always grown garlic with my roses and grown it in areas
where I'm trying to keep away aphids and mites and other things.
And I like to eat it too and harvest it because it is one
of the most healthful herbs.
Now I'm not sure if anyone here grows this plant,
but it's an unusual herb because it's used as a replacement
for cilantro, and it's called culantro.
And you actually see it in a lot of Chinese markets.
And it smells, when you smell it some people think it's a really
horrid smell, which is a link to its name, Eryngium foetidum.
So it's a feted smell, but it's a good flavor.
And that's true for quite a few things.
And in fact, in culantro, here are the leaves, the base leaves,
and they do taste like coriander because so many of us find
that the smell of coriander is very unpleasant but the flavor is great.
So that is also the case with culantro, why people grow it
because you can harvest it all year long, not all year,
but all summer long whereas coriander generally bolts,
meaning it goes to flower and seed
and we can't produce it during the summer.
So culantro is a great alternative.
And you might notice, this is in my own garden.
I let things reseed, and I have a Perilla.
I know it looks like a basil but it's not.
It's called Perilla, and it's one that I got from a Hawaiian chef
who selected it because it has a delicious cinnamon flavor.
And Perilla is an easy to grow annual
and it has a great flavor in cooking.
So I let it come up and then move it over once it gets to a good side.
Reseeding annuals, I love them because they're so easy to grow.
You just kind of make sure you move them
around at the right time of the year.
Lemon grass.
This is something that you must have if you love to cook.
It is a tender perennial, and it's very easy
to bring it in in the fall.
You basically just dig up the plant and keep as much of it as you want
to to use in cooking, and just keep a small division of it and keep it
in a pot, in a basement over winter, barely alive and then plant it
out the following spring.
Well the part that you use is actually all the aboveground parts.
You use the interior of the stem.
You take the outer harsh leaves off and then you use the inner part.
It's so delicious in soups and any kind of curry.
It's so wonderful.
It's a really unique flavor and then you can also use it for making tea.
It's a great tea.   And it's great for the herbal bath.

If you haven't tried that you can use it dry or fresh.
Yes? Female Speaker:   [ inaudible ]

Holly Shimizu: If you want to keep a hunk
over for the winter you can cut it back and just cut the tips back.
I know a lot of nurseries do
that because it's just easier to take care of.
Don't try to force it to grow in the winter though.
Female Speaker:   [ inaudible ]

Holly Shimizu: It's okay, but leave a good part base of the stem
on the lemon grass, okay.   So it's really easy.

It is one of the ones I have to grow every year because I use it so much
and I don't mind bringing it in.   It's pretty low care.

It's beautiful because when you think again about this texture,
it has that wonderful grassy texture so it adds that nice variety
into the tapestry of the garden.
Now this grass is interesting fragrance wise.
It's called vetiver.
And vetiver root, it's dug in the autumn
and it has a wonderful woodsy smell.
It's a very spicy, woodsy fragrance, and the fragrance comes
out when the roots are dry.
So vetiver, you find it if you go to some
of these wonderful stores like La Sateen
[ spelled phonetically ]   , you see vetiver perfume.

Even Saks, you see vetiver perfume.
It's from this plant, and it's considered a more masculine smell
and less feminine because it's not as flowery.
So it's an interesting plant, and in many tropical parts
of the world it is also used against erosion.
And so it's woven into things
to give off this wonderful vetiver smell.
Now we recognize lotus as a sacred plant,
but lotus is also a sacred fragrance.
And one of my coworkers recently traveled to Egypt,
and she brought me back the essential oil from lotus.
And so what you can do if you get
such a high quality essential oil is you can make a spray
by just adding some to water and then you spray it and it gives
that wonderful fragrance of lotus to the room.
So a lot of these are easy things to make
and wonderful, wonderful smells.
I can guarantee you that if you were to buy it, it would be very pricey,
and if you were to make it, you could do it for about a dollar.
So if you like to be creative with them,
it's really very easy to make some of these.
Now here's one from the park, and I brought you a living specimen
because I thought if you were brave, you might want
to eat one of the flowers.   Here. It smells.

It's called Mexican Anise Hyssop.
And it smells anisy like a sweet anise,
and it's a great hummingbird plant.   And it -- is it good?

Okay. And it has that sweet anise flavor.
We call them Anise Hyssops.   There are a lot of them.

And they have a variety of fragrances
but they too are attractive to a broad range of interesting
and beneficial insects and birds.
And I think that your garden is just so much more dynamic if you keep
in mind how so many of these fragrant things will attract all
of these beneficial things into your garden.
It brings a lot more life to it.
And one of the plants in bloom right now and fragrant,
more grown primarily for the use here is the saffron crocus.
It's blooming right now, and the stigmas are used.
Very pricey if you buy them in the store and very reasonable
if you buy the bulbs and grow the bulbs.
Easy to grow, autumn blooming, beautiful crocus.
And you can just harvest the stigmas
and use them then in cooking as saffron.
So it's easy, and we actually reminds me, I didn't put this
in there for this reason but I think it's this Friday --
not this Friday but a week from this Friday we have a program coming
up by Brent and Becky Heath on bulbs.
And that's their great, great source of bulbs located
down in Gloucester, Virginia.
And if you're interested in growing crocus, you can buy it from them.
Saffron crocus, not to be confused with any of the other crocus.
It's only this one particular species, which is crocus sativus.
And so I want to end with a mention of a new project
that we're working on, and I wanted those of you that work here
at the Library of Congress and those of you who visit here to know
that we have been working on designing a new garden
for the front of the Madison Building.
And you see the hollies have been removed, thank goodness.
And there was a rat problem there and that had to be dealt with,
so all of those have been removed.
And so I have been working with the head gardener here, Carl Morgan
and Matthew Evans, the landscape architect of the Capitol,
and we've done designs which have been approved
for fragrant gardens out there.   So we're really excited.

[ applause ]
And so a lot of the plants I showed you,
and many more because I barely touched the surface,
will be used out there.
Fragrant trees and shrubs and perennial, some of the roses
that I showed you, and so I hope that you will love it.
Remember that it always takes three years for any garden to look good,
so don't judge it on day one.
You have got to give it a little time.
And I hope that it will enhance the experience for all of you and all
of the visitors because it will bring this very important element
of fragrance into the garden.   Thank you.

[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]