Jekka’s Complete Herb Book
By Jekka McVicar
Kyle Cathie/Royal Horticultural Society, £16.99
FT Bookshop Price: £13.59 (304 pages)

This lovely book is a revised, paperback edition of the best-seller by award-winning herb farmer Jekka Mc Vicar. She has won 61 gold medals at RHS flower shows (including 13 at Chelsea) and helped to create a foodie’s herb garden at the home of TV chef Jamie Oiver.

Covering more than 375 varieties of herb, from well known species such as rosemary and mint to the perhaps less familiar, such as African bulbine and orach, this book will appeal as much to cooks as it will to gardeners.

There are more than 200 recipes (nettle soup anyone?) and other culinary nuggets, some of which might surprise. I did not know that the leaves of lady’s mantle are edible (apparently Marks and Spencer once sold a yoghurt made with them) or that marigold petals can be used liked saffron to enhance the colour of foods such as butter, cheese and rice. (There is also a recipe for sweet marigold buns.)

Comprehensive guidance on growing and harvesting each herb is supplemented by fascinating information on their many domestic and medicinal uses. For instance, the burnt leaves of winter tarragon are said to repel insects, while the roots and stems of soapwort can be used to make an upholstery shampoo. Feverfew is thought to be an effective remedy for certain types of migraine while the poisonous foxglove is famously used in the commercial production of the heart drug digitalis.

Numerous dire warnings are included in the book. Rue, for example, which you can find growing wild in your garden, can cause severe burns, while in 1910 Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen used hyoscine, derived from the highly toxic weed henbane, to murder his wife.

Glorious colour photos and a clear, generous layout combine with no nonsense prose to make this a hugely attractive as well as authoritative reference work. My only quibble, and it is a tiny one, is that the herbs are listed alphabetically using their Latin rather than their common names, which makes looking them up a bit harder for us less scholarly types.