Women's History Month: The Queen of Herbs, Jekka McVicar

Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

Happy Women’s History Month! To kick Women’s History Month off on Cultivating Place, we visit with the woman known as the Queen of Herbs, Jekka McVicar of Jekka’s Herb Farm in the UK this week. Her long and notable career has brought the gardened world the best the herbs of the world have to offer to our gardens, to our environments, to our kitchens, and to our souls. In recognition of her herbal research, plant breeding, garden designing, and advocacy around the many merits of all manner of herbs to the garden world these past 40 years, Jekka has been awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour in Horticulture by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Gardeners Media Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as 62 RHS Gold Medals. At Jekka’s Herb Farm and Herbetum in South Gloucestershire, she displays her life’s collection of more than 600 culinary, medicinal, pollinator-supporting, and beautiful herbs. I was honored to profile Jekka in my 2020 book, The Earth In Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants, as one of the women leaders in our horticultural world who have expanded and elevated the way we think and talk about gardening. Jekka’s newest book, 100 Herbs to Grow A Comprehensive Guide to the Best Culinary and Medicinal Herbs publishes from Quadrille Press in march of 2024. Savor! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.