Cocktail Gardening? You’ve Come to the Right Place.
I created this website to feature the many plants you might want to grow in your own cocktail garden, along with growing tips and cocktail recipes. Use the search box to search by plant or spirit. Cheers!
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Read MoreBuild Your Own Cocktail Garden Collection
OK, here’s the deal: cocktail-friendly plants for your own garden, at your bar or restaurant, or on your farm–we’ve got them. Wholesale grower Log House Plants, based in Oregon, is supplying the plants to garden centers and other retailers on the West Coast. Meanwhile, I’ve put together several pages of growing tips and recipes for the plants in the c0llection. You can find all of that right here, but I’ll also put some individual links below. The Mixologist’s Simple Syrup Collection: Six herbs that lend themselves to simple syrups, infused...
Read MoreThe Cocktail Garden: The Unvarnished Truth
So! Sunset magazine stopped by a few months ago. It was great fun hanging out with a couple of pros all day and watching them work. (Oh, and there was some mixing of cocktails, too.) Anyway, you can see the results in the February issue of Sunset, which is just hitting the stands now. And now–I’m delighted to share these charming hand-drawn illustrative plans of the cocktail garden that Susan Morrison of Creative Exteriors Landscape Design designed for me. Susan is a cocktail aficionado and an expert in small-space gardening: her book Garden Up! , co-authored with designer...
Read MoreHave a Drink in the Garden
Okay, it’s the middle of winter, but we can dream, right? This year, the nice people at Territorial Seeds and Log House Plants asked me to pick out a few of my favorite cocktail-friendly plants. We got a little carried away, and the result is the Drunken Botanist Plant Collection. We gathered up all the herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables that a mixologist’s garden would require. I’ll be posting recipes, videos, photos, and growing advice in the months to come as well. You’ll find the plant collections in West Coast garden centers supplied by Log House Plants...
Read MoreOrchard in a Bottle
Fruit trees? Cocktails? Of course! It’s bare root season, which is to say that you’re going to be digging around in a tub of dirt at the garden center pretty soon and pulling out gnarly masses of roots and twigs. They may not look glamorous, but trust me – bare root plants are both economical and vigorous. Just be ready to plant them as soon as you get home, and keep the roots covered in damp potting soil until they go in the ground. Apples. Before you head to the garden center, make sure you have a reasonably sunny spot to plant a tree, and take a look around your...
Read MoreThe (Not Entirely Complete) Drunken Botanist Bibliography
In the back pages of The Drunken Botanist, I shared a list of recommended reading on both plants and booze, and promised to post a complete bibliography online. This, I must admit, is not a complete bibliography. It includes almost all the sources I consulted in book form, about 320 in all. Not included here are scholarly journals, periodicals, databases, some government and trade publications, and, of course, interviews with actual people. If you’re looking for something and don’t see it here, I might be able to send you the link. Get in touch with me and I’ll...
Read MoreHerbalicious
It is with great excitement that I report to you on the arrival of a new gin, a gin that cannot even properly be called gin because its predominant flavor is not juniper but—are you ready? Sage. That’s right. Sage. It comes from the same clever people at Art in the Age who brought us Root, a liqueur inspired by traditional Pennsylvania Dutch recipes for root beer and birch bark beer. They also make a ginger liqueur called Snap, and a rhubarb concoction called Rhubarb Tea, made in honor of early American botanist and friend of the founding fathers John Bartram. Intriguing, right? ...
Read MoreDrinkable Herbs
We’re continuing to work our way through a year’s worth of grow-your-own cocktail ingredients, moving on this month from flowers to herbs. Let’s start with some of the sweeter, more floral herbs you might mix into a drink, and next month I’ll move on to the savory herbs. Autumn is a great time to plant any of these. Just water them until it starts raining, then stand back and let them take care of themselves through the winter. Anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) Also called ‘licorice mint,’ this tough little perennial is, in fact, a member of the mint family, and the...
Read MoreBlooming Cocktails
Last month I looked at flowers that can be used to decorate cocktails—borage and pansies and the like—but this month, we’ll consider a few flowers that actually flavor drinks. Some of these have been used for centuries to make not just liqueurs, but boozy medicinal potions as well. Elderflower. Cordials and sodas flavored with elderflowers are a very British thing, but it took an American distiller to recognize their potential. Rob Cooper, a third-generation distiller, tasted homemade elderflower syrup in a London bar and decided to create a liqueur from the flowers. The result is...
Read MoreBooks by Amy Stewart
The Drunken Botanist
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