100 Herbs To Grow
A Comprehensive Guide To The Best Culinary And Medicinal Herbs
Jekka McVicar · Quadrille, 2024
Britain's best-known herb grower, four decades in, on the hundred herbs actually worth your space — and the current edition, not a reissue of a 1990s book.
What's actually in it
- One hundred culinary and medicinal herbs, each with cultivation, propagation and harvesting.
- Written to address contemporary climate challenges and current pest pressures — the reason to buy this rather than her older, better-known encyclopaedia.
- Drawn from forty years of growing at Jekka's Herb Farm.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- A stated triple test for inclusion: each of the hundred herbs had to be easy to grow, taste good, and have medicinal properties.
- The hundred are drawn down from her own 500-plus collection over forty years, and the book explicitly addresses current pest pressures and climate change — she is claiming the advice reflects what she has watched change, not received wisdom.
- The definition of "herb" is stretched deliberately — sea kale (Crambe maritima) and cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) are both featured, alongside her own rosemary cultivar 'Jekka's Blue'. Note the botanical name is Salvia rosmarinus, not Rosmarinus: the book is current on the taxonomy, which many herb books are not.
- Each herb covers garden, container and seed growing, plus propagation, division, cuttings, harvesting and year-round maintenance — and there is a chapter on assembling a home herbal first-aid kit.
What we couldn't checkThis is a 2024 book with no preview, extract or substantive review yet in circulation, so we have verified its structure and its stated approach but not its individual entries. One thing we will flag: as with all her work, medicinal uses sit alongside the horticulture. Those are traditional and historical uses, not clinical guidance.
Buy it if
You want herbs that survive, and you want advice written for the weather we're actually having.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who wants a herb encyclopaedia running to several hundred species.
Where it falls short
We chose this over McVicar's own Complete Herb Book, which is the more famous title — but that book is from 2009, no mainstream UK retailer stocks it new, and its A–Z is ordered by botanical name, so you can't browse to "rosemary" without going via the index. The one thing to be aware of here: like all her work, this book carries traditional medicinal uses alongside horticultural fact. Those are folk and historical uses, not clinical guidance, and shouldn't be treated as medical advice.
Who wrote it
McVicar founded Jekka's Herb Farm near Bristol in 1984; it now holds the largest collection of culinary herbs in the UK, over 500 species and varieties, several of them her own named cultivars. She has won 62 RHS gold medals, fourteen of them at Chelsea, the RHS Lawrence Medal, and in 2017 the Victoria Medal of Honour — the society's highest award, held by only 63 living people. Forty years of organic growing in a UK climate. Caveats: she is self-taught with no documented formal qualification, and Jekka's sells the seeds, plants and cultivars the book covers.
Where it was written
Written from Jekka's herb farm near Bristol. UK conditions, and explicitly updated for current climate and pest pressures.
The facts
- AuthorJekka McVicar
- PublisherQuadrille
- Published2024
- FormatHardback, 288 pages
- ISBN-13
9781837830442 - LevelBeginner to reference
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.