Dill

A rough, sprawling Mediterranean annual grown for showy, open racemes of drooping, star-shaped bright blue flowers in summer. Branched stems and wrinkled, dull gray-green leaves are clad in bristly hairs and carry the taste and fragrance of cucumber. Easy in poor, dry soils, drought-tolerant, a magnet for bees, and a self-seeder that returns to the garden year after year.

A bushy, lemon-scented herbaceous perennial of the mint family, grown for its wrinkled, ovate medium-green leaves that crush to a bright citrus fragrance. Tiny two-lipped white-to-pale-yellow flowers appear in the leaf axils through summer and draw bees. Native to southern Europe, it has escaped gardens and naturalized across much of the U.S.; frequent pruning keeps it leafy, curbs self-seeding, and produces the most fragrant new growth.

A vigorous spreading perennial mint forming dense colonies via aggressive underground rhizomes. Leaves are the canonical 'mint' flavor (toothpaste, gum, mojitos, lamb dishes). NC State + every herb reference flags Mentha species as highly invasive in garden beds - container-only siting is the standard recommendation. Small pink-to-white summer flowers worked heavily by bees + small pollinators.

An aromatic annual herb of the daisy family (Asteraceae), grown for its small daisy-like flowers - 10-20 petal-like white rays surrounding a showy, bright-yellow domed center disk - borne June to August over finely divided, feathery, double-pinnate foliage. Native to Europe and western Asia, it reaches 12 to 24 inches tall and is most often grown in herb gardens to harvest its fragrant flowers, which are the chamomile used in most commercial chamomile tea because the species is sweeter and less bitter than Roman chamomile (Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder, which lists it under the synonym Matricaria recutita).

Lemon thyme (Thymus × citriodorus) is a low, mat-forming evergreen sub-shrub grown for its small leaves that release a bright, distinctly lemony scent alongside the usual warm thyme aroma. It stays under a hand-span tall, spreads into a fragrant carpet, and carries pink to lavender flowers in mid to late summer that bees and butterflies work hard. It is a kitchen herb first, excellent in cooking and teas, and a tough, drought-tolerant edging or paving plant second. Its taxonomy is genuinely unsettled: long treated as a garden hybrid of common thyme, more recent work disputes whether it is a hybrid or a distinct species, and sources disagree on whether it has any wild native range, so Plotwright records it as a cultivated plant without a mapped wild distribution.

A rhizomatous, upright herbaceous perennial of the mint family, most commonly grown as a culinary or medicinal herb and as a ground cover. A natural hybrid of watermint (Mentha aquatica) and spearmint (Mentha spicata), it carries fragrant rounded-to-lance-shaped toothed leaves on square stems and showy pink flower spikes in mid- to late summer. Native to Europe, it spreads aggressively by rhizomes into an attractive ground cover and rarely sets seed, so it is propagated vegetatively and is best confined by a soil barrier (Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder).

A compact cut-and-come-again bed of salad greens and culinary herbs for near-kitchen harvest: cool-season leaves, a warm-season basil anchor, and a perennial herb backbone.