It’s named for the house of the famed English gardener Gertrude Jekyll, who grew this cultivar. But she doesn’t mention lavender when she writes about her kitchen backyard; for her it seems to have been a decorative plant. A variety of forms of lavender exist, and local weather absolutely makes a distinction. The taste of lavender, like most herbs, is supposedly improved by adding lime to the soil, to make it more like that around the Mediterranean. Anise hyssop is neither anise nor hyssop; it belongs to a separate genus in the mint household. (Anise itself is in the parsley household.) The marked licorice taste of anise hyssop has one thing in common with the sassafras of root beer.
