A must-have top taste everyone can grow

Everyone can grow it – not just the green-fingered. And once you have this delicious flavour booster in your garden, you’ll never want to let it go.

Laurel (Laurus nobilis)

If you value a rich, aromatic, meaty flavour in soups and casseroles, you’ve probably lost count of the times you’ve reached for bay leaves from the spice shelves in the supermarket. Yet bay leaves are exceptionally easy to grow, and they provide more flavour when used fresh than dry.

The Bay leaf (sometimes called the Bay laurel) is actually the very common and hardy Laurus nobilis tree. It can often be found growing as a hedge, or as a specimen tree in your public gardens. In fact, this Laurel is so common you may very well have it growing in your own street!

Easy-as!

There is absolutely no trick to growing the Bay laurel. Although it can be purchased at a garden centre, if you have a friend who already has one in their garden, you need only take a sucker from it (a sucker is a young piece of growth sprouting from around the base of a tree or bush). Just be sure that the sucker you pull up has a piece of root attached to it, and you’re good to go.

If you prefer to grow your Bay Laurel from seed, collect the seed in autumn. Take off the fleshy outer covering which sits around the seed, and sow immediately. If seed the seed looks particularly dry, soak it in warm water for a day before sowing. If you can’t find seed on a laurel, this may because you are searching for it on a male plant (only female Bay Laurels carry seed).

Tame it!

Bay laurels are notorious for romping out of control unless they are kept vigorously pruned, so one of the best places to plant yours is in a pot. Plant up the sucker (or small bush if you have purchased it from a garden centre) in regular potting mix, and don’t be tempted to feed it with extra fertilizer more than once a year (in spring). Over the winter months, top up the soil level in the pot by 2-3 cm, being sure to keep it back from the base of the stem. Keep the Bay watered over the summer months.

Because Bay laurels grow so vigorously, it can be fun to turn your potted specimen into a ‘standard’. Standards are sometimes known as ‘lollipop’ plants because they appear as a ball of foliage grown on an otherwise bare stem. To create a standard from your Bay Laurel, prune it in summer, from the very beginning to just a single stem, snipping off side branches on the lower two-thirds of the ‘trunk’. Trim the remaining branches into a ball shape as they grow (ask at your garden centre for wire templates to help you with this).

Easy does it!

Although Bay Laurels are very easy to grow, should you find you already have an over-grown specimen in your garden, take care when reducing it down to a manageable size. Although the plant is sure to survive, it will recover from a very hard pruning quite slowly. It is always better to prune an unruly Bay Laurel by a third each year rather than cut it back all at once.