In Latin, herba was any plant not a shrub or a tree. In botany,
an herb is any non-woody, seed-bearing plant that dies to the ground after its growing season, and, if perennial, sprouts again the following spring. In general English usage, an herb is any plant whose parts are used for curative, aromatic, or cooking purposes.

By the way, even the ancient Romans sometimes dropped the initial letter h and said erba, thus producing early the present Italian word for grass, with which compare l’herbe with its French meanings of herb, plant, weed, grass, and — most felicitous — picnic lunch, in the phrase le déjeuner sur l’herbe, the subject of an Impressionist masterwork by Édouard Manet. Several French impressionists painted picnics and later artists like Pablo Picasso parodied them.

One of Picasso's déjeuners sur l'herbe

Known to lovers of French cuisine is the bouquet garni, a bundle of
fines herbes tied together, perhaps in a mesh bag, cooked with a dish
and afterward removed. Fines herbes are also used to decorate and
add savour to the surface of a cooked dish.

Yerba Buena

Herba, the Latin word, made its way into South American Spanish
as yerba, giving places named after a useful herb like Yerba
Buena, California. Yerba buena (Spanish ‘good herb’) is a creeper
used in southwestern cookery for its minty brio. But it was
discovered and introduced to botany at the northern limit of its
range in what became southern British Columbia by David Douglas
(1798-1834), a Scottish naturalist and collector of botanical
specimens. The Douglas Fir is named after him, and so is the
yerba buena, as Satureja douglasii. Douglas introduced the most
number of North American plants to international botany, and
some 50 species bear his name. In 1825 he reached Fort Vancouver
and then collected along the Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Hayes
rivers, travelling to meet Sir John Franklin’s expedition on
Hudson’s Bay in 1827. Two years later he returned to collect
along the Okanagan and Fraser rivers.

Consider too yerba maté from which a pleasing tea is made, the
restorative infusion favoured by Argentinian gauchos.

Hierba
Hierba survives in Castilian Spanish meaning ‘grass’ and ‘herb.’ It is also one of the common continental Spanish words for marijuana, equivalent to English ‘pot.’ Hierbabuena is a Spanish word for a mint plant. With a pejorative suffix, hierba becomes the Spanish word for a weed, hierbajo literally ‘bad plant.’

Arbor

The questing word maven might think that arbour or arbor derived from arbor Latin ‘tree,’ but it does not. It too is an herbal grandchild, stemming from Old French herbier ‘herb garden’ and transforming down through the years via these way-station forms: herber> erber > arber > arbor > arbour. After this word had begun to be spelled arber, the Latin word for tree arbor, also used in English (e.g. America's ‘Arbor Day’ to celebrate tree planting) began to influence how arber was spelled. In linguistic study, this orthographical influence is sometimes termed attraction.

Herb Snobs
It is not for this brief etymology of the word herb to wax rhapsodic about the superiority of freshly picked herbs to those dried and ground and sold in a bottle. If you know the difference in zippiness between freshly ground peppercorns and pepper in a bottle, you don’t need to be reminded of the potent zest of fresh rosemary as compared with the wan residuum of rosemary that lingers in powdered preparations of the herb.

Of course, one can go too far. There are herb and spice snobs,
persons who invite you to dine in their homes, and greet you at
the door talking like cookbooks: “I know you’ll love my entré
tonight. It’s so diverting to be served chops en croûte, trigly
strewn with a feathery garnish of chervil leaflets.” At such a
point it is best to step back, scratch your head in a bumpkin-like
manner, and mumble, “Gee, I usually just shake sand on my chops.
You do have sterilized beach sand, don’t you?” The true herb snob will
top you with: “But, naturellement, Bill. I use a soupçon of sand myself,
often when preparing harissa— you know it of course — that North
African spice mixture for couscous stews. Why, just last week I
literally force-fed my dear husband an intriguing little recipe I found
stamped on the back of a Libyan mud brick. So simple really. It began, and I’m translating here from colloquial Arabic so it’s a little bumpy: “First, simply obtain a gazelle’s vulva. Then, marinate for two weeks in gecko leavings and cardoon essence . . .” But I didn’t hear the rest, for I had tiptoed out of their house, suddenly remembering an appointment for root-canal surgery which I simply couldn’t pass up.

© 2007 William Gordon Casselman

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