Sincerity, and the Turning of the Year

In the old herbals chervil was valued as a warming, cheering spring herb, its domestic uses given here as folk history. In the language of flowers it stood for sincerity, a meaning read from its plain, unshowy freshness. Its whole symbolic life turns on its season: a tender green that comes early, when little else is growing, it gathered to itself the meanings of spring itself, renewal, hope and the new life the Church set at Easter. A modest kitchen herb, chervil carries one clear and gentle idea, the return of green life after winter.

Chervil is markedly more delicate to grow than its fines-herbes companions, bolting to seed quickly in hot weather and doing best sown in partial shade or in the cool of early spring and autumn, a fussiness that has kept it rarer in gardens and shops than parsley despite centuries of cultivation. Its French name, cerfeuil, and the old English name gourmet's parsley both mark it as a herb valued by those who already knew their way around a kitchen garden rather than a plant everybody grew, a modest but genuine reputation for refinement that has stayed with it since the medieval monastery gardens first kept it going through the winter for the coming of spring.