Organic Rosemary

Our organic rosemary comes from the leaves of "Salvia rosmarinus", a small evergreen plant of the mint family "Lamiaceae". Native to the Mediterranean region, rosemary has naturalized throughout much of Europe and is widely grown in gardens in warm climates. The leaves have a pungent, slightly bitter taste and are generally used to season foods, particularly lamb, duck, chicken, sausages, seafood, stuffings, stews, soups, potatoes, tomatoes, turnips, and other vegetables, as well as beverages.

Rosemary has been used medicinally dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans in 500 B.C. Dried sprigs of rosemary even showed up in Egyptian tombs from 3,000 B.C. Discorides, a contemporary of both Pliny the Elder and Galen, also wrote of rosemary in his opus "De Materia Medica", the gold standard about the use and identification of medicinal herbs for 1,400 years.

Rosemary was cultivated by the Spanish in the 13th century where it became a popular condiment for salted meats from the 15th to 18th centuries. Its genus name, "Rosmarinus", is derived from the Latin for "dew" (ros) and "belonging to the sea" (marinus) in reference to the warm Mediterranean region of its origin. Legend has it that the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, as she fled from Egypt, sheltered next to a rosemary bush. She threw her blue cape onto the bush and the white flowers turned blue. Because of this, the herb has long been called "rose of Mary" even if the blooms look nothing like a rose but are rather more like the mint flowers to which rosemary is related.