There's nothing like a meal cooked with fresh herbs. In this book you'll learn how to grow and cook with rosemary, basil, sage, and seven other outstanding herbs. This book will be enjoyed by gardeners and cooks.
If you enjoy herbs and organic gardening, you'll want to meet Ann McCormick, the Herb 'n Cowgirl. A life-long gardener, she has spent the last ten years devoted to writing and speaking about her favorite subject. Ann is a columnist for Herb Quarterly where she pens the Herbalist Notebook. She also contributes to regional and national home and garden and life-style magazines, including Organic Gardening, Country Woman, Gardening How-To, and Neil Sperry's Gardens. The Herb 'n Cowgirl also shares her love of herbs and her gardening techniques as a speaker and media guest.
The Herb 'n Cowgirl entered this world in Huntington Park, California as Ann Heck, only child of Helen Hicock of Southbury, Connecticut and Merrill Heck, of Los Angeles, California. Mom was a graphic artist by training and disposition. Dad worked as a stock clerk at US Steel. When Ann was two her family moved to Riverside, California (about fifty miles due east of Los Angeles), where she grew up in a house built from the ground up by her parents. Dad planted an orchard of apricots, peaches, nectarines, and other summer fruits. Her mother was an enthusiastic gardener, who always had flowers surrounding the family home.
Riverside was mostly rural in those days. Grandma and Grandpa lived just up the hill on a farmstead with chickens and goats and an amazing collection of farm equipment Grandpa never quite got working. The neighborhood included turkey farms, horse and cow pastures, and grain fields. Ann played in the surrounding alfalfa fields and cycling long country roads to visit friends. Among her childhood accomplishments were stringing barbed-wire for cattle pens, hoeing endless weeds, and mowing the world's biggest lawn.
Her first hint of greatness came when she won a speech contest in 4-H. But this talent lay well-hidden through the teen years as Ann focused on her career choice in aerospace. She attended Biola College and UCLA, completing a BA in Mathematics in 1976. Following graduation she worked for Hughes Aircraft programming computers that controlled test equipment.
In 1982, she met and married Gene McCormick, an ex-Navy guy from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The next sixteen years were their vagabond days, moving an average of once every two and a half years to various places in California and New Jersey following new job assignments in aerospace.
In 1998 Ann left her career in aerospace to pursue a life-long interest in herbs. This was part of her well-planned mid-life crisis. The McCormicks moved to Texas where the family expects to remain for some time. A committed Christian, Ann lives in south Fort Worth with her husband, mother, and three dogs. She works from home writing blogs, articles, newsletters, and books. To learn more about Ann, visit www.ann-mccormick.com.
