About Denise

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Denise Dunne established The Herb Garden, Ireland’s first certified organic specialist herb plant and seed nursery, based in Naul, County Dublin, in 1995. She was one of the earliest members of The Organic Trust when there were only a handful of organic producers in Ireland and she was also one of the early members of the Temple Bar Food Market in Dublin.

She is currently a member of Slow Food Ireland and The Association of Foragers and was a chosen delegate to represent Slow Food Ireland at Terra Madre, Salone del Gusto, an international gastronomy exhibition, in Turin, Italy in 2018.

She is also one of the founders of the Fingal Food Network and has played a pivotal role in the development of the Fingal Food Circle, a local food and drink provenance programme based in Fingal, North County Dublin.

Denise set up one of the earliest GIY (Grow It Yourself) gardening groups in Ireland and ran monthly meetings in her local village for four years on a voluntary basis, enlisting many interesting guest speakers, horticulturalists, authors and lecturers.

She has many years of experience in writing and teaching on the topics of growing and using culinary and medicinal herbs and native Irish wild plants for food and medicine. She is no longer running the herb nursery and intends to concentrate in the future on sharing her knowledge and experience through her current business venture, The Herb School.

Denise holds a QQI Level 6 Qualification in Training Delivery and Evaluation.

AFFILIATIONS – PAST AND PRESENT

MY FOOD STORY

One of my earliest food memories is standing on a chair at the counter in the kitchen, beside my Mam, and picking the thyme leaves off the stem into her legendary home-made stuffing. Picking the tiny thyme leaves was a tedious job that required patience, but not a huge amount of skill, so it was the perfect way to involve a young child in the cooking process. It was an important job, and I was very careful to pick out every last bit of stem that fell into the bowl. My reward was scraping out the stuffing bowl, and I always vowed that when I grew up, I would make a big bowl of it to eat all by myself. Onions sautéed in butter, then mixed with soft freshly made breadcrumbs and herbs straight from the garden. Delicious!

Good food has always been hugely important to our family, and we were practically self-sufficient long before it became fashionable. In fact, I often joke that my parents were hipsters and foragers before either concept existed in its present-day form.

They bought their first house in suburban Dublin in the 1960’s, straight from the plans. They selected the house with the biggest garden, in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by fields. Suburban gardens were huge back then compared to now. Mam and Dad planned and developed the garden themselves and within a few years they had transformed a barren plot into a miniature paradise.

The orchard was at the very end of the garden, along with the beehive and hen coop. The soft fruits were next and then the vegetable garden. As well as the usual potatoes, cabbage, etc., they also grew the more exotic vegetables, such as asparagus, purple sprouting broccoli and kohlrabi. In the greenhouse, along with the tomatoes, were aubergines, peppers, chillies and sweet corn.

The herb garden was in front of the greenhouse. It was a beautiful arrangement of crazy paving circular beds, interlinked with stepping stone paths. This was always my favourite part of the garden.

My Dad was a keen hunter and fisherman. Game was everyday fare for us. Dad also designed and built his own BBQ with a chimney, so that he could smoke his own food. We regularly dined on smoked pheasant, pigeon and home-smoked fish, and had ‘clam bakes’ where a huge selection of shellfish was cooked on the BBQ within a bed of fresh seaweed.

Foraging was a big part of life when I was growing up, although we never called it foraging back then. Where blackberry picking was popular in many suburban communities, my parents brought us out picking a huge range of seasonal wild plants – elderflowers for cordial and champagne, dandelion flowers, gorse blossoms and elderberries for wine, crab apples for apple jelly, rosehips for rosehip syrup, and sloes for sloe gin that would be served in my Granny’s antique sherry glasses around Christmastime.

Speaking of my Granny, she is the one who deserves the most credit for influencing the intrinsic love of good food and cooking in my family. From Summerhill, in County Meath, she started working as a kitchen maid in Killeen Castle when she was a young girl. She worked her way up to become cook, and therefore she was very skilled in the culinary arts and well versed in everything associated with fine dining.

The foundations of good cooking, such as homemade stocks and the French mother sauces, that might be considered highbrow in the home kitchen, were the basis of her cooking. Preparing game and shellfish, making preserves, pastry making, baking bread and cakes, and creating meals from the seasonal produce that came into the kitchen were an everyday way of cooking for her. In later years, my grandfather had an allotment, for which he won numerous awards from the RHS, so fresh produce was important to her throughout her life. I have many wonderful memories of helping her out in the kitchen when I was a child, and some of her cookery books and cooking utensils are among my most treasured possessions.

My Mam obviously learned a lot from her mother, and she is an amazing cook herself. My Dad loved to experiment, especially with game and seafood, and both of my parents loved preparing memorable meals, with or without the excuse of a special occasion. The meal would often be based on some seasonal game or fresh seafood catch, that deserved to be the centrepiece of a family feast. To complete the picture, homemade bread, cakes, a huge range of preserves, country wines and liqueurs were also an everyday part of our culinary experience.

When I was growing up all the neighbours called us ‘The Good Life’. How true that was. As a teenager, I found it quite embarrassing, especially when the hens escaped onto the street. It is only with hindsight that I realize what a wonderful gift my parents gave to us all. They both put so much effort into providing the best food possible for their family. It is only natural that cooking and eating together was always a special occasion and still is an integral part of any family celebration.

I must admit that I was never a great help in the garden. However, I was good in the kitchen, and I progressed from picking thyme leaves to picking the herbs of my choice and creating my own culinary inventions. I intend to share many of them with you on my website and blog.

Enjoy,
Denise