Author: Samantha Nobles-Block / Source: Atlas Obscura
Those who knew Jim Westerfield described him as a renaissance man. A talented, self-taught musician and composer who knew everything about antiques from the American Revolutionary period.
An entrepreneur who, together with his wife, created the Westerfield House, a popular inn and restaurant in rural Illinois. An obsessive culinary gardener and amateur botanist.But Westerfield’s true passion was breeding new types of mint—he created dozens of new varieties over the course of his lifetime. The names of his mints hint at their flavors: “Sweet Pear,” “Candy Lime,” “Marshmallow,” and “Candied Fruit.” His crowning achievement was “Hillary’s Sweet Lemon Mint,” one of the relatively few mint varieties ever to be granted a United States patent. Today, Westerfield’s mint varieties are widely propagated by both commercial growers and home gardeners. Online, bloggers review his mints, highlighting their unique attributes, and gardeners swap tips on forums for finding harder-to-locate varieties. Westerfield expanded the boundaries of the culinary mint world, giving gardeners and connoisseurs a palette of mint flavors never before envisioned.
An Illinois native and the youngest of eight children, Jim Westerfield was born in 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression. His fascination with culinary gardening began early. At the age of 10, he found a tattered old magazine with an article entitled “Grow Your Own Seasonings,” and became enthralled with herbs.
Growing up in an area that was hard-hit by the Depression, Westerfield spent hours in the library to keep himself out of trouble, devouring books on botany, herbs, and plants. “Jim came from a neighborhood where everyone had a vegetable garden. He started growing basil when he was about 11,” says his niece, Lori Crider. “He was just hooked from then on.”
After high school, Westerfield had hoped to attend college, but his father’s untimely death led him to enter the grocery business to support his mother. While working in the industry, Westerfield married, had a son, and travelled to Nashville on his days off to collaborate with musicians, composing and arranging music for pop-rock bands. His songs were featured in both America and Europe, and one of his compositions, “Another Time (Another Place),” was a “spotlight”…
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