With more than 30 varieties, basil is a nice, friendly plant — sort of peppery and sort of sweet.

In today’s kitchens, basil is great in pesto and almost any pasta topping. Snip leaves into soups, stir fries, marinades, or over meat on the grill. Add the flowers to salads. The purple-leafed cultivars lend taste and color to vinegars.

The most commonly grown type, sweet basil, grows 1 to 2 feet (30 to 61 cm) tall, 1 foot (30 cm) wide, and has bright green, oval, somewhat puckery leaves with serrated margins. The flowers are spikes of small, white tubular flowers, sometimes tinged with pink or purple, especially in the purple-leafed cultivars.

Give basil plenty of sun and moderately rich, well-aerated soil that also retains moisture. Plants wilt easily in drought. You can sow seeds in your garden — it germinates easily — but we always start ours indoors, 4 to 6 weeks before the last frost date.

Space plants about 1 foot (30 cm) apart. Plant basil among your flowers to help protect the herb from wind. A fine companion for tomatoes in the vegetable patch, basil’s reputed to repel tomato hornworms. As soon as plants are 6 inches tall, begin pinching off stem tips and tops that are threatening to bloom to encourage more branching and leaf growth.