The herbs are small, but Ruth Porto did not want to make “a little brochure” to match them. Instead, the dream was to create a beautiful and ambitious object with a double function: “a cookbook that stays forever” and a herbarium about aromatic herbs, “with what they can give us at the medicinal and culinary level.” Sal Verde is all this, materialized in 270 pages with hardcover, to pass from generation to generation. A volume of weight, which is also the result of a very own path, of a graphic designer who became a farmer and launched a brand in between.
“We founded Be Aromatic eight years ago because we wanted to change our lives,” Rute sums up. The plural includes her husband João Marcos, a landscape architect. “We wanted to be farmers and sell in bulk, but we realized that we needed to make a brand to achieve another profitability of aromatic herbs,” he continues. Through organic farming, varieties such as poejo, cider and peppermint are grown on the couple’s farm near Évora and sold in beautiful illustrated cans that the designer herself created. “Early on I started to get requests from people who wanted to know how they could use the herbs, and the idea of the book was born there.”
