Summer, OverPlanters, has its unofficial start today, and you know what that means: gimlets, rickeys, martinis, Ramos fizzes, g-and-t’s, aviation cocktails, pegu clubs, tom collinses, Long Island iced tea, corpse revivers, and tipsy parsons—all of them concocted with that divinely limpid liquid, that nature’s balm, that friend of the hot and weary gardener: gin.

Truly, gin deserves to be declared the official libation of gardeners. Just look at the list of ingredients in a bottle of Bombay: juniper berries, angelica root, coriander, cassia bark, almonds, lemon peel, liquorice, orris root, grains of paradise . . . why, it’s an entire garden in a bottle! In fact, distillers even refer to these ingredients as botanicals. How can you be a self-respecting gardener and not drink gin? It’s practically a duty. A really, really fun duty. (Be sure to check out the cocktails recipes on the “Spirited Gardener” page.)

Then, of course, there’s the excitement of exploring the different styles of gin. There’s the traditional London dry style, with its pronounced juniper notes (Bombay, Tanqueray); the softer, “new” gins, which are great for mixed drinks (Aviation); and anomalies like Plymouth, which has an almost floral fragrance. For the adventurous, there’s genever, which is basically a blend of gin and a whisky-like spirit called malt wine, and Old Tom gin, which is usually sweetened, often strongly aromatic, and sometimes barrel-aged. (For those of you who wish to explore the nuances and intricacies of gin, I recommend The Bartender’s Gin Compendium, by Gaz [sic] Regan. It’s self-published and could have used a good editor, but it’s crammed with fascinating facts.)

Not least, gin has inspired some of the literary world’s greatest minds. If you’ve ever seen a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (or watched My Fair Lady), you will no doubt recall the hilarious scene in which Liza Doolittle debuts her newly acquired “proper” accent:

Liza [darkly] My aunt died of influenza: so they said.

Mrs. Eynsford Hill [clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!

Liza [in the same tragic tone] But it’s my belief they done the old woman in.

Mrs. Higgins [puzzled] Done her in?

Liza. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon. . . .

Mrs. Eynsford Hill. But it can’t have been right for your father to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.

Liza. Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’d poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.

And finally, let’s close with a snippet from Ogden Nash’s “A Drink with Something In It”:

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish that I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it’s the Gin.