Rosemary can be rather tricky to grow, so why not give it a boost by growing other plants to help it out. These beneficial plants are called companion plants and your rosemary will thank you for including them in your herb garden.

Rosemary packs quite a punch as a companion plant. It will protect nearby plants by repelling insects, reducing disease, improving their growth, and much more. Not to mention that this aromatic herb will create a diverse ecosystem in your garden while adding something special to the kitchen.

Rosemary thrives in dry, sandy soil and plenty of bright sun. Even though it’s low-maintenance once established, its unique needs can make choosing the right plant partners a bit challenging. Many herbs, vegetables, and flowers that enjoy similar conditions can complement rosemary beautifully. But fair warning — not every plant will play nice. A few, if placed too close, might leave your rosemary struggling.

So, if you’re looking to give your rosemary — and your whole garden — a leg up, it’s worth pairing rosemary with the right companions can make a big difference. Up ahead, we’ll walk through 13 companions that thrive beside rosemary and five that you’d do best to plant elsewhere.

Rosemary Companion Planting

Rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) is an evergreen shrub from the Mediterranean. Many of us think of rosemary as a small annual, when in actuality it is a Zone 8 perennial that can withstand temperatures down to -5°C (23°F) and grows to be 1.5m (5 feet) tall.

Rosemary grows well in the garden and also makes an excellent potted plant as long as it has good drainage (it is drought tolerant and likes the soil to dry out between waterings). It prefers warm weather ((12-27°C/55-80°F) and full sun with at least 8 hours of exposure per day.

Check out this site from the Royal Horticultural Society for more on growing rosemary.

As a companion plant, rosemary has lots of flowers which is great for attracting pollinators. Its aroma also deters lots of bad bugs, most notably the cabbage moth, Mexican bean beetle, and carrot rust flies, but it is susceptible to aphids, whiteflies, and spider mites.

Knowing how rosemary grows will give you a better idea of which companion plant choose and how they will help each other out.

A good companion plant will:

Create biodiversity in the garden
Give you a second harvest in case the main crop fails
Shelter for more delicate plants
Reduce disease
Confuse or trap bad bugs
Bring in predatory insects
Attract pollinators
Improve the growth of the other plant
Make the soil better
Make each other taste better!

TIP: Did you know companion plants do not have to be planted in the garden? If you grow rosemary in pots, consider setting the plants amongst your garden near good companions for the benefits while still allowing you to give the rosemary the care it needs.

13 Best Companion Plants You Should Grow Next to Rosemary

Companion plants will create a symbiotic relationship where the plants help each other out. Below, we have listed the 13 best companion plants to grow with rosemary; some will help out the rosemary, while others will benefit from the rosemary.

Keep reading to find the best plants to pair with rosemary in your garden:

1. Brassicas

Rosemary is very helpful when growing brassicas. Brassicas are highly susceptible to a number of insects. In particular, the caterpillars of many moths and butterflies are particular damaging including cabbage worms and cabbage loopers.

The strong aroma of rosemary is well known as a deterrent to these moths and growing them with your brassicas can prevent them from becoming a problem.

Rosemary is a good companion for a number of brassicas including cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels spouts, rutabagas, turnips, kohlrabi, and radishes.

2. Beans

Rosemary and beans have a mutually beneficial arrangement. Many bugs like beans, including the rather devastating Mexican bean beetle which eats the leaves so the defoliated plants slowly wilt and die. Rosemary’s overpowering aroma masks the scent of the beans and confuses that bugs so they cannot easily located the plants.

Beans, in turn, fix atmospheric nitrogen from the air and traps it in the soil in a for the rosemary can absorb. This is especially important since over-fertilizing rosemary inhibits its growth, and the nitrogen fixed by the beans will improve the soil with out overloaded the rosemary.

3. Carrots

Carrots are very susceptible to carrot rust flies. These flies find the carrots by smell then lay their eggs in the surrounding soil. When the eggs hatch, the maggots quickly get to work eating your carrot

Since carrot flies locate the carrots by smell (they are really drawn in when foliage is damaged or handled in anyway) that we can protect your root vegetables by growing something that smells even stronger…and that is where rosemary comes in. The strong smelling herb masks the smell of the carrots so the buts can’t even find it.

The old saying to pair plants in the garden like you would eat them in the kitchen is very fitting in this instance, since fried carrots and rosemary is a delightfully dish.

4. Parsnips

Parsnips suffer from carrot flies just like carrots do, but parsnips are even harder to grow so we need to do all we can to protect them.

Plant rosemary with your parsnips so they will be well protected during the growing season.

TIP: Companion planting is not 100% failsafe, so you might want to utilize floating row covers, too.

5. Tomatoes

A tomato plants worst enemy is the hornworm, and these hungry caterpillars can eat and entire plant in a short time. Rosemary comes to the rescue by covering the tomato aroma, thereby confusing the moths enough that they will (hopefully) lay their eggs somewhere else.

Growing tomatoes and rosemary together is a bit contentious with many gardeners. The first reason is that some growers claim that rosemary makes tomatoes taste better when they are grown together while others say this is hogwash. Why not try it out and see?

The second reason being that the two plants have VERY different watering requirements with rosemary liking it dry and tomatoes needing lots of water to grow healthy and prevent blossom end rot. This can be easily avoided, however, by setting containers of potted rosemary amongst your tomato plants.

6. Chives

Even though rosemary’s smell repels a lot of bugs, aphids don’t seem to mind and they can cause a problem with your herbs. Thankfully, chives work well against aphids, so grow these two together for a really excellent insect-repelling package.

As an added bonus, chives have been reported to improve the growth and flavour of the rosemary.

Since both chives and rosemary are perennials (if your climate is right) so you can really make these two work together for the long run.

7. Sage

As Mediterranean herbs, both sage and rosemary have very similar growing requirements, which means they can be cultivated in the same bed with ease.

As an added bonus, rosemary improves the overall health and flavour of the sage.

Try interplanting these two amidst the other plants in your garden, or put them in the same pot for a really aromatic herb garden.

8. Thyme

Thyme is another Mediterranean herb that grows well with rosemary, since they can be cared for the same. Furthermore, both repel insects from the other so you should have very little trouble with either of them.

9. Oregano

Oregano is from the Mediterranean and is a perennial from Zone 5 and onwards. It has similar growing conditions as rosemary so the two work very well together.

Oregano can be cultivated as a low growing groundcover which forms a wonderful living mulch around the towering rosemary shrubs.

Once they are both established, make sure to let them dry slightly between watering to avoid root rot and other moisture related issues. They will both thrive in poor soil, but they will thank you for a helping of compost every spring.

10. Lavender

Lavender and rosemary are two more herbs from the rocky, sandy soils of the Mediterranean. They are both perennials (lavender is a Zone 5 plant) so work well in herb gardens or containers, and they both have similar growing requirements.

While rosemary is an excellent bug repellant, lavender is famous for its flowers which attract pollinators by the droves.

Pair these two in your garden to create a healthy, diverse environment packed with all the good bugs you could ever want.

11. Marjoram

Marjoram is another Mediterranean herb, meaning it likes all the same stuff as rosemary but marjoram has its own special gift. Marjoram releases chemicals into the soil which are absorbed by the rosemary’s roots, improving growth and boosting the overall health of the rosemary.

12. Sweet Alyssum

Sweet alyssum is grown in gardens all over the world as a companion plant, but it too hails from the Mediterranean. It is usually grown as an annual, but will come back year after year in Zone 5 and higher so it can be cultivated very happily with rosemary since their requirements are very similar.

Rosemary is great for repelling bad bugs, but sweet alyssum draws in the good ones. Its plentiful flowers attract pollinators and predatory insects which will protect your rosemary and all the neighbouring plants, too.

13. Marigold

Many people think marigolds stink, but even smelly things have their place in the garden (think poop turned into wonderful compost). Many bugs think that marigolds smell bad, too, and their fragrance deters a lot of bugs that would bother your garden.

Position marigolds around your rosemary plants, and the two will protect each other and everything near them with their intense fragrances.

They even work well together in pots!

5 Plants You Should Never Grow With Rosemary

Many of the plants we have mentioned above are herbs, but there are a few other herbs that should NOT be paired with rosemary. Here are some plants that make bad companion plants for rosemary:

Mint: Mint is very invasive and will quickly take over any spot it is planted. This can sometimes be a good thing, but in this case the rosemary can be choked out by the aggressively spreading mint. Also, mint prefers far more moisture than rosemary so it would be difficult to grow the two together without having one or the other suffer.
Cucumbers: Require consistently moist soil and higher humidity, contrasting sharply with rosemary’s preference for dry, well-draining conditions, creating an environment conducive to fungal diseases like root rot and powdery mildew on rosemary.
Basil: Basil is a beloved herb, but it should be kept away from rosemary. Not that they will harm each other in any way, but basil needs constant watering which would spell disaster for a rosemary plant.
Fennel: Releases allelopathic compounds into the soil, such as phenolic acids, that suppress rosemary growth, potentially stunting its vigor and health.
Potatoes: Rosemary plants emit secondary metabolites, including terpenes like cineole and camphor, that may negatively interact with potato growth. These interactions can reduce potato tuber formation, overall size, and crop yield, likely due to biochemical interference and nutrient competition.

Can You Grow Rosemary and Pumpkin Together?

Rosemary has been found to be very effective when dealing with pumpkin beetles (Aulacophora), yet the growing conditions of pumpkins and rosemary are very different so growing them together can be challenging, and gardeners are divided on whether these two make an acceptable companion. If you are dealing with pumpkin beetles, then it might be worth sacrificing a few rosemary plants by growing them with your pumpkins, or consider keeping them in pots and setting the containers strategically around your pumpkin patch.

Conclusion

Companion planting has been around far longer than humans. Since plants first grew out of the soil, Nature has been pairing them together in unique ways to ensure the survival of

Written By

Adriano Bulla

After many years as an academic in London, Adriano Bulla became a writer, publishing books like A History of Gardening, Organic Gardening and Elements of Garden Design; he then decided to become a gardener, following his childhood dream, and has been following his dream writing and gardening professionally in Southern Europe, where he has specialized in new and innovative organic gardening fields and techniques, like permaculture, regenerative agriculture, food forests and hydroponics.