Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

The album took four months to record on a budget of about $30,000. It was the first of their albums on which Simon insisted on total control, and the first made on eight tracks. Homeward Bound and Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall were carried over from the December 1965 sessions for Sounds of Silence.

It reached number four in the United States, thirteen in Britain in 1968 and eight in Canada, and went triple platinum in the United States. Bruce Eder of AllMusic called it their first masterpiece. Rolling Stone placed it at 201 in its 2003 list of the greatest albums.

Most of the album was recorded over a week in June 1966, with one date in July and two in August. Vocals were overdubbed because it was hard to get clean separation between Simon's voice and guitar. Garfunkel said that recording Scarborough Fair was the moment the duo became producers, because they stood beside engineer Roy Halee while he mixed it. Much of the material was written during Simon's time in England in 1965, and Patterns, Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall and A Simple Desultory Philippic had already appeared on The Paul Simon Songbook. In A Simple Desultory Philippic Simon imitates Bob Dylan, harmonica included. 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night sets Silent Night against a news report that mentions the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the death of Lenny Bruce, voiced by the radio disc jockey Charlie O'Donnell.

Credit disputes followed. Bruce Woodley co-wrote Cloudy but was not credited at release, though he collected royalties. Martin Carthy, who had introduced Simon to Scarborough Fair, was never credited, and according to Peter Ames Carlin none of the royalties Columbia paid to his publisher reached him. Bob Cato photographed the cover in a flower garden, and Ralph J. Gleason wrote an essay on the back. The BBC's Andy Fyfe wrote in 2009 that the album played as substantial a part in folk rock's evolution as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and that its boldest themes were still worryingly pertinent.