We have flower gardens and vegetable gardens, potagers and rose gardens. Flower seeds are listed in one part of a catalogue and vegetable seeds in another. Gardeners segregate them, but they are just plants, growing, then dying. Should we think out of the box, abandon these boundaries and mix all plants together?
Bold beginners, planning a brave new garden, like the thought of being inclusive. Before long, I tried broad beans in a flower border and cabbages in its front row. The broad beans attracted blackfly and looked such a mess after cropping that I had to pull them out. Ornamental phloxes would have filled the space more prettily, the aim of ornamental planting. The cabbages lasted longer but I did not then have access to what are now the prettiest, the Northern Lights varieties, easily germinated from seed. I recommend them, but slugs and pigeons like them too and the leaves do not colour vividly until temperatures drop below 10C. As they are best sown in summer for colour in autumn and early winter, they are at odds with a flower border’s prime season. When they bolt into flower they look unappealing.
After these experiments I relearned segregation and returned vegetables to a separate space. In due course I learned a modern lesson, that they need much less space than old gardening books and walled kitchen gardens accustomed us to believe. Grow smaller varieties in smaller spaces and pick them for eating when they are young. Carrots are never more delicious than when cooked before they develop the thick chunky roots that shops sell.
Fashion and format then changed too. Home-made raised beds replaced “kitchen gardens” and enabled edible plants to be brought near the entrances of houses and homes. On hard surfaces near a door, a bed of fresh soil could be built up inside a frame of wooden planks, raised to a height of about a foot and held in place by nails and vertical pegs, hammered into the ground below. French beans and radishes could then be grown where cars and bikes used to park on gravel. Vegetables were still being segregated, but they received new prominence in a garden’s plan.
Aesthetics changed too. Vegetable profusion began to be seen as an evocation of fertility, not muddle. Productive disorder became the badge of a good “home farmer”. Untidiness was rebranded: it became a welcome echo of the wild. Sprawling courgettes and bolting lettuces signal owners who relish green diversity.
Last April I gave up space for parking and introduced a rectangular bed, edged with nailed planks of wood set on top of one another, about a foot deep and four feet wide. It has yet to be a success. Dwarf runner beans, those welcome innovations, cropped quite well in late summer, but the courgettes spread too widely and swamped the young spinach and a second sowing of radishes. I contrived an edging of curly-leaved parsley by splitting up a rooted plant in a pot, bought in the green from a supermarket. I then killed a similar pot of basil. I hid the failure with autumn-flowering crocuses whose corms I planted in early August. The vegetable space ended by being colourful, a haven for yet more flowers.
This year, I vow to try harder: you know the feeling. I am inspired by an excellent new book, aptly called The Food Forward Garden: A Complete Guide To Designing and Growing Edible Landscapes. The author, Christian Douglas, is an admired designer who has laid out hundreds of culinary gardens in the US and Europe. He has travelled from Australia to the Dead Sea valley to watch how growers integrate food plants into farming. He began gardening as a boy on his father’s allotment, where he helped to dig and wash the carrots and potatoes. It was, he says, “love at first bite”.
His book is excellently designed and its many colour pictures are superb. Dirtiness and failure are nowhere in evidence, but images of perfection set a standard that will up our aims. The author starts with a principle so simple that most of us disregard it: we should consider vegetables and fruiting plants in the very first stages of a garden’s plan. Do not postpone them or segregate them: integrate them at the very beginning, he prescribes. Promote them too: give them space as near to a house as possible, especially if they are fast-growing courgettes or squashes, he recommends. We then pass by them daily and will be moved to look after their needs. Perennial herbs need less attention and can be planted farther away, he considers, the opposite to the usual practice of planting them as near to the kitchen as possible.
Consider “edible swaps”, he urges. They involve the substitution of cropping and fruiting types of tree or shrub for those that merely flower. In front gardens Douglas prefers persimmon trees and mulberries to non-fruiting magnolias. There is even a hint that existing flowery trees are better replaced with those fit for “home farming”. In the US he particularly admires a variety of mulberry called Pakistan. I would rather add a few cropping trees than swap others for them. Mulberries are wretchedly late to break into leaf, waiting until early June in Britain. Give me a spring- flowering magnolia any day.
Douglas thinks beyond the wooden box when discussing beds in yards and small gardens. He recommends woven willow panels, low mini-hurdles, as the frontage for raised beds, topped by flat planks of wood: his pictures show what a satisfying look they give. In raised beds he advises a soil depth from a foot-and-a-half to two feet, deeper than my recent effort. He also advises edible screening, contrived by planting climbing tomatoes, runner beans, cucumbers and so forth. They cover walls and fences more fruitfully than roses. Here too his photos testify fascinatingly to what can be done.
Owners of small urban gardens will be motivated in a food-forward direction. Strawberries tumble over the edges of Douglas’s willow-panelled beds. Tall climbing tomatoes displace clematis and wisteria on his arches and make fruiting tunnels. He depicts what he brands as “lush geometry” and “French formality”, all of it within easy reach. He even devises edible meadows by merging raised beds of edible plants into informal plantings that aspire to a fashionable meadow look. With the help of the app Sun Seeker, he works out how much daily sunlight to expect in each site he plants edibly: sun is a crucial element for success. He has ideas for shade too, the “edible woodland”, where he shares my favour for Alpine strawberries and their small fruits.
Designer-speak proliferates: “vertical space is untapped garden real estate” while “placing a table just inside the front gate sets the tone of relaxed hospitality”. He never discusses potatoes, let alone how to grow them in metal dustbins or buckets. Blackfly on beans, sawfly on gooseberry bushes or carrot fly on carrots are among the many pests whose control he never discusses in sufficient detail. The book is not a full guide to cultivation. It is better on how to braid garlic than on how to cope with snails. It illustrates and tempts us, nonetheless. Then we can unite around the ninth of his 10 principles of “food forward design”: engage often. “The more time you spend interacting with the garden, the more you will learn from it”.
All photographs are from “The Food Forward Garden” by Christian Douglas (Artisan Books)
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