Publications - AHS TAG - March/April 2007 Feature

The American Gardener

Ornamental Edibles
by Janet Davis

Some edible plants are just too beautiful to relegate to the vegetable garden. Here are some tips for integrating vegetables, herbs, and fruits into your landscape.

Do you love garden-fresh vegetables and herbs, but own a property that seems too small to devote exclusive space to their needs? Are you fond of fruit and berries, but not ready to give up your sunny flower beds in order to grow them?

The good news is that many vegetables, herbs, and fruits don’t need to be segregated in a suburban-style vegetable plot. Even in a small city garden, tomatoes and turnips are content growing alongside peonies and petunias, provided they receive sunshine and a little timely attention. Besides, many edibles are as beautiful as they are nutritious, so it’s a shame to hide them away in what a friend of mine calls “vegetable prisons” when they can contribute their own charm to an informal border.

Another good option for city or patio gardeners is to grow some vegetables and herbs in containers or window boxes where they can be both decorative and readily available for harvesting when you need some fresh herbs to season a dish or a few cherry tomatoes for a salad. A half whiskey barrel can support a surprising variety of vegetables and herbs, and there are a number of self-contained growing systems - such as the EarthBox™ - on the market that are ideal for raising veggies in a small space.

Assimilating Edibles

While medieval monastery gardens and ornate potagers such as France’s Château Villandry provide the inspiration for using vegetables as ornamentals, today’s gardener is less concerned about geometry and decoration and more interested in functionality and integration. In other words, how can edibles be assimilated into a mixed border?

The solution is to consider their requirements for soil, moisture, temperature, and sunshine, then match them with perennials, annuals (including edible flowers such as pansies, nasturtiums, and calendula), shrubs, and vines that share those cultural needs. As to functionality, food crops are meant to be eaten when they’re ripe, so mixing edibles with ornamentals might mean the gardener must plug in some annuals in the border come harvest time or overlook a few bare spots.

Combination Ideas

There are so many possibilities for mixing edibles with ornamentals. Here are a few of my favorites:

Salad greens such as leaf lettuce, mesclun, and spinach are easy to grow in rich, moist soil and make decorative front-of-border plants or leafy fillers between low perennials and annual flowers. Their preference for cool growing temperatures means they’re best seeded in early spring for summer harvest and late summer for fall picking. Sow them with seeds of hardy annuals that also enjoy cool weather, such as poppies (Papaver spp.), larkspur (Consolida ajacis), and bachelor buttons (Centaurea spp.). Pansies and forget-me-nots (Myosotis spp.) also look lovely growing with salad greens.
Some edibles have dramatically-colored leaves that rival any hosta or coleus. The reddish-black foliage of ‘Bull’s Blood’ beet contrasts nicely with other ornamental foliage plants such as chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas ‘Margarita’) and spiky New Zealand flax (Phormium ‘Maori Maiden’). Nasturtiums, with their edible flowers, make colorful fillers.
Herbs often have attractive flowers and leaves that look right at home in an ornamental border, and because you usually only need a little at a time for cooking or garnish, it is easy to pinch a few sprigs without affecting how they look. Sedums such as ‘Meteor’ or creeping ‘Angelina’ are good companions for edible sages (Salvia officinalis), especially those with colorful foliage like variegated ‘Tricolor’. And pink-flowered thymes look delightful paired with creeping sedums such as gold-flowered Sedum acre.