Edible Landscaping!

What is edible landscaping? Using herbs, fruit trees & shrubs, vegetables and edible flowers as the predominant plant material in your garden This presentation will cover a few different models: Potager Cottage garden Kitchen garden Community garden Easy alternatives Unless otherwise noted, all photos taken by Ruth Silver

La crème de la crème! The potager gardens at Chateau Villandry in the Loire Valley, France Potager: a formal garden design in which edible plants are used to create beautiful patterns. The aesthetic is as important as the function of producing food. They remain spectacular throughout all seasons. This is the most famous potager garden in the world! It's Chateau Villandry in the Loire Valley France. The intricate patterns of the garden plots are made from edible plants. 10 gardeners and 3 apprentices are employed full-time, year round to keep it up. Don't be overwhelmed! This is just a little taster of the fanciest edible garden in the world, the presentation will quickly move on to more attainable examples.

This photo shows some of the intricate geometrical patterns used to create the form of the garden. The space is divided into a grid and then is subdivided over and over again to create smaller scaled elements. The reason for this is so that the garden as a whole looks like one beautiful and unified space from up high and then as you descend into the garden, smaller more appropriately scaled spaces for a human body, are revealed. Note how the edges are lined with long rows of plants and the corners are punctuated with taller elements such as fruit trees and arbors.

Here you can see the view of what it feels like as you descend into the garden. You can still see the great expanse of the garden, but now the details really start to pop. Notice that the design uses large singular massings of plants in each square although there seems to be a wide variety of plants. The rows use long lines of complimentary textured plants with the complimentary colour scheme of yellow and purple. The edges are neatly defined using a fence and then boxwood hedges around each bed, using many concentric frames defines the space.

When you get right down into the garden you can see the richness and variety that only a few plant choices can make when used rhythmically. Notice how the standard repetition of textures framed with the same material creates an overall experience of unity. The fruit trees act as beacons, guiding your eye through the space and creating an imaginary wall that cuts through the space and defines the perspectival views.

Also at Chateau Villandry, this garden is a much more informal take on the potager. It's actually a garden of healing herbs and medicinal plants. The short flowers define the space on the edges, and in the beds, the massings of plants, while not symmetrical create balance because they are planted in comparable volumes. The tall evergreens create a focal point at the end of the path and the rows of trees and shrubs to either side define the vista.

Here's a diagram for a potager garden that would be both bountiful and beautiful. http://www.squidoo.com/VegetableGardenLayout

Kitchen gardens Kitchen gardens are traditional food growing gardens, prevalent in most cultures around the world! Usually they are easily accessible from the kitchen and supply a household with fresh produce and an abundance to preserve. Often they look more utilitarian in style, using long rows to separate different crops.

This kitchen garden combines edibles with flowers, trees and shrubs to create a large beautiful and delicious space. It uses the traditional method of long straight rows, with singular species of plants. Notice how the colours and textures of each plant compliment one another. Around the edges, grape vines are trained on low a low fence.

This kitchen garden uses large masses of singular plants in less manicured rows. The effect is more like a field than the strict geometry of rows. They also use a vine trained on a low fence to define the walking path. The monochromatic green from dark to light is very striking, especially when punctuated at the back with the bold yellow sunflowers.

This is a winter vegetable garden This is a winter vegetable garden. The plants shown in this diagram thrive in cooler weather so in June and July they can be replaced with a new round of hot weather plants. In the cool fall they can be resown! http://www.squidoo.com/VegetableGardenLayout

Community gardens Community gardens somehow seem to have avoided the great divide between flowers and edibles. These examples show beautiful combinations that could be replicated in any situation. Because community gardens are held by many people, you can bet on less uniformity and more variety! Depending on how the plots are divided, the space can feel like an efficient farm or an idiosyncratic place full of surprises. In this example beds are divided in linear plots and have a formal look to them. The flowers are separate from the veggies and the fruit tree is right in the middle of it all. Shared elements such as compost and water are kept easily accessible for everyone at the intersection of the major pathways.

This communal garden has a lot going on This communal garden has a lot going on! It probably wasn't designed to be anything but utilitarian, but notice the happy marriage of form and function all over the space. The pathways are marked by trees that stand at the end of a vista. The general theme is from low plants to high, but there are plenty of secret spaces too.

This community garden is also divided into linear plots with scatterings of fruit trees and shrubs. It was in the middle of a neighbourhood and this view is from the street.

Cottage gardens are idiosyncratic, use meandering paths and use large massings of plants rather than formal rows. This diagram could be a community garden if responsibility for the spaces were divided between many hands. http://www.squidoo.com/VegetableGardenLayout

Easy alternatives & spatial effects with plants These examples show plants used in traditional and non-traditional ways to create beautiful spaces that are functional and aesthetic This is a local example of using Creeping Thyme instead of grass as a ground cover. The plants weave into one another creating a gorgeous carpet of thick soft green, and best of all it smelled delicious!

Here's an example of a tiny vineyard on someone's front lawn Here's an example of a tiny vineyard on someone's front lawn. The way they've divided the space is of course functional, but it mirrors the architecture of the building and the low wall frames the whole garden and building into one lovely composition.

These long planting beds are actually mini nurseries for a large potager garden, however, even on their own they're beautiful. The large clumps of plants in square blocks create a pattern of edibles. You could achieve this look by planting many of the same planters full of one type of plant each.

At the top is another example of large raised beds or pots filled with one type of plant. Seen all together they create a unified beautiful garden, and they work define the space because they are separated. The lower image shows fences on which edible vines grow. This photo shows the different stages of growth and opacities that are achieved from very porous to almost opaque.

On the left is an arbour with grape vines overgrown thickly over the side and top. Because one side is left open, light is able to penetrate and a person is prompted to look over the fence to the view below. On the right are a few other examples of how to create different heights with plants and their effects. The short fence on which the vines are trained are low and are used to define the space around the garden. The tall wooden arbour creates shade and a place to sit on a sunny day.

Kid's garden with tepee shaped arbour http://www.squidoo.com/VegetableGardenLayout