Garden Designers Roundtable – Mixing Edibles & Ornamentals

 

Remember when having a vegetable garden meant a collection of raised beds, or a few tomato plants in a pot?  Instead of banishing them to out-of-the-way areas, these days, edibles are everywhere in the garden – mixed with ornamentals, scrambling out of recycled containers, and clambering up apartment walls.

This topic of this month’s Garden Designers Roundtable is Edibles, and I’m thrilled!Especially since Ivette Soler, fellow GDRT blogger, has just written the most amazing, inspiring and detailed book on the topic: The Edible Front Yard.

Today I’m going to show you some of my favorite edibles to mix in with your ornamental beds – separated into two categories:  Foliage and Flowers. And as an added bonus, at the very end of this post my friend and fellow landscape designer Michelle Derviss is sharing her stunning front yard potager with us!

 

Foliage

A favorite edible I like to mix in with my planting beds is purple brussel sprouts.  The deep plum-colored foliage of this variety effortlessly mingles with the neighboring echeverias and euphorbia ‘Blackbird‘.  And what a toughie! The leaves are fairly thick, so the snails and slugs have only done minimal damage, and its survived several bouts of frost.   I can’t wait to see these brussell sprouts continue to grow and send up their tall stalks of purple ‘buttons’, adding an unexpected twist to this narrow strip.

 

Another edible that provides beautiful winter and early spring color to my garden are ‘Bull’s Blood’ beets.

Personally, I love the taste of beets,  But even if I didn’t, their jewel-toned foliage just glows when backlit by the winter’s sun, providing a desperately needed jolt of excitement in my garden.

 

For years, I’ve planted sorrel (Rumex sanguineus) throughout my gardens, as its deeply veined leaves, with touches of maroon, add such a beautiful contrast to neighboring plants. The leaves are edible, but I usually use them as decoration – placing a few leaves under wedges of cheese and fruit or pile strawberries on top of them for a gorgeous dessert.

The sorrel is so reliable, too!  If it starts to look a little haggard in the summer, just prune it back to the ground and it’ll re-sprout with fresh, new leaves within a week or so.

As I’ve written about in the past, one of my favorite colors to add to the garden is maroon.  And Red Kale ‘Mizuna Purple’ is another example of a perfect edible for this purpose.  Not only does it taste fantastic, but its long lived and when planted in the fall, it will add color until the first hot weather arrives.

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Flowers

When designing gardens, plants are thoughtfully chosen to provide necessary color, shape and form. Edibles are no exception, and  can play the same important role.  Edible flowers come in a wide range of colors, making them easy to include in just about any garden.

If you want to add cool and calming colors to your garden, you can’t go wrong with the blue, star-shaped flowers of a Borage plant.  Plant one of these and you’ll have Borage for life, as they freely re-seed in the tightest spaces, requiring very little water.  And they taste delicious, sort of a nutty-cucumber flavor.

On the opposite side of the color spectrum, the bright orange and yellow petals of  nasturtium flowers wake up a garden during cooler months.  My kids have grown up eating nasturtium flowers stuffed with cream cheese, having so much fun picking the flowers and making little ‘purses’ out of them!

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Multi-colored violas come in a range of colors, from white to purple and just about everything in between.  They are one of the easiest annuals to grow, and add a colorful note to both your garden and your salad bowl. One of my favorite varieties is ‘Ultima Morpho’, as its tougher than most, blooming well into warmer weather.  Plus I love its name – SO macho!!

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And I can’t forget one of my all time favorite edibles flowers – the fava bean!

This is such a great edible to incorporate in a planting bed as it only reaches about 2 1/2 – 3′ on sturdy stems, so it doesn’t flop over.  On top of that, snails and slugs pretty much leave it alone, and it gets a ton of these unusually colored black and white flowers which blend with almost all other flowers in the garden.

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For mild climates, nothing beats evergreen rosemary – both the creeping and the upright varieties.  My favorites are creeping rosemary ‘Prostratus’ and upright rosemary ‘Tuscan Blue’.

Draping over a wall, standing upright in the garden, or even in a topiary form, their late winter flowers in shades of blue add such drama to the garden, as well as tasting and smelling divine.

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Front Yard Potager

Michelle Derviss, one of Northern California’s most talented landscape designers, has one of my favorite front yard gardens EVER.  She has a small front yard, but has artfully created a year-round edible garden which blends in seamlessly with the rest of her garden.

With the creative use of evergreen plants (such as the boxwood border and red cordyline in the urn) this garden looks good year-round.

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Here’s another view of the potager in a different season.

Come take a peek inside to see what she’s planted….

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Besides adding beauty to the garden and food to the table, growing your own edibles means you control how they are cultivated. Knowing your produce is pesticide free and safe not only lowers your food bill, it brings peace of mind.

Enjoy reading what the rest of the participating Garden Designer Roundtable bloggers are writing about this month!

Douglas Owens-Pike : Energyscapes : Minneapolis, MN

Pam Penick : Digging : Austin, TX

Genevieve Schmidt: North Coast Gardening, Eureka, CA

Scott Hokunson : Blue Heron Landscapes : Granby, CT »

Shirley Bovshow: Eden Makers Blog: Los Angeles, CA