Make your vegetable garden a feast for the eyes

Ellen Ogden says everything she knows about gardening, she learned at art school.

The co-founder of "The Cook's Garden" seed catalog also designs ornamental kitchen gardens, where plants are chosen as much for their colors and textures as for their flavors.

"I've always been interested in using my eyes as well as my mind while I garden," Ogden said. "I usually border my (vegetable) beds with lively things like decorative parsley, fennel or kale."

Today's ornamental kitchen garden generally is smaller and less formal than the traditional potager (puh'-tuh-zhay) that originated in 16th Century Europe. With the typical French château potager, a tasty tapestry of herbs, fruits, flowers and vegetables was planted a few feet from the kitchen door and delivered dew-fresh to the table.

Ogden carries that tradition literally from the garden to the dining room at her Manchester Village, Vt., home. She garnishes with chives and flowers, and grows pansies around her vegetables so she can gather them as she walks by.

"One of the things we know but don't think much about is that a splash of color enhances the appetite," she said.

The humble vegetable, if chosen well and given some landscaping help, can elevate the kitchen garden from a rectangular plot into a living, vibrant work of art.

The medieval potager garden was distinguished by a combination of walls, gates, walkways and growing beds. They provided a sense of privacy, a degree of shelter, enough space for crop rotation, seasonal beauty, usefulness and order. Many of those plants, including fruit trees and shrubs, were trained to grow upward or espaliered into two-dimensional decorations on walls or fences. Herbal knot gardens also were customary.

Contemporary kitchen garden design is more casual and more personal. It borrows features common to healing gardens (raised beds, walkways), meditation gardens (twisting and turning trails, statuary or fountains) and outdoor rooms (trees, benches and hedged borders).

"I like to incorporate some history into the kitchen gardens I design for my clients — history involving family and memories," said Jennifer Bartley (http://americanpotager.typepad.com/american_potager/), a landscape architect from Granville, Ohio, and author of "Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook."

Bartley uses the formal potager outside her window as a "tasting garden a little of everything to snack on through the season.

"I use it to eat from daily," she said. "I also use it to entertain. After guests arrive, I'll send them out into the garden to make some impromptu salads before they get comfortable around the table."


 

Potager pointers

Here are some tips to make your creative gardening endeavors more palatable:

• Follow the sun. Vegetables need their day in the sun, or at least six to eight hours worth, if they're to produce the best yields. But showier varieties deserve visibility, too. Place them near the kitchen door for convenience; yet also position them where they can be enjoyed from the windows.

• Plan small and then plant smaller. We're talking about using a heavy mix of perennials here, things like asparagus, rhubarb, horseradish, chives, strawberries, fruiting shrubs and trees. Find varieties that are at the same time attractive and flavorful.

"Start with a 10-foot by 10-foot section. You always can add to it later. Then grow just the things you enjoy or can't get at the farmer's market or grocery like luxury herbs and fancy, tender little greens," says Ogden, the co-founder of "The Cook's Garden" seed catalog.

• Skip the bigger plants, like sweet corn. They not only take up a lot of room but they rob the soil of nutrients. Salad greens or tomatoes provide more nutritional value for the space, Ogden says.

• Succession planting. Get a second crop into the ground immediately after harvesting the first. Depending upon your climate and the maturity dates of your plants, a compact ornamental kitchen garden can be good for as many as three crops per growing season. Speed things along by using seed sown in peat pots. That way, they'll be ready to drop into the ground after the cool weather plants (beets, cabbage, radishes, mustard and spinach) are done.

• Border plants. If you prefer a living barrier to stone walls, then choose a hardy ornamental shrub that will flower, fruit and produce a colorful background when viewed from within or without.

• Lay off the chemicals if you intend to nibble on the blooms. You'll be washing them, of course, but gently if you want to deliver them intact to the table. Better that you grow such things organically to make them even more food-safe.

• Some edibles taste fresher and last longer when picked than others. But you can enhance those flavors by harvesting in the cool of the morning. Keep the clipped edibles crisp by covering them with a cool, wetted towel.

• If you're starved for room, then plant deep and grow things up as well as out. Use vining plants like grapes, beans and squashes.