Potager gardens feed the senses and the appetite

Potager gardens are a feast for the eyes, as well as the palate, nourishment for the body, the spirit and the planet.
The word "potager" — PO-tah-zjay — comes from the French word "potage," which means soup. In gardener's parlance, a potager, then, is an artful stew of edible and ornamental plants.
Appropriately, Denver chef-owner Teri Rippeto cultivates a potager at her Capitol Hill eatery with the same name. In the tiny courtyard and in the alley behind Potager, Rippeto grows fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers.
Rippeto prepares her menus using only locally grown, seasonal, organic foods. Rippeto's delicious discipline has not gone unrewarded by Denver diners: Potager, 1209 Ogden St., just celebrated its 12th anniversary.
Rippeto does business with a network of Colorado farmers, but she also grows her own: rhubarb in troughs, raspberries in a raised bed, herbs in whiskey barrels, and a variety of veggies thriving both in her restaurant garden and her plot at home.
Rippeto, raised in a small farm town in Missouri, picked up a hand trowel and loosened the soil in one of her raised beds. Gently, she pulled up a couple of radishes.
"Growing food is such a reward. You gain an appreciation of food and learn to honor it," Rippeto said. "The moment you pick the tomato you grew and eat it, that becomes a celebration: You're honoring something so natural, and celebrating life in its simplest form. And you don't waste it."
Rippeto insists upon knowing where her food comes from. On a table near the entrance to Potager, she keeps a well-thumbed coffee-table book titled "Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture."
"My belief is that even if you don't consider yourself a gardener, if you have a piece of land — even a little square of yard or lawn — you should be growing some food. That's what I believe our community needs to move toward. If you can't eat everything you grow, share it with friends, neighbors or donate a box of vegetables to a soup kitchen."
Laurie Jekel, owner of The Last Detail, a Denver landscape design and build firm, profoundly appreciates the aesthetic appeal of fruits, vegetables and herbs. She cultivates crops ranging from arugula to zucchini, and she advocates not only for their nutritional value but their artful appearance.
"Red cabbage is a beautiful ruby, like a pomegranate red; and when grown in a garden, it adds such great color until fall. When the sun hits it, it's hot pink," she says. "And bibb lettuce is lime green, a great color."
"I love to see broccoli. Not many people realize what an exotic plant the artichoke is, or Brussels sprouts — an amazing plant. Asparagus has a fabulous fern. Potatoes of every variety make a little shrub that flowers. Potatoes here in Denver are great because you can leave them all winter and just dig some up when you want them."
Jekel credits the success of her high-yield potagers to composted soil cultivated weekly. During a telephone interview, Jekel made her way around her own potager, cutting ingredients for a supper salad.
"All the different lettuces are fun. They look so European. I have spinach and scallions and green onions. Celery smells great in a garden. And later, lemon cucumbers, I love to see the yellow lying around the garden, they add a great snap of color."
Jekel's potagers incorporate culinary herbs.
"I plant lemon thyme so you can brush up against it and smell it. Dill is a beautiful, airy plant. I use peppermint and spearmint, but also orange mint, ginger mint, chocolate mint, lemon mint," she says. "Variegated sages are pretty. Parsley is curly and adds a whole different texture and a different green. Chives have that great little round purple flower. Lavender is so great, and people are using it for so many things now."
For Jekel, the ideal potager engages all five senses. "That should be true for any garden, but especially for potagers. You want a potager to look good, smell good, feel good, taste good. You want to be able to hear the birds and the bees."
To keep potagers looking good, Jekel adds annuals and perennials: cheery snapdragons, bee balm, dramatic Joe Pye weed, foxgloves, a hydrangea tree, roses, hellebores.
"And you always want to have some stargazer lilies, so that when you're out in your potager picking and cutting for cooking, you can remember, 'Oh, I can have a bouquet too.' "
Jekel also plants potagers with nasturtiums, their edible leaves and blossoms bridging the gap between flower and food.
Another preferred potager plant is rhubarb: "Rhubarb is gorgeous for its leaf and burgundy stem. I use them in floral arrangements, and I just found a great recipe for a summer drink with rhubarb and vodka," Jekel said. "Rhubarb is a great smell. It reminds you of summer when you were a kid."
In fact, nostalgia, Jekel believes, is a cornerstone in the potager.
"Potagers are what we remember from our grandma's gardens. You see rhubarb and remember your grandma made rhubarb pie. Or how you dipped your rhubarb in a Dixie cup of sugar. Potagers are not just about eating, but about bringing back childhood memories."
Even in the digital age, kids continue to make memories in a potager. Jekel related an anecdote about a client's kitchen garden.
Not only did the client's son eagerly eat his fresh vegetables at meals, he also visited the potager to help himself — a habit the client learned of only when she went out to harvest broccoli for a dinner party, but found none.
She might have blamed the rabbits, except near the verdant vegetable plants her son had left behind a piece of telltale evidence: a cup with the remains of ranch dressing.