Feasts for the eye: Vegetables gardens can be beautiful as well as productive - Garden Outdoor Living

Sunset, April, 2002 by Lauren Bonar Swezey, Jim McCausland, Sharon Cohoon

Six centuries ago, Saint Ignatius of Loyola offered these words of advice: "It is not enough to cultivate vegetables with care. You have the duty to arrange them according to their colors and to frame them with flowers, so they appear like a well-laid table." Heeding this advice, Europeans have long excelled at creating grand kitchen gardens (or potagers, as the French call them) that combine vegetables and ornamental plants in stunning designs.

Today, the concept seems more timely than ever, especially in the West, where ever-smaller yards give gardeners more incentive to make the vegetable patch an aesthetically pleasing part of the landscape.

On these pages, we show beautiful, productive vegetable gardens, each representing different approaches to design. Choose the style that suits your taste, and have fun experimenting. You'll be rewarded with a well-laid table--in the garden and in the kitchen.

Focal points in a formal setting

"Vegetable gardening should be elevated to the level of a formal garden, where the beauty of the plants can be shown off to maximum potential," says designer Freeland Tanner, who gardens with his wife, Sabrina, in Napa, California. Inspired by the plants' delightful colors, textures, and forms, the Tanners created a inviting garden room in which to show them off.

A formal allee of metal arbors draws visitors into the garden along a gravel path and culminates at a circular herb bed accented with a wooden obelisk.

Throughout the rest of the garden, raised beds with low stone columns at the corners form living tapestries of plants in complementary colors. "I stage each bed like a flower arrangement," Freeland explains. He starts with a focal point in the center, then builds a composition around it.

Large half-barrels, for instance, anchor most beds. In each barrel, the Tanners place an obelisk (planted with beans or peas, depending on the season) or a handsome blend of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. In other beds, variegated corn, Agastache 'Tutti Frutti' (shown above), or other tall plants serve as focal points. Below these, low-growing herbs and vegetables form patterns (as in a potager) or a more random mix of compatible colors and shapes.

Each bed is edged with overlapping hoops formed from small cuttings of apple, elderberry and pear trees. The hoops are then underplanted with sweet alyssum, parsley, or violas.

The Tanners do mix in a few choice nonedible perennial flowers with their crops. "This way, we'll always have vegetables for dinner and flowers for the table," says Freeland.

Fences frame the garden

Vi Kono of Redmond, Washington, started by framing a space with fences, then composing a garden within it. "I can see the vegetable plot from my kitchen," she explains. "The fence gives structure to the garden and gives me something to look at during the time of year when there's the least to see."

The rustic fence is composed mostly of bitter cherry saplings joined with wood screws. Three varieties of espaliered apples form a living fence along the south side. Fence-top birdhouses, as well as an arbor and gates made of unpeeled logs and twigs, convey the feeling that Hobbits inhabit the garden.

Inside the fence, assorted vegetables--carrots and garlic, Swiss chard and lettuce, squash and tomatoes--share informal, curved beds with dahlias, delphiniums, lavatera, perennial linaria, and a few annuals like cosmos and marigolds. Edible-pod 'Sugar Snap' peas and pole beans clamber up twiggy trellises, while a hop vine and porcelain berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) grow up opposite sides of an arbor that runs along one side of the garden.

At planting time, every vegetable and flower seedling gets a sprinkling of controlled-release fertilizer. To maintain soil fertility, Kono digs in vast quantities of compost each year, supplemented with cow manure every third year.

Giving peas a rung up

Julie Heinsheimer of Palos Verdes, California, has a passion for old, weathered garden implements. So when she found this vintage ladder in a trash heap, she rescued it and put it to use as a support for vining vegetables. Peas climb it in spring (cucumbers take their place in summer). Wire wrapped around the ladder gives the vine tendrils plenty of places to twine around. Near the ladder, the rosy pink plumes of Jupiter's beard (Centranthus ruber) attract beneficial insects, including butterflies.

RELATED ARTICLE: Design tips

* Create focal points. Place a large container, an obelisk, a trellis, or a sculptural object in the center of the bed.

* Arrange the bed like a container. Place taller plants in the center and surround them with shorter plants.

* Plant in patterns. Arrange low-growing plants with interesting forms, colors, and textures (cabbages, herbs like basil) in circles or other patterns.

* Echo colors. Start with a colored vegetable (purple eggplant, for example), then echo the hue with similarly colored vegetables, flowers, or foliage.

* Grow vegetables vertically. Trailing types of cucumbers, melons, and squash are space hogs: Train them on an arbor or trellis. Pole beans, peas, and indeterminate tomatoes also need to be trained on some sort of structure.