Creating an attractive vegetable garden

I was totally bemused this morning listening to an episode (via podcast) of Ken Druse Real Dirt. Druse is a fabulous garden writer, photographer, and excellent plant person. His books about natural habitat gardening were some of the early celebratory books about the beauty found in native plants.

But he's never been a vegetable gardener to any great degree, nor had his guest on this podcast, Susan Harris, one of the bloggers on Garden Rant, a gardening coach, and a sustainable gardener.

Their conversation was excellent, touting the pluses of Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden, and the People's Garden (a new, and expansive vegetable garden) next to the USDA building in Washington, DC, followed by a discussion about the extensive native and sustainable gardens planned to surround the USDA building. (I was an intern at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum almost thirty years ago and remember it then, as it has appeared on all my subsequent visits as a dreadfully depauperant landscape of scruffy lawn). Maybe there was a shrub or two, but basically it was pretty lame for our Dept. of Agriculture. So kudos for Secretary Vilsac for getting something different!)

But what amazed me was their discussion about whether a vegetable garden can be attractive. They did talk about Chanticleer, which apparently now has a wonderfully interesting vegetable garden.

I'm a great fan of our natural landscape plantings, but I'm also extremely fond of my vegetable garden, and I think it looks pretty darn nice year-round even in the middle of winter when it's only Tuscan kale, winter bor kale, and red bor kale, punctuated by garlic shoots.

Now admittedly, I live in Zone 7B, but really? Their excuse was that Rosalind Creasy, the wonderful gardener who started the Edible Landscape trend in the U.S. over 20 years ago lives in Southern California. (Her book Cooking from the Garden, was one of my early inspirations, way before I was a serious gardener, vegetable or otherwise; I guess I was a cook before I was a 'real' gardener).

Ken lives in Southern N.J. and Susan outside of Washington, D.C. There is no reason that a three-season vegetable garden in either of those places wouldn't look perfectly nice, at least if it's laid out attractively (not mini-farm rows, although those are good-looking, too, in summer).

I spent the morning volunteering in the kitchen garden next to our visitor center (at the botanical garden where I work). We've converted it to a four-season vegetable garden. It's lovely right now.

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Why not more vegetables?

My morning walk takes an occasional loop through a new neighborhood, not far from our established one. Developed on the site of a series of old horse pastures, it supported grasses and forbs with large trees on the perimeter. Currently, there are 4 completed houses with inhabitants, two houses for sale, and one in the final stages of construction. All quite large, of course, with expansive space around them. This is not remarkable, unfortunately, but what is fascinating (and scary) is how uncreative the landscapes are.

This is not for lack of spending money on the landscape, mind you. The rows of leyland cypresses, ornamental shrub beds, and heavily watered turf sodded in great expanses strikes me as unmodern and not forward-thinking at all. The water is streaming from overhead irrigation in the morning.

Why not add a diversity of interesting (and fast-growing) native trees to create shade instead of crepe-myrtles? Or native conifers and pine?

And where are the vegetables? One house has two tomato plants next to the garage near a sea of irrigated grass and 'foundation' plantings. I read a blog post in Garden Rant this afternoon that mentioned an article in Time magazine about Edible Estates, something I'd read about before, but I missed this article.

I love the idea of this -- I've been doing various programs (this link is one version of it) recently about creative and ornamental vegetable gardens, so I think Fritz Haeg's concept is brilliant.


We're fortunate enough to have lots of space in front and in back of our house, and the main and satellite vegetable gardens are in the backyard, but they're certainly attractive enough (in my opinion) to be out front!

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