Designing Ornamental Gardens with Herbs, Fruits and Vegetables

Written and Photographed by Kerry Michaels

Every garden, no matter how modest, is filled with small wonders and essential truths about the order of the world, but a truly great garden can overwhelm and surprise you—challenging your assumptions about what is possible and what is beautiful. Integrating edible plants into a landscape challenges just those assumptions.

Jacquelyn Nooney, owner and lead designer of Jacquelyn Nooney Landscape, Inc. in Eliot, Maine, has been combining edible and ornamental plants for years. “Seeing recognizable things in an unexpected place can be really interesting and surprising. When you take an edible out of an agricultural setting, it becomes more memorable and engaging.”

Creating beautiful compositions of edible and ornamental plants is the foundation of a potager garden. Potager, translated from French, means edible. Potagers originated in the walled gardens of monasteries in medieval France, where meditation, beauty and order were married to food production—flowers, herbs, trees, shrubs and vegetables were grown in the same space.

Jennifer R. Bartley, author of Designing the New Kitchen Garden, and the upcoming, The Kitchen Gardener’s Handbook, said in a recent conversation, “What makes a potager different from a typical vegetable garden is not just its history, but its design: the potager is a landscape feature that does not have to be hidden in a corner of the backyard, but can be the central feature of an ornamental, all-season landscape—even in the front yard of a home in the most exclusive neighborhood.”

Potagers complement any landscape, from extremely formal gardens to cottage gardens. According to Jennifer, “While a potager is a structured garden space—a design based on repetitive geometric patterns—potagers don’t have to be large and complicated, but they are special places, and the design should call that out.”

Integrating Edibles Into Existing Gardens
There are countless ways to include vegetables and fruits in your existing landscape. For Nan K. Chase, author of Eat Your Yard!, fruit trees are one of her favorite ways to combine ornamental and edible plants.

“A Callaway crabapple is a great choice. The blossoms are amazing and eating the fruit is like tasting liquid Sweet Tarts candy. There are also columnar apples that are bred for the fruit to grow up the stem. They’re great looking and are perfect if you have size constraints. Quince is marvelous and dates back to antiquity. The contorted quince is out-of-this-world gorgeous. Quinces have amazing springtime flowers, and they’re a shrub, so they are a manageable size and the fruit will stay on well into fall.”

Nan is a fan of tucking vegetables and herbs into existing flower and perennial beds. “You don't have to tear up your lawn to grow edibles, you can work them into your flower beds. I use fennel as filler, and put leeks and onions in the blank spots in my garden beds where they throw up lovely green stalks. Once you’ve had an onion fresh from the garden, you'll never go back to store-bought.”

Ivette Soler, author of the upcoming book, Front Yard Food, and the popular blog, The Germinatrix, believes that integrating edibles and ornamentals simply makes sense. “Sometimes edibles are the best plant choice—even in a strictly ornamental garden. Using thyme or oregano as a ground cover can be luscious. They crawl and scramble, and can magically knit together a collection of plants into a real garden. The fact that they are edible is just a bonus.”

Ivette added that some edibles are also a thrill to use. “Take golden oregano—it’s a diva that gets all up in your face. It’s as ornamental as a plant gets. And there is a basil for every garden. Basil has fragrance, flowers and spectacular colors. It goes from a somber moody purple to a sparkly lemon.”

Growing Edibles In Containers
Growing edibles in containers can add a great design element and structural interest to any garden. No one knows this better than Jacquelyn Nooney.

Although Jackie, designer of the gardens at the flagship Stonewall Kitchen store in York, Maine, has been integrating edibles into landscapes and containers for years, she is still excited about creating new combinations. She has developed a list of plants that are not only edible, but that are beautiful and will endure throughout the entire growing season.

“There are many stunning edibles. There are all kinds of chards: yellow-stemmed, rainbow and a gorgeous red. There are four or five kales—my favorite is dinosaur kale, which is not only spectacular to look at, but also wonderful to eat and as the season goes on it gets sweeter and sweeter. I also love using curly parsley; it is a super green and makes a tidy mound. It looks amazing with red kale.”

Jackie also loves the spectacular foliage of beets. And this year, for vertical interest, she is using new variegated varieties of corn in both landscapes and containers.

Gardening with edibles, however you choose to grow them—by creating a formal potager or a pair of white window boxes dripping with tiny red fraises du bois strawberries; by tucking herbs, vegetables and edible flowers into perennial beds; or by fashioning a container of fairytale eggplants dangling like earrings—can make gardening more of an adventure.

On any given day you can find truth and beauty in the garden. On a truly great day you can find truth, beauty and a perfectly ripe tomato.