Beautiful Bounty

by Tanya Sousa of Orleans, VT

There’s been an explosion in vegetable gardening, and with the rising cost of groceries (and living in general) not to mention the fairly frequent food scares, it isn’t a surprise. I too want to know what it is I’m eating, where it came from, and what went into producing it.

Flower gardening and preening the landscape seemed to be the explosive form of plant husbandry in the last ten years. It also seemed to me that many people identified themselves during that time as either flower gardeners or vegetable gardeners. There appeared to be an interesting divide in the way each kind of person viewed the other camp. Vegetable lovers told me they didn’t have time for the non-essential flowers. Flower lovers often viewed themselves as landscaping artists; the world of vegetables seemed too mundane in comparison.

I’ve known some people who feel happy with both, but most clearly leaned in one direction or another. They may have had massive flower gardens they called “rooms,” frothing with blooms all year, and a tiny spot of edibles, or the other way around.

There were even people I met who planted vegetables and flowers together, intermingled as if they belong together. Scandalous! These sorts of gardeners were few and far between, but I was interested in how I saw that a vegetable garden could be pretty, and a flower garden could be more, well, functional.

I used to fall into the flower gardener camp for years. I’d try to grow a tiny salad garden on occasion, but it just wasn’t as fun for me. Although I spent hours blissfully weeding my blossoming beds, the lettuce, spinach, arugula and their kin choked and eventually became lost in a jungle of questionable greenery.

As the years wore on, my property overflowed with spaces of flowers so thick and established, it would have been daunting work to make room to add edible plants. I still had the idea brewing in the back of my mind though.

When we bought our new farmhouse a year and a half ago, the land was a blank slate with the history of being a working farm in the recent past, and the way the economy was turning brought me back to the importance of growing our own food.

My eye likes the color and balance of good landscaping too, and my first idea was to mix edibles with flowers so I would trick myself into caring for them better. Then I read an article based on a Vermont Public Radio interview with a Master Gardener/horticulturist (who’s name escapes me, I apologize). This man spoke of using fruit bushes, trees, and vegetable plants as flowers and landscaping beauties.

Blueberry bushes come in dwarf varieties that stay petite, have colorful berries in summer, and leaves that color nicely in the fall. Fruit trees flower in the spring and then grace their chosen areas with shade and also the fruits themselves. There are forms of vegetable plants that are downright blazing with color, and who’s to say that the shiny green of basil leaves or the spikes of chives are any less attractive than other ornamental plants that are chosen because their shape and shine offers variety to the eye?

The Master Gardener shared all this, and it made perfect sense to me. It is agri-culture to recognize that there is little more beautiful than the things that feed us. Looking at them can nourish our hearts too.

When well cared for, is there anything more peaceful and lovely than a pasture full of grazing animals, or the sight of chickens clucking on a nest or racing after an elusive insect? What is more pleasant than walking through an orchard, either in bloom or with leafy heads loaded with fruit?

I set out to landscaping with edibles with a willing husband in tow. We planted blueberry bushes in front of the house where other ornamental shrubs would have gone, and rows of fruit trees near the driveway. Neat raised beds of vegetables greet people as they park, and thornless blackberry bushes and a variety of herbs surround the doorway. They are all placed as I would place any flowers I may have had, and look just as wonderful to me. The garlic chives are in full blossom right now. A flower is a flower, even on an herb plant. The apple mint is blooming too, in lovely lavender.

It sounds as if I’ve completely changed camps, but I haven’t really. I just came to the realization that any plant can be beautiful and used creatively. And guess what? None of them are lost in the jungle.