The idea is no longer new but perhaps its time has finally come.
There I was at the Elmhurst Garden Walk this past July and what did I see at the first garden I visited but a large rectangular flower bed, right out front between the house and the sidewalk, with three giant in-your-face squash plants dominating the planting. Indeed, they were the visual element that held the display together. Large rounded plants with massive leaves that you couldn’t
miss—they kept the smaller-leaved frou-frou stuff nearby from getting lost in the crowd.
Right on, I thought. Rosalind Creasy would be pleased. Creasy first published The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping in 1982, but it’s taken a while for many of us to buy into her “ground-breaking” notion that edible plants are attractive and why not put them in the front yard with your ornamentals? No more “I’d like to grow more
of my food but don’t have room in the backyard.” Put ‘em out front. No apologies.
I’ve had a separate vegetable bed in my front yard for years, but a crab tree on the other side of the fence is starting to shade it out, so this year I’m trying three ‘Milano’ tomatoes in another front yard space—the big perennial border right in front of my house where there’s more sun. One tomato plant is growing next to
an ‘Abraham Darby’ rose, another is standing between some daylilies and a ‘Hella Lacy’ aster, and the third is near some phlox and a Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’.
I surrounded them with wire cages and they’re blending right in.
The diminishing sun also prompted me to plant eggplants and peppers in
containers and pop them into another flower bed, this one by the fence along
the sidewalk. Passersby peering over the fence may get a little surprise when
they realize they’re looking at veggies among the flowers, but hey, there’s
nothing wrong with the appearance of peppers and eggplants.
Or green beans. I tore out a couple patches of iris rhizomes that were getting
to be too much of a good thing, and in went the seeds for one of those trendy “haricots verts” (just the French word for beans, actually). They look fine too.
Getting more of our food from local sources is important, whether we grow it ourselves, buy it at a farmers’ market, subscribe to a CSA program (community
supported agriculture) or visit roadside produce stands on weekend trips. It might even be that the word “organic” isn’t as important to the big picture as “local.”
As Michael Pollan pointed out in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there’s a
certain disconnect when we expend thousands of gallons of airplane fuel to
import organic asparagus from Argentina. And it was hardly “fresh” produce
when it finally arrived at the upscale grocery store where he bought it.
So if my future mixed border includes vegetables as part of the mix, that’s just the way it is. Next year I may grow Malabar spinach up my front fence right next to the ‘Avant Garde’ clematis. As a heat-loving climber, it will probably do far better than the springtime varieties anyway. I’m thinking positively. After all, that’s what gardeners do.
