OOH LA LA! FRENCH FLAIR IN THE GARDEN
Create an elegantly designed space for growing your own vegetables
Vegetable gardens don’t have to be chaotic, messy, disorganized spaces. They can be beautifully designed, functional, productive places, even works of art in the right hands.
The French, in particular, seem to have mastered the art of creating beautiful kitchen gardens.
One of the most famous is Chateau Villandry in the Loire Valley. It’s an exquisite formal garden with a magnificent pattern of clipped boxwood containing an immaculately maintained tapestry of vegetables that provide not only colour and foliage texture, but also a striking rhythm and architecture throughout the garden.
In Abbotsford, Kelly Schroeder has designed her own version of a French potager garden.
In 1980, she started Valleybrook Gardens, one of the biggest perennial wholesale nurseries in Canada, with her husband, John. Schroeder is also a garden designer with a natural flair for combining perennials in beautiful and long-lasting combinations.
But Schroeder’s passion now is for vegetable gardening, and she is especially keen to capture some of the charm and style and practical functionality of the much-admired French jardin potager in her new kitchen garden.
Schroeder’s enthusiasm was first kindled when she and John visited Babylonstoren, a Frenchstyle fruit and vegetable farm garden about 53 kilometres east of Cape Town in South Africa.
At the heart of the farm is a 3.5-hectare (eight-acre) garden, neatly laid out in an attractive geometric pattern, with a strong axis dividing it east and west containing a maze of individual compartments for herbs, vegetables, ducks, chickens, prickly pear, citrus fruits and berry bushes. There is also a woodland, with more than 7,000 clivia used as ground cover.
The garden at Babylonstoren was designed by French architect Patrice Taravella, who was hired because of the superb work he had done at Prieure Notre Dame d’Orsan (Priory of Our Lady of Orsan), a delightful, now worldfamous potager garden in the Berry region of France’s Loire Valley.
Schroeder immediately fell in love with Babylonstoren and Taravella’s work when she saw it, and started working on her own potager this spring.
“I started by ripping out my old vegetable garden — the one I had put in a couple of years ago — and started from scratch,” says Schroeder.
Her new garden is three times the size of the old one and measures roughly 18 by 25 metres.
“I love well-designed gardens, and I thought, why not put those design elements to work in my vegetable garden too?
“The French style is attractive, but also very practical and functional. I love how organized it is with an emphasis on clear geometric lines and strong symmetry.”
She organized her vegetables into grids alphabetically by family name. For instance, carrots, celery, parsnips and cilantro were all grouped together under Apiceae, lettuce and endive under Asteraceae, and cabbage, kale, aspabroc and radish under Brassicaceae.
Swiss chard, beet and spinach (Chenopodiaceae); cucumber, melon, pumpkin, squash and zucchini (Cucurbitaceae); snow peas, white chickpeas, yellow wax beans, tricolour pole beans and mascotte beans (Leguminosae); tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes and peppers (Solanaceae) and asparagus, onions, leek and garlic (Liliaceae) make up the eight general sections.
“I don’t really need a ton of food, but I have been harvesting like crazy all summer. We have had to buy no produce since May, and we’ve been enjoying kale, broccoli, radishes and lettuce and so much more. It’s been amazing.”
Schroeder’s garden is bordered on two sides by neatly clipped cedar hedges which act as solid barriers and almost turn the area into a classic enclosed walled garden. There are two main axes — long, narrow, grassy paths, that cross in the middle of the garden where a tall, black metal gazebo structure provides a strong architectural anchor for the centre.
Teepees of bamboo have been dotted here and there to provide support for beans and act as an attractive vertical element. These structures are skirted at their base by masses of red, yellow or apricot nasturtiums.
“The nasturtiums help draw aphids away from the vegetables and also, I’m told, add to the flavour of the crop. I saw squash being grown on trellises in Europe, so I’m also trying it myself,” says Schroeder.
Formal boxwood hedging was resisted because it would take up too much space and also cast unwanted shade. Instead, Schroeder has used camomile and dwarf blueberry and rosemary plants to create divisions, along with purple-flowered snow peas, marigolds and petunias.
“As far as possible, I have tried to make this a totally edible garden with some companion planting to help ward off insects.”
Some specialties include Egyptian walking onions and about 10 varieties of heirloom potatoes brought in specially from Alberta. The walking onion produces clusters of bulbils (topsets) at the top of tall stems. The weight of these bulbils can make the stem droop to the ground, where they can root. This is how the onion got its name, because it can seem that it’s literally “walking” across the garden.
Berry crops — raspberry, boysenberry and blackberry — are all grown into a sturdy, horizontal wooden wired-grid structure. Espaliered fruit trees — apple, cherry, pear and plum — are all being trained along a matching vertical wired grid. Each tree is grafted with four varieties.
Schroeder has planted her first asparagus patch but doesn’t expect to harvest for at least a couple of years. Three kinds of eggplant, including one heritage Italian variety, are grown mixed with blue-flowered nepeta to help promote pollination.
Red Russian garlic planted last October has already been harvested and left in the sun to dry. Seven varieties of squash, and at least three varieties of zucchini and pumpkin are planted.
“I’m in the process of building a wattle fence around the squash. I saw a photo from Prieure d’Orsan of squash on a bed of hay. I thought it was so pretty, so I’m trying to copy it.”
Lemon balm, nasturtium and basil have been used as companion plants. Borage has been planted close to tomatoes, and strawberries and sage next to snow peas.
Schroeder puts about two hours work into the garden each day, weeding and harvesting.
“The initial design and digging and planting work was quite hard and tiring, but once that was done the day-to-day maintenance is not too bad,” she says.
Drip irrigation lines, installed at the time of building, keep plants watered properly and bark mulch has been spread between beds to provide easy access.
Schroeder has already designed a similar, smaller potager garden for a friend who immediately said, “I want one, too.”
“I think more people would enjoy this style of garden because it’s pretty as well as multifunctional. When we started the perennial nursery 36 years ago, people were stopping growing vegetables and getting more into growing ornamentals.
“The trend is now going the other way, with a strong move back to growing your own food. But it’s also important to think about good design.”