Mix flowers and veg for a real cottage garden, says Carol Klein
Mixing flowers with vegetables is a true reflection of how gardeners have worked t through the centuries
Anew generation of gardeners are discovering the joy of growing vegetables and flowers together. For some, it’s the unexpected drama of incongruous vegetables that excites. For most, it’s the small size of the modern garden that means everything you grow will be close to each other by necessity. If they’re lucky enough to have an allotment, they’ll be trying to nourish the soul as well as the body. To me, these are modern versions of the cottage gardens of old. The romantic and idyllic picture conjured up by Wordsworth, chocolate-boxes and Midsomer
Murders isn’t the full story. In fact, cottage-dwellers would have led a hand-to-mouth existence and the produce from their plots was essential to feeding the family. Potatoes, swedes and cabbage would always have priority over hollyhocks and roses. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a flower in sight. On the contrary, there are early records of flowers being planted in the gardens of humble dwellings, primroses lifted from the woodland edge and transferred close to the house, and there must always have been an element of ornament, of using flowers to gladden the heart.
And before we could nip down to the chemists for cough sweets or headache pills, it was gardens that provided medicines, and many of the plants that went to make these remedies were the attractive ones.
It was only later that flowers, fruit and veg were separated in the gardens of the up-andcoming middle classes. The rural poor would have continued as they’d done for centuries, while the new working class had no gardens.
The passing fashion in the 1980s was for the ‘potager garden’, a rather contrived regimentation of crops within box hedges and the like. Of greater relevance was the new style of cottage gardening which still thrives today.
The idea of mixing and mingling produce and flowers had a new lease of life in Geoff Hamilton’s The Ornamental Kitchen Garden, published 27 years ago. In it, Geoff encouraged us to appreciate the value of growing
‘The romantic and idyllic picture conjured up by Wordsworth, chocolate-boxes and Midsomer Murders isn’t the full story’
flowers, fruit and vegetables together. He stressed its pertinence to the tiny gardens of today and its benefits for wildlife and the garden’s health. His leading stance on organic gardening pioneered modern thinking on the subject.
Even though this idea dates back at least to the monastic gardens of medieval times, it has relevance to modern plots. You need to decide whether to mingle flowers on your veg plot or plant veg in your flower borders. Some vegetables are extremely decorative, while others are not so attractive. Foliage is going to be the first consideration, and leafy crops, such as chard, beet and curly kale, are liable to be towards the top of the list of good mixers – kale ‘Redbor’, rainbow chard and beetroot ’Bull’s Blood’ among them.
Another asset for growing them in mixed company is that they don’t need bare soil around them to help them ripen in the same way an onion would. Having said that, it’s not always foliage that attracts us – runner beans were first introduced into cultivation on this side of the Atlantic from The Americas for the ornamental value of their red flowers. French bean ‘Blauhilde’ is very pretty.
Consider also the courgette – instant dramatic foliage, big yellow flowers opening fresh each day and bountiful fruit in glowing yellow, deepest green or stripes! Courgettes take up a lot of space, it’s true, but there are climbing varieties you can grow.
Other climbers too, tall peas and runner and French beans mix well with sweet peas in the veg garden or as features up obelisks or other supports in flower borders.
Many veg look great in containers, salad crops among them, you just need to think about when you’re going to harvest and prepare for filling in bare patches by growing lots of
spares in modules. They’re never wasted and if you’ve already embraced the principle of mixing edibles and ornamentals, you can add them to your flower borders at will.