Garden harvest a feast for eyes
Masters of the edible landscape celebrate book with florals, lunch and recipes
The sprawling backyard garden at Stefani Bittner’s Lafayette home was still catching up to spring thanks to the winter downpour, which is why the planned artichoke arrangement didn’t make it to the table for the company luncheon: Bittner, a master gardener, and florist Alethea Harampolis, are the co-founders of Homestead Design Collective, a landscaping studio that creates edible gardens throughout Northern California. To herald the growing season, they gathered their co-workers around a bountiful table in the garden featuring recipes from their latest book, “Harvest: Unexpected Projects Using 47 Extraordinary Garden Plants” (Ten Speed Press).
While the spiky thistles weren’t ready for a starring role in a floral centerpiece (for its striking geometry, the artichoke arrangement is one of the book’s more design-forward garden-to-home crossovers), Harampolis improvised with the garden’s current offerings: flowering dogwood, deep-purple leaves of loropetalum and exquisitely nodding hellebores. She extended the reach of the untamed arrangement by trailing fringe-y spring jasmine along the table. “Since jasmine can easily get tangled, be sure to handle it delicately so you don’t lose any flowers,” says Harampolis, gingerly tucking the vine into the side of the white ceramic vessel. The jasmine is a tender, almost ethereal addition to such a robust spring composition — a snapshot du jour of the garden.
With a handful of books between them (Harampolis, who is also the cofounder of the now-bicoastal floral-design workshop Studio Choo, also co-authored “The Flower Recipe Book”
and “Branches and Blooms” with Jill Rizzo, while Bittner co-wrote 2013’s “The Beautiful Edible Garden” with Leslie Bennett), it seems that Harampolis and Bittner are making the most of these fleeting moments in the garden: In “Harvest,” they are creatively captured not just for our viewing pleasure — after all, a summer-pruning arrangement cascading with blackberry on the vine is a botanical sight far beyond the typical grocery-store bouquet — but also for our eating, drinking and even beautifying pleasures. “People give their gardens their time, money, water, so it’s nice to have a garden that gives back to you in harvest,” Bittner says.
Many of the recipes in the book, arranged by season, are time-tested. For instance, Papa’s finger-lime gin and tonic, a late-fall concoction that has been in Harampolis’ family for decades, is garnished with the fruit’s signature “caviar.” Vin d’orange, a Sancerre infusion made with bitter oranges, was handed down from Bittner’s mother —while the fruit arrives in winter, the brew gets better with age, and thus can be enjoyed year-round. More modern projects include a summery salt scrub made with almond oil and chopped-fine lemongrass, which has natural antibacterial properties. A fragrant lilac cream — an homage to the flower perfumes that Harampolis formulated as a kid growing up in Australia — has just two ingredients: extra-virgin coconut oil and lilac blooms picked in the early morning at their ambrosial peak. “We really tried to emphasize the simplicity of the garden harvest by letting each plant shine,” Harampolis says. “A lot of these recipes have just two or three ingredients and take minutes to make.”
The luncheon table is set with Heath Ceramics dishes, vintage silver and Homestead’s own line of cotton napkins, dyed with indigo and logwood bark, which gives a sort of cosmic effect, with galaxies of red, brown and purple spots. Place settings are adorned with a takehome gift of rosemary smudge sticks, a folkloric dispeller of negative energy. Accompanying amber blocks of oozing honeycomb harvested from Homestead’s hives, are discs of creamy fresh goat cheese, pressed with a design of chives and pink-striped claytonia sibirica blooms, both clipped from the garden. Quick-pickled rhubarb and an early-season herb salad of rustic arugula, fresh oregano, chocolate mint and nasturtium add spicy and bitter flavors to the spread. Before digging in, Harampolis and Bittner offer a toast to the forthcoming harvest, rain-fed and lush, with Champagne auspiciously garnished with blue, star-shaped borage, a pretty, butterfly-attracting, hornworm-repelling annual known as a guardian of the garden.