Proper vegie gardens are long neat beds, with rows of cabbages or lettuce and obediently staked tomatoes. They can look both ludicrous and productive.
There’s a long tradition, in fact, of “potager” gardens, vegies planted with an eye to beauty as well as usefulness, spirals set in stone or pebbles, circles like small vegie fountains of bounty and beauty.
But you don’t need a dedicated vegie garden to grow enough veg for dinner every night. Just like veg may need to be disguised if you want your kids to eat them (my standby is finely chopped parsley and shredded carrot in everything from spag bol to home “sausage” rolls) you can have a sneaky vegie garden. Just scatter the most beautiful — and the most delicious and easy to grow — veg among the flowers and shrubs already in your garden.
Edges and hedges
I edge most of our flowerbeds with garlic chives — months of blue-mauve blooms nodding above the fresh green leaves.
Try a froth of parsley (though it will need to be planted fresh each spring when last season’s goes to seed and you must allow for the width of vigorously growing parsley as well).
A long row of frilly red lettuces can be stunning, especially if you only pick a few leaves from each lettuce at any one time, so you don’t mar their symmetry.
A row of round “baby” carrots may sound odd for the front of your flower garden, but carrot tops can look lovely, especially with a strong colour behind their green.
Veg among the flowers
Think: ferny asparagus here. You eat the young spears through spring then let the shoots grow during summer. They are as pretty as any fern, and in autumn the females have bright red seed heads too.
Red or yellow pear cherry tomatoes can look stunning, too, laden with colourful tiny fruit.
Try red, pink, or yellow-stemmed silver beet, too, or “bush” pumpkins, neat compact bushes that give lots of small bright orange round fruit, great for baking or stuffing — or just admiring in the garden.
We rarely eat most of our globe artichokes. The big jagged grey leaves look superb all year round. And if you forget to pick the fruit, or can’t be bothered, they eventually open into bright blue thistle-like flowers. A hedge of artichokes in flower can breathtaking.
Bountiful fences
The brightest blooms in our garden this summer were the almost garish orange-red flowers of the perennial runner beans, climbing up a 2m-high trellis. They come up year after year, dying down each winter then sprouting in spring. They may not set fruit in the heat of summer, but as the weather cools there’ll be masses of beans and you’ll have flowers from late spring to the first frost of winter.
Back-of-the-garden beauties
If you’re looking for tall and luscious, try Jerusalem artichokes. Buy the tubers from the fruit shop or supermarket, not necessarily the garden centre. Plant about 10cm deep, and by next autumn they’ll be taller than you, with a mass of bright yellow sunflower-like blooms. The plants will die down in winter, which is when you dig them up to roast or make soup, but there are always a few tiny ones you miss and they’ll form new plants in the summer to come.
Ground covers
Weeds love bare ground. I love to fill bare spots between larger plants with herbs like golden marjoram or flowering oreganos with flowers like a host of coloured butterflies in summer. Most of the thymes make gorgeous ground covers too, with carpets of white, pink, red, or mauve flowers above leaves that can be dark green, grey-green or variegated and of various heights, but thymes do need a lot of weeding and “top dressing” with a scatter of fresh soil every couple of years to keep them vigorous and lush looking.
Once upon a time an “ornamental” garden was a way to yell to the world, “Hey, look, I’m so rich I can afford to grow roses and sweet peas instead of cabbages.” These days we can have both — gardens full of flowers and sweet scents and beauty and plants we can eat, as well.
