GARDEN DESIGN
A potager pairs produce with flowers to create a kitchen garden that literally looks good enough to eat –and benefits the health and abundance of both vegetables and blooms
T he classic French potager is the ultimate romantic landscape: an orderly parade of abundance with vegetables and flowers combined to elevate food growing to a new level. Potagers are often beautiful enough to rival any intricate knot garden or parterre. This is high-level ornamental design, with elements of both prettiness and practicality that can easily be borrowed for adomestic garden. One of the most famous historic potagers is at Chateau de Villandry in France, where rows of spectacular vegetables are planted in rhythmic, geometric patterns, punctuated by roses and other flowers and bordered by low evergreen hedging.
Traditionally, 17th-century potagers were divided into 16 small growing squares. At Villandry today there are nine beds planted with 40 species of vegetables from eight different plant families. These are set out in alternating colours and the planting is changed twice ayear, to run from March to June and June to November. With each season, the layout of the vegetables prioritises harmony of colour, shape and form, while following strict principles of crop rotation for soil health and fertility. The resulting chequerboard effect is sumptuous –almost too good to eat.
But if you take the literal translation from the French, a potager is quite humble in origin and simply means aspace to grow seasonal herbs and vegetables for the soup pot. The practice dates back to mediaeval monasteries, when feeding and healing people shaped the tending of gardens. The geometric layout evolved as away of simplifying cultivation and it’s only with the later influence of Italian Renaissance gardens that potagers developed the highly ornamental style we’re familiar with, to bring together productivity and pleasure.
THE ENGLISH KITCHEN GARDEN
The fundamentals of potagers can be seen in Victorian walled gardens, too. Here, gardeners use agrid layout of beds and combined vegetables, herbs and flowering plants.
Apart from the visual impact, there are lots of practical advantages to the potager style.
Growing the vegetables in blocks and rows helps with the planning and rotation of crops; the pathways allow access to beds more easily for planting and harvesting; using walls for espaliered or fan-trained trees maximises the growing space and helps with ripening of fruit. Using herbs and flowers and step-over trained fruit trees planted as low hedges around the beds also adds colour and interest for people and pollinators.
A CONTEMPORARY APPRO
