Food plants have jumped the fence from the kitchen garden. They're making their way into the landscape, doing double duty as both food sources and things of beauty.
It's a movement called edible landscaping, and there's good reason for it. Edible landscaping encourages and simplifies local food production, with all its health and environmental benefits.
The idea is that fruits, vegetables and other edible plants can be intermingled with ornamental plants such as shrubs and flowers. Often edibles can be used in place of landscape plants - rhubarb instead of hostas, perhaps, or a fruit tree instead of a maple.
Edible landscaping is considered a part of permaculture, an ecological system that stresses living harmony with nature, because food plays a central role in sustainability, said Jonathan Hull, co-founder of the organization Green Triangle, which promotes permaculture. Home-grown food is more nutritious than much commercially produced food, and growing food locally saves the energy needed to ship it long distances.
Better for the planet
What's more, reducing a lawn to make room for food plants means less maintenance, less need for chemicals and less use of noisy, polluting equipment, he said.
Edible landscaping also benefits pollinators and other wildlife that are seeing many of their habitats and food sources destroyed. And it's an economical approach to landscaping in tough times.
Landscape designer Sabrena Schweyer regularly incorporates edible plants into the landscapes she and husband Samuel Salsbury create through their Akron, Ohio, firm. Sometimes those plants might be clustered in an attractive area set aside for food growing, such as a traditional French garden called a potager, or contained in pots in an area close to the kitchen. Sometimes they're incorporated into a food forest, a growing method that mimics the layers and plant diversity of a natural forest, where plants naturally get the water and food they need to thrive.
She and Salsbury created what she calls an edible border on an 8-foot-wide strip of land that edges the driveway on the south side of their house. There they mixed edible plants such as nasturtiums, cardoons, strawberries, potatoes and tomatoes - some of them in pots - among small trees, shrubs and perennial flowers.
Schweyer said she took care to choose food plants they would use and looked for disease-resistant types, which often are heirloom or native plants. She often uses dwarf plants or climbers, such as the purple Italian beans that clambered up a bamboo arbor and fed the couple for a good part of last summer.
