Edible Gardens

The edible garden is the ultimate in sustainable green gardening. It can be beautiful as well as productive – providing edible plants, medicines or wildlife havens.

From a palette of thousands of edible perennial plants and fruit trees, an edible garden enables you to combine beauty with purpose. Through growing vegetables alongside flowers, otherwise known as Polyculture, the edible garden is rewarding, functional and aesthetically pleasing. Living Colour Gardens offers a bespoke edible garden design service, and also has its own in-house edible garden project complete with a range of Living Colour recipes.

Edible Gardens are as old as gardening itself and have undergone a recent revival. Ancient Persian gardens combined both edible and ornamental plants. Medieval monastic gardens included fruits, vegetables, flowers, and medicinal herbs.

Plants were originally cultivated purely with survival in mind.  It was only when food became more readily available that attention turned to growing plants just for their looks, with fruit and vegetables generally grown in different beds to the flower borders.  There have been exceptions; ornamental potagers combining flowers with vegetables and early cottage gardens with vegetables and flowers growing together in one happy, colourful mass.

Then, as more and more plants were specifically bred and developed for food, the practice of eating and using the edible parts of many flowering plants was abandoned.  There are however plenty of ornamental plants grown in the flower garden today.

Traditionally these days the home vegetable patch has been restricted to the far corner of the back garden where it is out of sight, or to the few small herb plants growing on the kitchen window sill. Herbs and vegetables can be very attractive and there is great potential to bring them out of the back corner, and with a little thought given to design, they can be used as key features in the ornamental garden.

Thinking about vegetables and herbs this way can open up possibilities within the garden. Brightly coloured kale, lettuce and rhubarb can be used to replace, or grown alongside, flowering annuals. Plants such as chives and parsley have attractive foliage and make lovely border plants. Traditional ornamental plants can also be mixed with vegetables and herbs to create wonderful harmonies and contrasts.