Border vegetable garden

 English garden layouts: How to grow veg among ornamentals

The idea of flowers and vegetables growing in borders in English garden layouts that look good enough to eat has beguiled gardeners for centuries. However, in our experience, that is all it is – a nice idea for English garden layouts. It offers the possibility of saving space and what the Shakespeare would call ‘beauty through utility’; but, in reality, the appearance of flower-veg borders in English garden goes to pot along with the vegetables as soon as they are harvested. The only way around this is to plant vegetables as embellished, and stick to robust types that can cope with the crush of neighboring flowers without becoming diseased or diminishing crops.

English garden layouts

Our favorite long cropper’ is Tuscan black kale. It has inky grey leaves with white ribs, which sprout from its stem like the plumes of an ostrich. I first saw it used ornamentally years ago in France, planted with orange pot marigolds and the feathery annual grass Stipa tenuissima; and I have used it with flowers in my English garden layouts ever since. You can pick it little and often once the plants reach 60cm, and it keeps looking good throughout summer. 

On a free-draining soil, it’s getting bigger and better each year. In a gravel garden, it’s just the thing to set off vivid orange California poppies in summer and still looks perky right through winter when the delicious young leaves are at the best.

Beans are brilliant with English garden flowers too. Climbing Borlottis pushed into the earth at the base of silver cardoons or roses will scramble up to 6 ft. high, provided you water while they are growing and bear plump seed-filled pods, which at summer’s end turn ivory-white and crack open to reveal a treasure of mottled pink and red beans. 

The yield is small – this is true of all veg grown among flowers in English garden layout or any other garden – but you don’t need many ‘Lingua di Fuoco’ to thicken a winter soup or casserole.

Runner beans are good for forming shaggy wigwams of leaves and flowers, wonderful for adding height among sprawling cranesbills in your English garden layout. My favorite is the vermillion ‘Scarlet Emperor’. Like all runners, as long as the pods are regularly picked, it will carry on producing long into summer and happily grow in semi-shade.

Salads are ideal for shade and for sowing in gaps now in July. So, choose a right spot in your English garden layout for it. It hardly needs saying but if you can keep the slugs off you can’t go wrong. Even when summer heat triggers their flowers, they look good, especially the Lollo types that rise like skyscrapers of red and green. 

Sweet corn is perfect for mixing with exotics and it’s not too late to plant it in the English garden Border vegetable layout. The usual advice is to grow in blocks to ensure pollination, but I’ve used them singly among dahlias and ornamentals bananas and still had a harvest. 

Red orache, the large purple relative of sorrel, is my favorite leafy vegetable for growing among flowers. Its self-sows, and it’s seed sprout so early in spring that it’s there with the daffodils. Picking off the soft leafy tops does it good, and stops it engulfing its neighbors. Cooked in butter, it tastes like spinach, so it’s as much of a delight in the pot as your vegetable borders in your English garden.

By Jazzy219 – slow activity (Flickr)