Is it Monet or a Munchie?

 By Ron Dieter, Sunnyfield Greenhouse & Gardens

Ask most people to imagine a vegetable garden and the picture that comes up is a well-tended garden plot with lots of straight rows and maybe a tomato trellis or two. That was the image that always came to my mind until I visited Rosemary Verey’s vegetable garden at Barnsley House in England a few years ago. She designed and planted her vegetable garden in the same way she plants her perennial gardens and borders. Giving careful attention to the color, texture, and form, she designed a beautiful garden tapestry using cabbages, broccoli, carrots, crabapple trees, trellised pole beans, and other vegetables and herbs.

Designing a vegetable plot to be a beautiful ornamental garden is really as simple- or as challenging- as doing the same with flowering plants. For some folks the task actually may be easier because they are more familiar with vegetable plants.

To plant an ornamental vegetable garden, first make a list of the vegetables you want to include. As you create your list, make notes of the special traits of each vegetable that will affect the design. Green beans, for example, have both bush and vine forms. The vines trained to a trellis or pole would provide a good vertical element. Tomatoes, too, can add height to a garden when trained to a trellis. Head lettuces provide bold texture compared to the leaf-types.

Color certainly comes into play, too. Lettuces come in many shades and combinations of green, chartreuse, and red. Cabbage heads can be a beautiful purple red. Swiss chard stalks of gold, yellow, orange, and red contribute to the color palette as well. A form of basil is a deep burgundy. Page through some of the specialty vegetable and flower catalogs to get more ideas for good color, texture, and form. Once you have settled on a palette of plants you can begin your design.

Whether the garden is vegetables, or perennials, or annuals, or a combination of the three, the most important step is to draw up a plan. Use graph paper with quarter-inch squares, a circle template to draw circles of different sizes, a pencil, a soft eraser, a straight edge or triangle, and some colored pencils.

The drawing scale of one-quarter inch equaling one foot is easy to work with. Draw the plants into the design using the circle template,. For example, use the half-inch diameter circle template to draw in cabbage plants that grow to two feet in diameter. Use the quarter inch circle to illustrate plants that get about a foot wide. You get the idea.

A template that has graduated circles from an eighth of an inch up to two or three inches is perfect for most design projects. There are some special horticultural templates that produce different shapes to help signify various textures and forms, but most professional designers pass them by in favor of simple circles and lines.

As you draw your design, make lines lightly because you will probably be erasing many times. Plants that grow into each other can be illustrated by overlapping the circles slightly.

Use the same guidelines for locating plants as you would for designing a flower garden. Low growing plants such as leaf lettuces, radishes, carrots, and spinach make good border or edging plants. Round headed vegetables contrast well with the bold flat leaves of beans, cucumbers, and even rhubarb or the straight slender shafts of onion plants. Herbs such as dill and parsley blend well in texture and form with most common vegetables. Use the colored pencils to visualize more easily the color aspect of the design

Make allowances for paths and spaces throughout the garden so the plants can be easily tended and harvested.

Like a perennial border, the garden will change as the season progresses. Plants will mature and be harvested, creating gaps and "holes" in the design. Successive plantings, annuals, and potted plants can fill the voids.

When everything fits together just right, you may have a problem. If you harvest that head of purple cabbage you may throw the whole design off kilter. You’re faced with a difficult choice. Is it food or is it art?