Kitchen Gardens

By Ellen Ogden

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

More than just a place to plant lettuce and herbs, a kitchen garden can be a thing of beauty and a work of art

When I planted my first kitchen garden in 1980, I marked the perimeters with four sticks and a ball of twine. Borrowing a sharp edged spade, I removed the layer of turf, double-dug the remaining soil to create a loose pile, and then supplemented with a few shovel fulls of compost. I was fresh out of art school, so instead of making art on a canvas, I began to think of myself as a food artist; building color in the garden with a collage of lettuces blended with dabs of red orach, fronds of emerald green chervil and rosettes of claytonia that elevated the garden—as well as a simple bowl of salad—into a work of art. 
Vegetable gardens are as old as the first hunter-gatherers who decided to sit back and watch seeds grow.  The term kitchen garden, or as the French call it, a potager, is a scaled back Victory garden, planted with only those essential herbs, greens and tender vegetables that the cook uses on a daily basis. The kitchen garden is ornamental as well as productive, and many classic designs are based on the earliest documented form that hails back to medieval times, when monks and nuns tended herbs, greens and aromatics behind the high walls of a monastery. Old woodcuts depict intricately patterned beds, designed with espaliered pear trees, medicinal herbs, aromatic flowers and vegetables planted in geometric grids. These gardens served as a source of nourishment, as well as a retreat for meditation and prayer for the whole community.  The most successful kitchen gardens are both aesthetic and productive, and are often a reflection of our individual personalities—orderly, painterly and sometimes just plain whimsical. There are so many choices for the first time gardener who is starting with the basics; raised beds or naturally elevated? Bark path or straw? Post and rail fence or white picket? My garden continues to evolve, but I’ll admit that many of my best ideas have come from other gardeners, and this time of year, I like to get out and see what my neighbors are planting.

“Vegetable gardens should be pleasing to the eye,” explains Claudia Dekany, a kitchen garden designer in the Londonderry area. We’re strolling in the South Londonderry garden of one of her clients—a myriad of triangular beds each planted with a collage of lettuce, herbs and early spring peas. Each spring, Dekany prepares the beds and plants with seeds and hardy plants before the owners arrive in early summer. She blends culinary herbs with salad greens, edible flowers between the tomato trellises. “It should be more than just a place to go and grab your vegetables,” explains Dekany, who is also a certified yoga instructor. “It should be fun and engaging.” Dekany’s designs rarely start on paper. Instead, she arrives with a shovel, takes a few moments to look at the area and then begins to form the garden beds—one bed at a time. “It sort of evolves as I go,” she says. She keeps the beds narrow enough so that a cook can reach an arm into the interior without stepping inside to compact the soil, and the paths are typically three feet wide to allow easy access for a wheelbarrow. Once she is happy with the design, she will start to plant......