Edible Landscaping, Foodscaping, and Food for Thought
This is the second installment of a series that I’ve been writing with my dad about food and gardening. The first installment is about growing sprouts.
A beautiful edible landscape at the Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, NY.
When I told my dad I wanted to study plant science, he immediately gave me a copy of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. While, like most 15-year-olds, I considered anything from my parents to be “lame,” I remember soaking up Pollan’s first book like a sponge. Years later in my environmental ethics class we would study the same book for nearly half of the semester. My ethics professor used the book, not as an ode to gardening, but as a lens through which we question our relationship with nature.
The garden as a metaphor for humankind’s relationship with nature is an interesting one, and leads us to questions of control, authoritarianism, and cultivation of the environment itself. How does food play a role in this metaphor? Agroecology is the practice of growing food and farming using ecological principles to manage crops (crop rotation, legumes for nitrogen, fostering healthy insect populations, etc.).
How does maintaining a garden for aesthetics rather than the production of food have moral implications? Utilizing the growing space you have allows you to contribute to your area's food security. Plus, it’s fun. As you might be able to guess, I think that having more food grown in as many gardens as possible, in as many places as possible, is the way to go. We’ve recognized during the pandemic how fragile our industrial system is, and how outbreaks threatening food safety can spread nationwide when we rely too heavily on food shipped across the country. Obviously with our global population we need our farms to produce large amounts of food, but the more food we grow in different places, the more resilient each local system is.
One cannot think about gardening for aesthetics without considering the privilege that it takes to have massive grounds, but there are also many families that tend beautiful, small gardens, full of flowers and joy that the whole neighborhood can share. What I have come to learn from my dad and other gardening experts is how gardens are so much more than just a patch of grass. Gardens hold space for calm, solace and connection, they provide purpose and a healthy hobby for many, and they also can feed us. If you’re wondering how can gardens serve all of these human needs at once, you can look to edible landscaping as the practice that can bring it all together.
“The garden, as the word suggests, should be a guarded and secluded space, free from the use-value and the exchange-value that dominates the outside world. Gardening grounds the individual to a specific location inside the otherwise random thrownness of Being in the world. At its best, working with soil and plants transports us to a timeless oceanic experience where the border between the I and the Not-I dissolves—what Freud calls the perennial philosophy of the Nirvana Principle.”
What white-male, elitist drivel! I could start out with that kind of language, but this kind of discourse is better suited to a young Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Michael Pollan. The glorification of the garden as the perfect synthesis of nature and culture reflects what the art historian Franz Neckenig calls “the predilection of the educated upper-middle class for beauty without utility.” Also translated as “useless beauty.”
A residential edible landscape in Hood River, Oregon.
Certainly, modern gardening, landscaping, and farming practices need to overcome romantic illusions and face the modern realities of their role within the larger social context of the market economy (earlier, simply called Capitalism), and come to grips with the challenges of the food-industrial complex. Urbanites and suburbanites can play a significant role in changing how food is sourced, be it simply growing more edible plants, joining fruit and vegetable co-ops, or supporting local farmers markets. More radical voices call for full-scale farming on urban and suburban land—in comparison, having a lush, chemical dependent green lawn is a sin, as Organic Gardening editors hyperbolically argued a decade ago! At the same time, proponents of corporate farming scoff at the ideas of growing backyard fruits and vegetables, claiming that if all the inputs of labor, fertilizers, and planting costs of home-grow produce were taken into account, we would end-up with tomatoes that cost $40 a pound. One then wonders what the real cost of corporate-grown food would be if the true costs of energy, water, environmental degradation, and exploitation of labor were similarly calculated—but I get side-tracked…or do I?
One could generalize that most urbanites and suburbanites want a garden and not a farm where they live. The obvious next step is to transform the landscape into a place of both beauty and productivity. Exactly here lies the ideology of edible landscaping, or “foodscaping” — the practice of mixing attractive food crops with ornamentals, or completely replacing non-productive ornamentals with equally attractive edible plants. Yet, edible landscaping is more than simply staggering blueberry bushes six-feet apart on the front lawn, or letting cherry tomatoes and zucchini overwhelm a parking strip. Interplanting food crops among ornamentals, or switching completely to planting edibles has all nuance and complexity as any other style of gardening.
Mixing food crops with ornamentals is as old as civilization itself. The oldest accounts from the Fertile Crescent and West Africa represent paradise as a lush garden that includes fruit and nut trees, berries, and even vegetables. Because of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and a garden being the locus of Original Sin, Judeo-Christian tradition mistrusted plants, both ornamental and edible. Still, in practice, the mixing of food and fanciful crops continued from Ancient Rome, to medieval monasteries, to Renaissance palaces, and to Baroque’s pleasure gardens. In fact, the Austrian Holy Roman Emperors of the 18th century designed an entire section of their garden as an idealized and beautifully landscaped farm. After all, the Kaiser liked to dig in the dirt once in a while! The Dutch tulip craze notwithstanding, Protestantism more strictly divided food crops from ornamentals. Flowers were of transient beauty, while commodity crops and the human beings who tended them were exploited for maximum utility and profit. The 19th century loved the “exotic,” with relentless European plant hunters searching the world for ornamentals in an imperialist way. With the rise of the first commodification of food markets, starting in the 1870’s, arose ever-larger farms with ever-greater monoculture to feed food-dependent urban industrial centers. The story of the expansion of this corporate system, especially in the U.S., has been told too many times.
Beautiful and bountiful! The harvests from a summer garden in Portland, OR.
The modern origin of Edible Gardening in America has very specific roots—namely, Rosalind Creasy’s book Edible Landscaping from the early 1980’s. It was considered the Bible for the home gardener who wanted a stunning and edible front yard. Creasy espoused the radical idea that edibles could replace ornamentals without losing any of the aesthetic values: with careful choices, the edible landscape could be just as beautiful as an ornamental garden. She astutely argued from both the utility and the purely aesthetic angles simultaneously. Rosalind Creasy is simply a treasure, she has written two dozen (!) books on growing attractive edible gardens— books on growing for specific cuisines, a book on landscaping with heirloom varieties, and my favorite, a book on edible flowers! For your gardener and foodie friends, any of her books would make a wonderful gift. (How come Rush Limbaugh won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and not Rosalind Creasy?) Edible Landscaping eventually gave way to other trends in gardening style, like the snooty herbaceous perennial boom, regional gardening styles that sadly only work in that particular region, and xeriscaping, which reduces irrigation but is more about rocks than plants. Edible landscaping really got a boost after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, when a new generation began questioning food sourcing and the critique of the food industrial complex became more politicized. The larger movement today is called Foodscaping to include urban and suburban land-use policies and small poultry production.
As a disclaimer, I do not like mixing ornamentals and edibles, and my romantic notions of gardening supersede my more enlightened politics on the subject—and I will never let my daughter farm my lawn, no matter how hard she begs! With that confession made, I can write that the very first garden I ever designed was an edible landscape for a friend in California’s Silicon Valley in the early 1980’s. She enthusiastically wanted the trendy Edible Landscape, not the passé French Intensive garden. So, with Rosalind Creasy’s new book as my guide, I began my long preparations. In the old-days, there simply was not the access to the nursery stock or seed varieties that are taken for granted today. The explosion in varieties of chard, kale, amaranth, eggplants, peppers, and ornamental corn had simply not happened yet. (Today, kales in all colors adorn the lobbies of office buildings and fine hotels!) Everything except the tomatoes, which do not belong in an ornamental garden anyway because they are ugly (something my daughter and I also disagree on), had to be started from seed. It took weeks to sprout all the seeds and mature the seedling on the fire escape of my tiny San Francisco apartment. Finally, I was ready to plant.
Gardening is hard work, but the payoff can be stunning.
An edible landscape should, as a rule of thumb, be planted more densely than a vegetable garden to allow for intermittent harvesting without destroying the beauty of the effect. So, over the next three days, I planted lettuce varieties with different colors and leaf shapes, carrots and asparagus to give a feathery background, elephant garlic and chives to lend height and color, and, of course, the ubiquitous tomatoes and peppers! After baby-sitting the new plantings daily for the next week, my friend returned from vacation and was in ecstasy about the end result. But a new garden is never about an end result, gardening is about the process of tending and raising plants slowly to maturity. In hindsight, my first clue should have been how little she began to mention the new landscape in our subsequent phone conversations, and then eventually, not at all. I visited the garden in the fall, and it was an unmitigated disaster. The lettuces had either fried or bolted in the summer heat, the carrots were lush and lovely above the ground, but the roots were two-inches long and hard as stone, and the garlic and chives were messy and untended. By the next spring, the edible landscape was completely gone, replaced by a no-maintenance landscape dominated by the troika of cheap rhododendrons, azaleas, and camellias.
This catastrophe was obviously my fault. I had turned over a complex and high-maintenance landscape to an inexperienced gardener. But my beloved Rosalind Creasy has to share some of the blame. Like every garden author, she underestimates the problems and overestimates the ease of the edible landscape. Certainly, any plant that is given care, attention, and proper growing conditions will grow to be a beautiful example of its species. However, in an edible landscape, the horticultural needs of the plant are all-too-often at odds with the aesthetic goals of a beautiful garden. An edible landscape must be planted, fertilized, pinched-back, and deadheaded in an entirely different manner from a vegetable patch. The gardener must meticulously use best practices, or the results will neither produce a good yield, nor a pretty landscape. Besides, an edible landscape relies too heavily on annuals to be a year-round garden in most regions.
Please do not get me wrong. There are front yards resplendent in seas of squash with corn growing above, stunning mass plantings of heirloom sunflowers and basil, and lush gardens of eggplants and peppers—both are beautiful plant varieties in their own right, and simply jaw dropping when carrying fruit. At the same time, there are too many untended parking strips and front yards that look like a bad children’s watercolor, all to get a few ears of tough corn, and lots of zucchini the size of baseball bats. Farming is a profession, and growing food takes time and care. Everyone can do it at a certain scale, but it might not look as picturesque as Rosalind Creasy says it will—as I learned many years ago!
By all means, grow an edible landscape on your parking strip or on your apartment balcony—find varieties especially created for containers. An herb garden is always a good place to start. Or mix-in food crops with your ornamentals and go for the full-on edible landscape! Just be mindful—it aint as easy as it looks.
This piece is a series that Hannah is writing with her dad, a brilliant professor of history and an avid gardener. We’re having a blast writing these pieces and we hope you'll let us know what you think!
