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Positively edible

Abandon the edible/ornamental divide and take a permacultural approach, says Michele Fitzsimmons – create a beautiful garden which is good enough to eat!
Pictures: Michele Fitzsimmons

Sweet Cecily

Myrrhis odorata, a native of Europe, has delicate fern-like leaves which have a subtle aniseed flavour. The fresh bright green fronds shoot up in early spring. They are really delectable then, providing a great early addition to the salad bowl. The plant develops into an attractive feathery bush about 60cm high and wide.

Appealing as it is at this stage, sweet Cecily still has more to give – in May, creamy-white frothy flowers bloom and these are especially delicious, combining the aniseed flavour of the leaves with a honey-like sweetness. The flowers then set seed into solid green pods which stand proud of the foliage. These can be used to imbue soups, relishes and preserves with an aniseed flavour. The seedpods turn slowly brown and then black, making beautiful silhouettes against the grass-green foliage, which lasts well into September.

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Good things in store

Most gardens maintain a strict divide between the veg patch and the ornamental bit. The food area consists mostly of annual veg, neatly laid out in rows, duplicating the style used on allotments, which in turn models itself on a farmer’s field. Then there is the pretty patch, consisting mostly of flowers and ornamental shrubs, which is lovely to look at but has no other function. Edible landscaping starts to blur this divide. Springing from a basis in permaculture, it places a strong emphasis on creating functional and productive landscapes which are attractive and pleasing to the eye.

Approaches to edible landscaping are many and varied. It can mean growing edible perennials, of which there are thousands, in an arrangement which is bountiful in terms of food production but also beautiful to look at. It can mean building your conventional annual veg garden into a less rigid format, intermingling your veg with other herbaceous perennials, shrubs and trees. Or it can simply mean the deliberate creation of a beautiful space when creating a patch of food, even if it’s in a 12 inch container.

I do all of these things and more in my garden, and for the last 15 years I have been developing gardens for others which use plants which I think are both delightful to look at and delightful to eat. I am always looking for interesting edible perennials and am forever extending the range of plants that I grow in my garden, which I can then use in designs for others.

One of the distinct advantages of growing an edible perennial garden is that it requires less work than growing conventional annual vegetables. This is not just because of the obvious reason – you don’t need to raise your plants from seed every year – but also because perennials need far less watering than annual veg, they withstand weed competition far more readily, and you do not need to prepare a bed for them every year. If you then choose a no-dig technique the maintenance is reduced even further.

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Plan crop rotation

Mustards

The Brassicaceae will impart a hot, peppery flavour to your salad bowl. There is our native Alliaria petiolata, aptly named garlic mustard, or more poetically Jack-by-the-hedge. As its first name implies it is both garlicky and mustardy. In small quantities it adds that extra something to your salad mix. Spring is when it is at its best – the young leaves are fresh and lack the acrid aftertaste that can develop as the plant matures, although I continue to harvest young leaves throughout the season. I like the flowers as well, which have a strange but pleasant combination of sweetness and hotness.

One of the most spectacular mustard-flavoured plants I grow is dame’s violet or sweet rocket Hesperis matronalis. At variance with its name, the leaves of this plant are seriously hot. In my garden it maintains a rosette of fresh growth throughout winter; it is the rosette where the young leaves are found, and these are the best to eat. In spring, a profusion of flowering stems begin to develop. By May I have a large sprawl of a plant, one metre by one metre, completely covered in small pure white flowers. The flowers, which have a more subdued mustard flavour than the leaves, look great scattered over a green salad. There are other varieties with mauve to purple flowers.

A couple of other mustards worth mentioning, not perennials but prolific selfseeders, are landcress Barbarea verna and hairy bittercress Cardamine hirsuta. The latter looks like a miniature version of the former but is less hot and more nutty. I prefer it for this reason. It’s a real winner in a mixed salad, the only drawback being that its leaves are a little on the small side. Its name is a complete misnomer; it is neither hairy nor bitter.

Landcress pops up all over my garden and is a welcome opportunist. Its ability to self-seed means a continuous and effortless supply throughout summer. Indeed, there is a landcress which has made itself extremely comfortable in my greenhouse. This plant has not only grown to gigantic proportions (for a landcress that is) but also overwinters, providing me with hotness when things are at their coldest! Landcress has a very similar taste to watercress, which it is related to, so if you are hankering after that hot peppery flavour but have no running water, landcress is an easily achievable alternative.


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Garlic mustard Alliaria petiolata.

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