OVER THE PAST DECADES, our plant palette has changed in unexpected ways. Of course, taste and trends are always changing, and plant explorers and breeders are always introducing new plants into nurseries—along with garden and landscape designers and decorators, among many others, they become the tastemakers, slowly altering which plants we can get hold of. Lots of these trends are obvious, but like the changes in the life and tilth of our soil, some can be slow and more subtle. One slow but enormous change is our shift from a rural to an urban society. As a result, we’ve gradually lost our connection to the land and to a time when plants were many things: our pantry, hardware store, art supplies, and medicine cabinet. Reconnecting with that time and passing down that connection should be easy; it just requires a shift in the way we think about our gardens and the purposes they serve, starting with choosing the right plants.
My mother, Gloria, in the garden where I grew up. In this little garden, on this little farm, a clump of bamboo has provided for hundreds of structural needs, including holding up the clothesline.
Not too long ago, lots of suburbanites had ties to the country. Most of us were just a generation removed, with grandparents or relatives still living and gardening on small farms. Those farmyards were intriguing jumbles of all different kinds of plants, swings, little outbuildings, and chickens. But, for many, that farm life—the plants and jumbled landscapes—came to represent hard work, repression, and poverty, while planned landscapes in the suburbs represented ease, simplicity, and pleasure. Plants became perfunctory, required by contract or expectations. Intentionally designed, aesthetic gardens were becoming more common—a luxury of people with lots of free time or cheap labor.
Standardization in all fields led us to become less reliant on our plants for use as medicine, food, construction materials, and art supplies. Who wants to go to the trouble of mixing their own paints, a process that involves growing and crushing and mixing with who knows what? Who wants to dye their own cloth—or, for that matter, grow their own flax and weave their own shirt? Our need for gardens teeming with multipurpose plants dissipated. Gardening, like so many other aspects of our modern world, became more and more about buying things.
Like many of my colleagues, I’ve made a living and excelled at building big, pretty gardens for my clients—a friend calls this “tarting it up.” But I’ve always seen myself more like a missionary than a salesman. I’m driven to share the spirit of the earth and the satisfaction derived from bringing forth nutrients and joy from the dirt with as many people as possible. I knew in college that I wanted to work in botanical gardens: gardens of stewardship and service. I wanted to work in public settings where researching new ways of gardening and then interpreting and teaching those methods had equal importance. There I found teams of gardeners, volunteers, and visitors who were connected by a shared vision. I’ve come to feel that, together, we need to take landscapes and gardens back, from being places of consumption, places that use up the earth’s resources and fill up landfills, to places that produce and supply things for our lives. Again, it starts with the plants.
What do you think of when you hear the term “cottage garden”? Perhaps you imagine an English garden in the country, with little white fences and flowers spilling through, an apple tree, and Peter Rabbit rummaging in the carrot patch. That romantic and idyllic picture, which arose during the turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts movement, came to prominence through the work of renowned garden designers Gertrude Jeckyl and William Robinson, who appreciated and mimicked the simple beauty of working class gardens. But cottage gardens are more than that and are utilized all over the world by people who have no time for studying garden design or seeking out exotic plants from specialty nurseries. These are gardens that are planted purposefully and quickly around other useful things: sheds, slaughter tables, cauldrons, pumps, discarded tables, and stump stools.
Today, they happen on city rooftops and even in fast food parking lots. As old-style cottage gardens were built around farm things, new ones are built around fire escapes, air conditioners, and parking lots. There’s a Chinese restaurant near my house where the old driveway and storage shed and everything in between is filled with kohlrabi and bitter squash. I’ve worked on a city project converting a fire escape, basement hatch, and three parking spaces into a courtyard garden for an obsessed office manager. The point is, these gardens happen wherever there is available dirt and in places that were not originally intended or designed to be gardens.
In this urban cottage garden, the homeowners found space around existing walks and porches to grow the plants they treasure.
But it’s the little country gardens that most inspire me. They stimulate memories and tell magical stories of their people—they call to me. Upon seeing them, I’ve knocked on gates and doors from Mississippi to Madagascar, finding great plants, creative ideas, and generous people. I love rambling through them to find a new plant or an old trick, or just a great story. What motivates Mr. Willie to let English peas climb up his okra stalks? How big is the love in Hazel that she plants an empty lot with sunflowers and puts up a sign that says, “Free, pick your own”? Those little gardens still happen today, here and all over the world. And a basic principle of each is that the plants are so much more than perfunctory. Plants make the garden and serve many purposes, not least of which are providing food, structure, and mulch, materials and inspiration for art, and satisfaction of the soul.
The Teachers
RICHARD HAGER AND NAN CHASE
Trying to count the functions of a plant can seem like a funny concept. We can never do it completely, nor do we really have the right—it seems totally anthropocentric. But still we do it, and we love sharing obscure ways a plant can be eaten, cooked, sewn with, or used. Two of my mentors in stacking are old-style country gardener Richard Hager and new urban gardener Nan Chase. Both use plants in a zillion ways, including as vehicles to tell stories and to remember people from other parts of life, and they’ve mixed all sorts of plants together. I can think of few people with kitchen gardens, camellia gardens, or butterfly gardens, but Richard and Nan have them all together in a beautiful jumble. In old-style country gardens or in new-style city gardens, people who garden spontaneously, without master plans or design, have lessons to teach about all the uses, pleasures, and functions of mixing up your plants.
Richard Hager (right) is the kind of man who gardens so much and is so involved in the plant world that for years, I thought he was a professional gardener. Together, he and I, along with his lifelong and equally inquisitive gardening friend, Alfred Burnside (left), embarked on a restoration of a 1930s camellia garden.
The objects of daily life provide the structure of Richard’s garden.
In their old-style cottage garden, Richard Hager and his partner, Noel Wallace, have seemingly just thrown everything together—it looks like a garden of happenstance. Flowers weave around little sheds, doghouses, barns, clotheslines, and wood stacks in the backyard. Cherry trees, hydrangeas, and viburnums—Richard’s love—fill beds in the front yard. Richard loves their individual beauty, and he shows them off in typical garden fashion, contrasting their habits and textures and placing them with complementing colors. But this is so much more than an artistically arranged pleasure garden. Trees, shrubs, and perennials with practical uses are mixed in everywhere. While touring their garden, we pass by an apple tree, and Richard begins listing its uses, among them that apple wood is durable and great for building little fences and it can add flavor to smoked meats. In our brief conversation, Richard can list up to six uses for his apple tree, alone. Through every season, something from this tree is being used in the kitchen, the garden, the compost bin, or for repairing the chicken coop fence. Nothing from this plant goes to waste, and if I were to press him, I’m sure his uses would keep stacking up.
In permaculture, the popular design philosophy, one of the principles—stacking functions—states that everything should have multiple uses. Richard’s apple tree is a source of food, pleasure, and wood, as well as a scrapbook. And we’re not even touching on the more cerebral, the ecological functions for all the insects and animals that use it. Fences become trellises. Chickens become fertilizer producers. Trees save energy—and, like chickens, they eventually become energy, too. In cottage gardens, stacking happens. Richard’s tells stories. In his garden, he stacks things pretty deep.
Before he had a heart transplant, Richard’s garden was a regular gathering place for artists, master gardeners, and friends who would hang out in such droves that some Saturdays the garden became a community market. And all the little old ladies from the neighborhood love Richard because he keeps the farm up just like they remember their aunts and uncles doing—his is even cuter, in fact. His version is slightly amped up and certainly stocked with more rare plants than an old working garden. It’s the perfect balance of care and carelessness—and it was all done in his spare time.
I’ve known Richard since the 1990s, and for the longest time, I knew him only as a gardener. He was everywhere—gardening for other people, dropping off things he’d grown at the botanical garden where I worked, and speaking to garden clubs. It never dawned on me that he was anything but a professional gardener. Then one day, many years into our friendship, I received an invitation to a retirement party for Richard Hager, assistant principal, Ridgeview High School. Shocked, I spoke to a young guy who was gardening with me who recalled his high school days with Richard in charge: “He was a hard man. He’d always say to me, ‘Get back here on school property and put out that cigarette, or I’ll write you up and suspend your ass.’” Richard was an old-school teacher, and lots of good old boys in town showed up to that retirement party to show their respect for the man who whipped them into being gentlemen.
Perhaps because of his limited time, everything in Richard’s garden is where it is because that is where it’s most useful. There are no cleverly designed birdhouses to hide the sprinkler heads, and no hidden hoses. And there is definitely no putting fruits or veggies off to the side. Sitting at a little table surrounded by hosta and caladium in the shade of an oak, Richard can simply reach up and pick a fig. This reminds him to tell me of his childhood, where he grew up in a yard full of edible, useful plants and flowers: “We did everything outside, in the yard where we had apples, roses, tulips, rhubarb, strawberries, peaches, grapes, cherries, and lilies all mixed around the house and tool sheds”—all those are beautiful and edible plants. They were the backbone for the cottage garden. He says:
I think of an old, green apple tree, growing right in the yard. You know, in warm climates you grow those summer apples, kind of little, mostly green, but so good for fried apple pies. We’d pick bushels, peel them and cut them in the yard, slice them, and put out hundreds of slices to dry in the sun on the tool shed roof—we’d scrub the roof really good first. They’d hang in cloth bags in the pantry. Momma used the dried apples to make little fried apple pies all winter long.
Ilex vomiteria ‘Carolina Ruby’
He recalls the group effort, from a house of nine, that it took to keep that garden, which they depended on for so many things. His grandmother’s contribution was to start flowers, tomatoes, and peppers from seed underneath a wood stove in her bedroom. In this way, they all became farmers and gardeners.
Today it’s just Richard and Noel putting in all the work, and at sixty-five, Richard is still learning from their garden all the time. He asks me to look around and name all the edible things I see in the garden. I think he has two reasons for this. First, the teacher in him wants to challenge me. Second, he’s inquisitive and wants to find out if I know about eating or drinking any of his plants in ways he hasn’t discovered yet. I see figs, basil, rosemary, blueberries, apples, and pecan trees. Then I mention a more obscure useful plant, yaupon holly, from which you can make a stimulating tea. He tries to top me: “I’ve been eating lots of lambs quarters this year—just rinse it really well, cook it like greens, and put a drizzle of lemon on it.” From Michigan to Florida, lamb’s quarters is a common, bothersome weed, but Richard finds a way to put it to use. There are so many things that you can eat. You don’t have to work too hard to plan an edible garden, you just have to learn about what’s already there, and what you can use—even when it comes to weeds. Richard continues, “I remember eating creasy greens; in fact, I just bought seeds of it. It’s a weed, but it’s always around in the winter and full of micronutrients.” With that, he’s outforaged me; nobody eats creasy today.
These little summer apples were treats for farm children when friend into small pies. The trees persist in humid climates without pesticides or any care at all.
While Richard’s garden is a recreation of an old-style southern cottage garden, Nan Chase grows a thoroughly modern adaptation of one, in the city, on less than 2000 square feet of dirt. Nan built a new, compact house in an old textile village overlooking downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Her packed garden fits right into her neighborhood; it’s the sort of garden every house in the area would have had in the 1940s.
Grapes climb the house; pruned, dwarf apple trees have clematis growing up their trunks; a tiny path leads through a pretty tangle of plants. It’s so packed in that Nan has to stand on the sidewalk or porch to do about half of her gardening. She’s not a farmer, but she eats from the yard as much as she can and uses inspiration from the yard for her writing and photography. She wrote a book about this little space called Eat Your Yard and another about all the great stuff you can brew into hot and cold tea—you can drink it, too. Her garden is the perfect example of what you can do in a small space, of old cottage gardens that sprawled in new settings. And it’s only five years old.
Useful, edible, multifunctional plants can be thoughtfully mixed into modern gardens. This kiwi vine obscures a cliff and retaining wall that was built to help create a flat lawn on this hillside garden.
Nan Chase’s thoroughly modern cottage garden fits right into her urban Asheville, North Carolina, neighborhood, which was built as a working class mill village. Not too many years ago, everyone would have grown food in these little yards.
When she started, it was just a slab of clay. She doesn’t try to live entirely off her plot of land, but she draws all sorts of inspiration and soulful satisfaction from it. Her garden is made not for vistas or parties or to show off her design skills, but the yard still looks absolutely outstanding, with peonies, roses, irises, chamomile, more roses, grape vines, daylilies, and all sorts of gorgeous greenery and young apples and crabapples all glistening from a recent rain. Nan loves it, as do most strangers who happen to pass by. She says:
It just feels pretty to be out in it. The other day, a complete stranger was driving by and yelled out, “That is a beautiful yard. Just beautiful,” then kept on going. Five minutes later, I was still sweeping when a young lady walking her dog also stopped to say how beautiful the yard was. Then just now, I was out picking some salad greens and fennel, and a girl walked by and said, “This is the most amazing garden I’ve ever seen.”
It’s starting to crack me up!
The feeling of sharing beauty with strangers of all backgrounds and ages is a powerful high, and makes me so hopeful about the continuing improvements in a pretty rough neighborhood. It speaks to the transformative power of a garden far beyond the “owner’s” enjoyment. It doesn’t take an expensive show garden to make a difference—in fact, it just takes love.
Nan harvesting from her vines, which climb the front porch
Nan stands on the sidewalk to harvest potatoes from her garden.
Updates and Adaptations
Tom Hall and I are farmers (or maybe new agriculturalists, or even just fellas who have fun with flowers). We run an organic flower farm and a garden design business. Our farm looks a bit like my neighbor Mr. Frank’s old farm, where I worked as a teenager, with pastures and pecan trees with clover growing underneath. We have fields of lilies and vegetables planted in rows, while the constant chatter of chickens, donkeys, bees, and dogs keeps things lively and interesting. Our health and wealth depend on the quality of our plants. Healthy plants mean healthier food, and this ensures that our customers keep coming back. This garden is our experiment, our place to try out and share old gardening methods—to show how, updated and merged with new scientific understanding, putting these methods into practice can feed the world and make a beautiful business.
I’ve spent most of my career building gardens for other people, both public and private. In the past, I’ve mostly designed and gardened using typical landscaping methods. But since I’ve been able to experiment on the farm, I now create gardens for people who want all earth-friendly practices, from installation to care, using what I’ve learned there. I use all kinds of techniques, including worms, mushrooms, compost tea, and plants that support the web of life that lives in the soil. Many of these techniques have been used for centuries, though some were not well understood until recent advances in soil sciences. On our farm and in other people’s gardens, we’re demonstrating that both old and new ways of gardening work, and they work even better when they’re combined.
In one of my design projects, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a few amazing years working on an isolated site. Swamps, tobacco fields, and quiet, good old country people who were slightly suspicious of outsiders surrounded this farm in a remote part of South Carolina. It was to become a massive pleasure garden, yet it was a hand-hewn garden in the middle of nowhere. The mostly Mexican crew and I kept to ourselves—working, eating, and sleeping on site. Conveniently, I had recently learned Spanish, and they were eager to learn English. I quickly learned to call my coworkers cuñados—my brothers-in-law. It seemed a bit like living or working on an island, maybe near their home in Vera Cruz. Though there were local stores, they didn’t carry the tools or plants that we needed. So we grew a lot from cuttings and sourced a lot of our materials from the woods. They’d grown up working with machetes and repairing fishing nets—together we made for an innovative, resourceful team.
On our farm, we alternate rows of our primary crop, crinum lilies, with all sorts of useful plants. In the foreground, crinum, then purple gomphrena, okra, and pecan trees beyond—all provide joy, healthy food, and income.
A nearby pond was an endless resource for us: we looked to lily pads for inspiration and beauty; we cooled off by diving off the dock into the water; and we ate fish for supper. Bullrush, a tall grass-like plant that grows in the shallow water, became string for tying plants to trellises. My cuñados taught me, using their fishing-net sewing skills, to make hanging baskets with pine needles. We used palmetto leaves as a sled to move giant pots around. They reminded me to look at the natural world as an endless supply of raw materials. We built trellises from saplings, footbridges from tree trunks, and fences from thick muscular vines.
On the weekends, I took them on field trips—for their first elevator ride, movie, and art museum. Through it all, I watched them register wonder, disgust, and inspiration. Once, after visiting the gallery of a basket weaver, we went to my crinum farm where I had a massive pile of muscadine vine prunings. We made head-high, spherical vine balls. These mesmerizing spheres could be rolled around the yard. Later, we suspended them 20 feet high in the canopy of a whispering pine grove, where they’d quietly sway and bounce. Adult visitors would crane their necks and ask, “Do they have some purpose? Or are they just there?” Depending on my mood, I’d say they were statements on the emptiness of garden art, dancer cages, or spirit houses. Young visitors, on the other hand, just got it—they wanted to dance under them and throw things at them to make them swing.
Tom Hall and I in our crinum lily field, where most fertility comes from companion planting, microbes, and worms.
We did, of course, also use our wild supply for serious construction needs: for trellises, fencing, bridges, and shading; for supporting and training new trees. For example, if you want a weeping tree to grow up big and tall quickly, you can put a big stake beside it and train one weeping branch upright. That branch soon becomes a trunk, and you repeat the process. Saplings and bamboo work great for this. My cuñados had many different words to refer to different sizes and types of bamboo, evidence of its cultural importance for them. In fact, bamboo is pretty important in most of the world. With one single, easily cut cane of bamboo, you can make a fishing pole or a tomato stake, prop up a clothesline, fence, or window unit, stick it like rebar into a wall, roast a hot dog, or make yourself a simple bowl, cup, candle, or hose pipe. Bamboo is the duct tape of the plant world. Besides, when it’s alive and growing in the ground, it provides shade, privacy, erosion control, and a beautiful leaf litter that you can use as mulch on other garden beds. What’s more, the edible shoots are rich in seventeen micronutrients, amino acids, and fiber.
Gardeners everywhere both love and fear bamboo. But that fear is based on stereotypes and ignorance, on limited knowledge of one type of bamboo that can, when neglected, take over other plants. Of the more than 1000 species of bamboo, there are many more true clumpers than aggressive runners. And there are ways and situations for either to add beauty, shade, vertical green, and an unlimited supply of construction materials to landscapes. I now include bamboo in every garden I build—every one. Their filigree leaves rustle; their vertical, ribbed canes mesmerize. In the right place, surrounded by asphalt or buildings, running bamboo works well—the bigger, the better. I’ve used giant timber bamboo in everything from small courtyards to big parking lots to provide shade and amazement. Black or gold bamboo makes for elegant container plants. For over eighteen years in my small city garden, I’ve grown a hedge of Bambusa multiplex, the true clumping bamboo (my favorite cultivars are ‘Alphonse Karr’, with golden canes, and ‘Riviereorum’, with slender, solid canes). The clumps are now just 5 feet square at the base and sheared at 15 feet tall. The hedge hides the neighbors and provides plant stakes for vegetables. There really is no need to buy those cheap, little green bamboo stakes they sell in garden centers, which actually come from tonkin bamboo, grown in mainland China. They may be easy and affordable, but there is a huge environmental cost to harvesting, cleaning, and dyeing them, packing them in plastic, and shipping them on boats and trucks to your garden.
Berchemia twines around a cypress tree in Francis Marion Swamp in South Carolina. Because it is so flexible, weavers call it supplejack.
Woody vines woven to be objects of art, contemplation, or taken down and rolled around.
Dried wisteria vine, screwed onto a new trellis, acts as a guide to the young climbing rose.
Other trees and shrubs can also provide dried canes for staking and trellising material. In new gardens, I include cutback or coppice shrubs: woody plants that you cut to the ground in winter. By midsummer, they’ve grown long, straight, and useful stems. Catalpa, known around here as the bait tree, is a classic example of a tree that can be mixed into a perennial border but cut back to the ground every year. This severe pruning makes its leaves huge and pretty and its stalks really straight. In just one summer, you’ll get 6-foot-tall stakes. And if you’re into fishing, you’ll get catalpa worms, caterpillars that make great fishing bait—I have several friends whose first jobs were to collect the worms and put them in freezers to sell later. Vitex, rose of Sharon, mulberry, and crepe myrtle can also be treated as cutback plants, providing quick stems for garden staking. Japanese parasol tree can grow 15-foot-tall stalks in one summer. I cut a few every spring to have on hand for staking vegetables in the summer.
‘Tanakae’ bamboo, with its green and purple leopard-skin patterns, entices people to plant it. But it is a giant plant and an aggressive spreader. This planting is in front of a commercial office building, surrounded by concrete walkways.
Bamboo canes being dried and stored for later use at Warren Wilson College Farm in North Carolina.
Back on our own farm, Tom and I integrate many useful plants into our crinum fields. The farm is old—it’s been farmed and gardened since the 1750s, and has quite a history—so bamboo, figs, pecans, and a hundred other useful plants are established around the fields and barns. In the fields, we mix in food and herb plants. Our soil is managed to keep the microorganisms thriving. I like to call it “beyond organic.” Between our lines of lilies, a row of parsley adds winter green, and in the summer, the parsley flowers attract tons of bees, flies, and wasps. By August, we collect parsley seed for cooking, and we chop and lay the withering plants down for mulch. Also, in late summer, okra provides food and can be pickled. In fall, we leave the tough stalks standing; they become trellises for February-sown sugar snaps. Then, in early spring, we cut the old okra stems.
Long, straight pieces of stems from perennials can also be useful in the garden. These lightweight, dry stems are sometimes known as haulm. Haulm is what you get when you cut and store perennial plant stalks to use later. I’m a haulm hoarder. Any plant that grows a thick stem quickly is great haulm. Fern fronds were used traditionally for haulm to be applied as a light mulch and covering for frost protection. We save fennel, okra, and asparagus stems and pull them over fall veggie seedlings on the first really cold nights to act as an insulating blanket. It’s the free version of what your garden store calls floating row covers. It’s important to remember that you don’t always need those material things on display at your garden store; you don’t have to buy plastic or stakes or row covers simply to protect your seedlings from frost. As gardeners, as workers of the earth, we should be the leaders, the examples, the medium through which innovation and creativity in the use and reuse of our plants is passed on.
Parasol tree (Firmiana simplex) is coppiced to show off its giant leaves. Each winter, the resulting straight stalks are cut and used for plant stakes and fences.
Parsley, after it has gone to seed, is cut and laid over as mulch and a nutrient source.
Thin-leaved grasses work great as mulch, too. Spartina bakeri, or sand cordgrass, is a favorite of mine because it’s easy to harvest and lasts a long time. To keep it uniform, I grab a handful of the grass at the base and simply cut it off. Use it fresh or store it in bundles, always with the base ends together, so that all the grass is flowing the same way. Then, when you mulch with it, thread it around your plants. Having a big clump of a grass is like having your own little straw factory in the yard. If you don’t have room for it, find someone else’s yard to plant a grass in.
Plenty of other plants offer beautiful mulches, though plenty can be ugly. I’ve tried and tried to make big, curling crinum leaves into a pretty mulch. Even though they end up being ugly, I can stuff them behind and under large shrubs, under bananas, and even onto newly planned beds. There, they do what mulch is supposed to do, but you don’t have to look at them. Cypress leaves make a delicate, lacy mulch of rusty orange. Bamboo leaves work, too—you can easily rake them up. But the ultimate mulch makers are the trees right overhead. In a tiny urban garden, I once chose all the small trees based on the composition of colors and texture of the fall leaf drop. I found a carpet in the house, took a picture, then walked through gardens looking for leaves colored to match that carpet. The idea was that the patio garden would be mulched in the same colors as the living room carpet.
Ferns are a traditional plant for haulm. Bracken fern is an aggressive groundcover that can be cut to provide lightweight mulch to regulate soil temperature and provide potassium. In this garden, it’s contained by a brick wall.
Cordgrass is an elegant ornamental grass that can be cut to use as winter mulch.
The most important mulches, from a management standpoint, are our green mulches. We plant these heavily: peas, peanuts, or parsley to shade the soil and smother weeds. All of those plants are then cut, in place, sometimes chopped, and used as mulch. We simply cut the stems at the ground with a machete, drop the dry vines or stems, and chop them in place. They make winter mulch that helps maintain heat, moisture, and winter weed control. The microbes and insects break it all down by May, and we start over. To help reclaim new land, we use an aggressive, tall-growing mum called ‘Miss Gloria’s Thanksgiving Day’. We direct stick cuttings (meaning we take a 6-inch cutting of a plant’s stem and stick it in the ground, where it will root and grow next spring) in the winter, let them smother everything all summer, then chop and leave the stems for winter mulch. What’s more, as this variety flowers very late in November, it provides tons of pollen for bees and flies. Removing nothing, adding nothing, we let every living thing be a part of the complex system that we can’t really begin to explain.
The work we do in our nursery also offers examples of ways that we can be gentler to the earth. We want to understand, to respect and honor the life in soil, in the plants and insects—we want to share in the recognition that we are all part of one big system. In our nursery or in your garden, that understanding, that cycle, is perhaps the ultimate function of our plants—they are teaching tools. The techniques we’ve developed are perplexing to new gardeners, who are always asking why we do it. Professional horticulturists want to know if the interplanting just gets in the way and makes things more difficult. The first thing I always tell them is, “You can do it, too. The why and the how come later. Just try it in a little area.”
Though this garden might look like an old-style shrub garden at first glance, I added many multiuse plants, ones that fix nitrogen and many edibles including figs, pawpaw, pecan, and quince. Tom Hall and I designed and oversaw the renovation of this, the oldest house and garden in Columbia, South Carolina, to keep the spirit of the yard, a place that’s had multiple uses for centuries.
Roger Swain, host of PBS’s The Victory Garden, and I once had a discussion about the limitations of this sort of interplanting. He explained that home gardeners may plant some blueberries next to their roses, but when it comes down to protecting and seriously cultivating for harvest of berries, the gardener simply doesn’t need to expend the resources. In other words, if you are not home when the flock of berry-eating birds comes through, you’ll go to the store that afternoon to buy a quart of berries. That crop of berries isn’t valuable enough to you to offset the cost of staying home to protect them.
I understand the practicality of that. There’s no fun in having to go out on a dark, rainy night to pull up muddy beets while balancing a flashlight and wondering if you even have enough time to preheat the oven so you can deliver roasted beet salad, as promised, to the dinner table. But yet there’s so much more to it all than that. Here we are, gardeners, volunteers, and high school principals able to reclaim a bit of dirt and make it do more than just look pretty. If you’ve ever worked the ground, even just a little bit, you know that satisfaction. And while your children may be bored when you garden with them now, that’s okay—they’ll remember. And they’ll need to remember, because they’ll eventually be the ones voting on agricultural policy and making our food decisions in the coming years. To develop a lifelong love, a deeper commitment, people need to be around people who use plants. Richard Hager, our cottage gardener and a lifelong professional educator, told me:
Fig preserves will forever remind me of climbing fig trees, itchy arms, and my mother, who makes them every year.
Being around people who care for plants, especially plants that we eat, may not seem to influence a child, even as they grow up, even as an adult, for a long, long, long time. But it will. Give children a responsibility in the garden, and they’ll get the spark. Anybody who was around it, one day will remember, will love to see things grow, to help things grow. Like all nine of us who lived in a little shack in North Carolina, they’ll be a farmer at heart.
For my entire life, my mother has harvested figs and made fig preserves that we could use throughout the year. Her figs, roses, and azaleas grow together—it’s a beautiful, coarse, textured backdrop to her flower garden. Figs require care just twice a year. In the spring, we pull out weed tree seedlings and vines and, in drought years, we water to stimulate fruits. In the fall, when we rake other areas, we dump the leaves under the fig trees. Otherwise, they need no pesticides, no fertilizer—nothing is added. The output is so much more valuable than the cost or the physical input. To be honest, I don’t even like fig preserves all that much. But my soul has been fed forever by that connection, that memory, that fig tree. As Richard says, “Sure, I could buy corn and figs cheaper than I can grow them. Then, though, I wouldn’t have all the extra to give away and the joy in giving!”
On our farm, we select plants that fill multiple needs, and we mix together all kinds of growing, living things. We stack. And we do so for all the reasons that cottage gardeners, everywhere, in all times, did it and still do it—it just makes sense. It’s efficient, and it honors the earth’s resources. Today’s gardens don’t have to be our entire pantry, medicine cabinet, hardware store, or art gallery, but they can contribute to all of these things. They can give us cleaner, deeper lives with more layers and more hope that in the future, the people who make decisions about what we eat, how we treat the world and each other, have some inspiration—that spark—from their own gardens, and the gardens of their youth.
Persimmon fruits are an added benefit to growing this elegant small tree.
