From Rosalind Creasy:
If Johnny Appleseed were to visit present-day suburbia, he would weep. In most yards he would be likely to find not a fruit-laden apple tree, but a flowering crabapple, cherry, plum, or peach tree—none bearing fruit.
Not that many years ago, he would have had more luck. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers usually kept a fruiting apple, cherry, or peach tree in their front yards, and grew vegetables and herbs near the kitchen door. The trees not only were beautiful at blossom time, but they provided fruits to be eaten fresh and preserved for the months ahead. Some of the vegetables, too, provided pleasure to the eye as well as provender for the pantry. But their main interest was food. Beauty in a producing plant was a bonus, not a requirement
Somewhere between that era and the present we have developed an “edible complex,” that is, a resistance to including edible plants in our landscaping plans. A number of factors brought about this attitude. One of the most important was the massive shift in population from rural areas to urban centers and suburbs that began early in this century and accelerated dramatically after World War II. The trend was paralleled by the development of an efficient agricultural community, which produced inexpensive foods we would have had to work hard to grow ourselves. A rapidly developing technology, a long period in which oil was cheap and readily available, and vast expanses of fertile land all combined to make the United States the number one food-producing nation in the world. Agribusiness became so efficient that currently less than two percent of our people can produce all the food we need. In that context, what difference could a backyard apple tree possibly make?
Despite the old saying that “you can take the person out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the person,” the whole nation seemed to agree that we were well rid of the need to grow our own food. But even if we had wanted to grow some edibles—just for fun, perhaps—other developments constrained us. For example, as suburbs and subdivisions multiplied, individual families found themselves with less land and fewer opportunities to express their personal tastes through landscaping. Developers often dictated the landscaping tone for whole neighborhoods by cutting down trees and putting in lawns; “neighbor pressure” further contributed to conformity.
The impulse toward uniformity fit in well with the principles of landscaping we inherited, mainly from the formal tradition perfected in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. This style, developed for the leisure class, concerned itself almost exclusively with ornamental plants. It was expressed in manicured lawns, shaped shrubbery, and flowering ornamentals. Later, in middle- and upper-class suburbs, where yards were assumed to have no function other than a recreational or aesthetic one, food-bearing plants were relegated to the inconspicuous hobby garden. A suburbanite or city dweller with a yen for dirt daubing usually wound up trying to develop more floriferous fuchias or lusher lawns.
The result of these combined influences was a conventional style of American home landscaping that stressed large, pristine, and manicured lawns; formally trimmed ornamental shrubs and trees; and the decorative use of flowering annuals and perennials. The function of landscaping was seen as cosmetic, period! “Messlessness” became a primary objective. For example, the fruitless mulberry came into favor because, although mulberries were tasty, they were messy, and unless harvested regularly accumulated on the lawn. We even asked propagators to sacrifice fruits for the sake of bigger flowers. In response they made available numerous varieties of nonfruiting cherries, almonds, apples, plums, pears, and peaches, and even a nonproducing carob and olive.
But, you might ask, why tilt at this particular windmill? Those fruitless trees are not hurting anyone, lawns do set off our homes nicely, and flowers are among life’s greatest pleasures. Am I taking a stand against beauty? Am I advocating that we spend all our free time “putting up” or drying peaches? To these questions, I reply that as a gardener I enjoy flowers and all growing things, as a landscape designer I am a seeker after beauty, and as a homemaker I do not need any more chores. Still, the fact that most Americans are totally dependent on commercial agriculture for their food supply concerns me greatly. I consider the average citizen’s lack of involvement with the land, our most basic source of sustenance, to be one of the most destructive results of the escalating complexity and specialization of our society.
Among my other concerns are skyrocketing food prices and the possible health hazards associated with the increasing number of chemicals used in commercial food production. Finally, I am alarmed at the waste of natural resources our present practices generate. In a world where fertile soil is an endangered resource, millions of acres of our nation’s best agricultural soil are covered with ornamental shrubs and lawns. Soil can be brought into production for agriculture only at great economic and environmental cost. Why do we allow so much of what we have to remain unproductive? Furthermore, the water we use to irrigate our purely decorative landscape is finite, and the fossil fuels we use in maintaining them are nonrenewable. We are becoming aware that our wasteful ways may be having irreversible consequences.
Oil deserves special mention in this context. Few people need to be told that petroleum use is problematical in this day and age. However, the pervasive use of petroleum in home landscaping is far less obvious to most people than a crisis at the gas pump. While we are aware of its use when filling the power mower’s gas tank, it is not immediately apparent that many fertilizers are made from natural gas, and that a great majority of pesticides and herbicides are petroleum-based products. Power equipment—mowers, edgers, blowers and the like—not only use petroleum for fuel, their manufacture also utilizes great quantities of energy. Thus, for me, growing food at home became one aspect of a greater goal: making our landscaping practices more environmentally sound.
As a result of these concerns, over the last three decades my work as a professional landscaping designer, teacher, and author, and my own home gardening efforts have been aimed at finding ways to revise standard landscaping practices to meet certain primary goals. These are: to provide delicious, healthful food for the table; to curtail practices that waste water, soil, and energy; and—most important, since it provides incentive for the rest—to create beautiful, well-planned landscapes with the use of edible plants.
I have learned—despite resistance to the idea from some landscaping professionals and nursery personnel who still suffer from the “edible complex”—that it is possible to plan a yard that is both productive and beautiful. Not all food-bearing plants have been hybridized to serve commercial interests in facilitating harvesting, packing, storing, and transporting. Home growers can produce foods that are tastier, fresher, and less altered than commercially grown foods, and can preserve more of their vitamin content. Furthermore, home growers can choose to keep their land unpolluted, uncontaminated, and healthy.
Many people are already aware of the practical benefits of growing edibles, but it seemed to me that developing and promoting their decorative value was essential in order to bring them back into favor in landscaping. I don’t want to leave the impression that you trade off on appearance for taste in shifting from pure ornamentals to edible ornamentals. Nor is it merely the fruits that are decorative; the flowers, the leaves, the very shape of many edible plants please the eye long before the fruits appear. In most cases the fruits or vegetables are a bonus to a plant’s contribution to the garden’s appearance or to the plan of a yard in general. For example, I recommend specific fruiting varieties of plum, pear, peach, and apple trees that are particularly beautiful in bloom and provide sweet, juicy, sun-ripened fruit. I talk of combining flowers and selected vegetables in perennial borders; substituting edible, ornamental shrubs for barren ornamentals in foundation plantings; and using handsome nut trees for shade. In every case, both the landscaping and culinary uses of a plant are considered.
I cannot overemphasize the potential for beauty that landscaping with edibles holds, since many people still have difficulty accepting this notion. I came to understand this potential by experimenting in my own yard, in the process relearning the joys of eating fresh-picked peas, vine-ripened tomatoes, and sun-warmed apricots. I purchased dozens of different varieties of vegetables to plant in my food garden but also to interplant in my flower garden. Red cabbage with its colorful foliage, string beans with purple flowers, the many varieties of lettuce with their interesting leaf patterns, artichokes with their gray-green, fernlike foliage and magnificent blue thistles, and the heavenly purple globes of the eggplant were extremely effective in my standard flower bed.
Since my first tentative experiments, I have developed and thoroughly researched a list of ornamental edible plants that can be grown in different areas of the United States. The plants selected range from the exotic water chestnut to the familiar apple. I have also discovered some unusually attractive varieties—string beans with large, showy, white flowers; bush cucumbers with compact vines; peaches with showy, pink, double blossoms; and plum trees with delicious fruit and red foliage. I found that some standard food-growing practices—for example, staking bean vines with an odd assortment of poles or “caging” tomatoes—could be replaced by less intrusive, more aesthetically pleasing techniques. I found, too, that some edible plants were hard to manage in a landscape situation.
Edible landscaping gives you the satisfaction of assuming responsibility for at least that portion of the environment that is solely under your control. In addition you will enjoy marvelous eating, give a boost to your budget, and have a beautiful yard. Nowhere is it written: Thou shalt landscape only with barren ornamentals. If only one out of every ten United States citizens planted just two fruiting trees, the world would be richer by nearly 6 billion pounds of fruit!
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See also Gene’s The Anatomy Of A Homestead Landscape,
Edible Estates, and BountifulBackyards.com
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Rosalind Creasy is author of Rosalind Creasy’s Recipes From The Garden: 200 Exciting Recipes from the Author of the Complete Book of Edible Landscaping.
Illustrations Credit: Marcia Kier-Hawthorne
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
