Notes from the Potager
As many of our regular visitors know, we have a potager in the Walled Garden. The Walled Garden was originally built for supplying the family with vegetables and fruits.
The potager (ornamental vegetable garden) was incorporated into the new design of the Walled Garden to commemorate its original purpose. Now that we don’t have the pressure to supply food anymore, we are growing vegetables, fruits and flowers in a little different manner to the production of food.
Last year’s chard is giving us height, architectural look and colour
Charlie, who sadly left us in spring this year, was instrumental in bringing new life to our potager. She was not only a highly experienced horticulturist, but also a garden designer with many RHS medals under her belt. This meant that she was more than capable of making our potager more beautiful and exciting. She brought height and colour to these plots and mixed different vegetables, fruits, medicinal plants and cut flowers together.
Artichoke will give height to your vegetable garden and the colour is electric… if you don’t harvest these flower buds
I would really like to keep this style of our potager going, in which we celebrate the whole lives of vegetable plants by intentionally not harvesting some of them. When leaf or root vegetable crops such as lettuce or beetroot start to flower, it’s called ‘bolting’, and it is not a good thing if they were grown for consumption, because the leaves or the roots start to become tough or bitter. By allowing some crops to flower (= ‘go bad’), we can enjoy the height, texture and flowers they bring, which can be quite unfamiliar to us. It is fun, unusual and educational.
Left hand image: Our radish bolted and has gone to seed. We couldn’t eat the radish, but isn’t this seed pod beautiful?
Right hand image: Lettuce plants do flower if they are left to do so. They are part of the daisy family.
It is also somewhat liberating to allow nature to take more control over what we do in the garden. I, for one, tend to try very hard to take control over our landscapes in order to produce beautiful displays. By allowing plants to self-seed, I feel more like working with nature rather than against it.
Angelica archangelica dies after flowering in the second year. We are letting it seed naturally and will work around where the new plants decide to grow.
Our potager may appear unkept or strange to some of you. We are doing something a little unusual, but with a reason and a lot of effort.
We do hope many of you will join us in celebrating the vegetable plants and allow us and nature work together to produce a beautiful and interesting display.
Misako