This week's recipe is for an informal garden like I have at home. Next week's recipe will be the absolutely fail-safe formula for a formal herb garden in drop-dead gorgeous style -- like I design for clients!
My informal herb garden design recipe is a "cook till done" type of ongoing project: Add a dash of this and a dollop of that, garnish as needed! Be assured, there are no rules in stone here, although some careful thought and a few initial sketches on paper are a good idea. (Paper is cheap! It's easier to play with plants on paper than to move them around with a shovel in the garden.) The result is of course a bit of a jumble, but a happy one.
Here is the process, more or less. In this case I settled on an initial theme: "gray foliage". Note that I chose the theme in tandem with deciding where to put the planting bed. The spot I chose is on a hot and sunny south-facing slope where the drainage is good and the soil is lean. Perfect for herbs! Lots of herbs are gray! Good fit!
The design is informal because this is part of a sprawling country garden. For a garden in town, or for a gardener with more of a preference for symmetry in design, I would probably use a more formal approach like the one I'll talk about next week. However, it is perfectly possible to use the informal "cottage" look in town, too. Here are some pictures of cottage gardens in from a town in New York state, thanks to Ithaca Gardens. Sorry, that 1997 link is no longer valid -- removed January 2003.)
My very informal gray garden is in a roughly round, raised flower bed all to itself, edged with stones collected from our woods. In the center there is an ornate Corinthian style plinth which usually has a concrete frog sitting on it. (The plinth was a special gift and my daughter chose that frog when she was two. I love all three of them!) The plinth provides a central focal point in all seasons and adds a little height to the planting scheme.
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