Home » Plants & Animals » Garden Design » Edible Landscaping

Edible Landscaping

© Kirk Johnson

The current fashion for edible landscapes dates from the publication in 1982 of "The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping", by Rosalind Creasy. Rosalind developed this approach to landscape design in the front yard of her home in Los Altos, California, where she has lived with her husband, Robert, since 1969.

The idea of mixing food crops with ornamental plantings was frowned on by design professionals when Ms. Creasy got her degree in landscape architecture in 1973, but she ignored them and began teaching classes about edible landscaping. Rosalind now spends much of her time lecturing about edible landscapes and she has written a number of books on the subject of how to integrate herbs, fruits, and vegetables into an attractive home landscape.

I have a copy of "The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping". Most of the information and ideas in this book can be found in other books, but the author's emphasis on harmonizing the colors of vegetables with the colors of ornamental flowers is rather unique.

Rosalind Creasy doesn't pretend to have invented edible landscaping, she points out in her book that this is a tradition which goes back to the ornamental gardens of ancient Egypt, where edible plants and ornamental plants were both grown in formal gardens. Ms. Creasy gives a short history of garden (or landscape) design through ancient Rome and the Middle Ages and she dates the separation of ornamental gardening from orchards and vegetable gardens back to the Renaissance. She says that the first mention of this separation is in the writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404 - 1472) who felt that in an ideal garden "All the paths are to be bordered with box and other evergreens. Bright streams of water must flow through them and above all must start up unexpectedly, their source a grotto with colored shellwork. Cypresses with climbing ivy must be in the pleasure garden, but fruited trees and even oaks are relegated to the kitchen garden".

Alberti's point of view didn't have a huge impact on fifteenth century gardens, most Early Renaissance gardens featured fruit trees and the geometric beds were often filled with vegetables and herbs and this practice continued during the High Renaissance and into the Late Renaissance, especially in Florence. Northern Renaissance gardens combined Medieval traditions with ideas from Renaissance Italy, so the practice of growing ornamental plants with food plants continued into the first half of the seventeenth century.