Trust the French, a nation that has a great sense of style and celebrates culinary excellence, to nail the myth that you can’t combine pleasing aesthetics with functional food production. A potager – pronounced puh-tuh-ZHAY and literally meaning ‘for the soup pot’ – is a plot filled with fruit, vegetables and herbs that’s designed to stimulate the eye as much as the taste buds.
The garden of the 16th century Château de Villandry in the Loire valley is widely regarded as the classical French potager. Built on a grand scale, the restored Renaissance-style garden is a patchwork of plants laid out on three levels, the lowest of which is divided by low box hedging into nine equal squares. The beds are planted with a bewildering range of fruit and vegetables, surrounded by ornamental annuals.
A justifiable criticism levelled at the Château de Villandry is that it’s too formal by far, and could do with an injection of the allotment spirit, where improvisation and organised chaos are often employed to achieve the desired effect. Symmetry and repetition clearly works in a garden setting but if a single plant or more perishes it can spoil the entire effect.
There is no strict potager template and it is effectively any kitchen garden that doesn’t adhere strictly to utilitarian principles and instead seeks to be more playful. There’s nothing in the rule book either that says your potager must be made up entirely of edibles. In many cases ornamental plants can be used for functional purposes, like aiding pollination and deterring pests, or simply for their appearance.
The design and look of your potager will of course reflect your own tastes, but those that work best employ natural materials like timber and stone or quirky recycled materials. Within reason, each piece of space should be occupied by something growing and where possible plant things with a climbing habit on arches, arbours and obelisks.
In more elaborate spaces, fruit can be used to great effect, with many varieties of apples, pears and raspberries being grown as cordons (single stems) or espaliers (stems branching out on either side in tiers). Grown in the manner the fruit trees provide good natural boundaries.
Among the so-called edimentals, those plants blurring the lines between edible and ornamental, are globe artichokes, bronze fennel and chives, the latter working in everything from a window box to a Belfast sink or even a rockery.
A potager favourite and among the easiest veg you can grow are runner beans. A climber that brings plenty of height and colour to your plot - and that’s before you harvest it’s sweet bounty. For that authentic rustic look build a pyramid with hazel or willow branches for the beans to grow up. Colourful varieties include ‘Painted Lady’ (red and white), ‘Sunset’ (pink) and ‘Scarlet Emperor’ (red).
Swiss chard too is among the easiest and most robust veg you can grow and believe it or not the variety ‘Bright Lights’ really does have a ‘wow’ factor. Its glossy green and reddish leaves with red, purple and yellow stems are so good, some people plant them in their borders. If sown in late July or August they will provide colour throughout the winter.
