STYLE: GARDENS : Good Enough to Eat

Relax, radishes. At ease, asparagus. A vegetable garden need not march in rows and regiments, especially in a tiny back yard. Johnine Novosel’s Venice patch, far from looking like a truck farm, comes disguised as a pint-size cottage plot run wild around an elfin dwelling. A picket fence sets off the diminutive structure, a run-down tool shed recast by landscape designer Jay Griffith to be the center of the playful idyll.

Painting the fence, shed and surrounding concrete walls in Caribbean colors, and creating a path from scraps of castoff bathroom tile, Griffith set the stage for a lively, low-cost garden as good to look at as it is to eat from. “Why should something cheap and functional be dull?” Griffith asks.

Novosel, an organic gardener who chose most of her edibles from the Santa Fe-based Seeds of Change catalogue, agrees. Seeking diversity, flavor, nutritional value and eye appeal, she bypassed some of the usual greens in favor of red Russian kale, royalty purple bush beans and marvel striped tomatoes. “I wanted to grow things I couldn’t get at the store,” she explains.

Planting her food crops late for an extended fall harvest, she also worked in blooms she couldn’t eat--roses, cosmos, coreopsis--and covered a wall with an ornamental hyacinth bean. For further decoration, she lets her artichokes flower and her ruby chard grow big. For the most part, though, she’s in this for the vegetables. “It’s nice when you put so much work into something, to be able to use it, whether it’s a flower to cut or a squash to eat,” she says. Or, one might add, a little tucked-away patio on which to swing in a hammock and watch your arugula grow.