Landscapes That Are Good Enough to Eat
Where other landscape designers might plant a bird of paradise, Tony Kienitz plants an artichoke. Where others put a border of petunias, he plants one of lettuce; instead of an oleander, he puts in a pomegranate.
He wants to have his ornamental landscape and eat it, too.
Kienitz likes to break the rules when it comes to landscape design principles. He takes fruits and vegetables out of traditional confined spaces and uses them everywhere--including the middle of the frontyard.
“My goal is to create California gardens consisting of edible plants that provide beauty as well as function.”
In his own yard in Pasadena, crimson amaranth with cascading clusters of plump seeds stand as sturdy sentinels among the vibrant green of okra and peanut plants.
This all comes very naturally here, he says. California is the agricultural center of the nation, and Southern California gardening has its roots in orchards, vineyards, vegetables and fruits that fed settlers centuries ago.
Kienitz, 40, is a self-taught horticulturist with an artist’s eye. He created his landscaping business, Vegetare, seven years ago in response to friends who kept asking him to make them ornamental edible gardens.
“Garden design is a latent talent I developed on my own as a hobby and then started as a business,” he says. His horticultural awakening began in 1993, when he built a raised bed in his Pasadena backyard and filled it with heirloom tomato plants at a time when they were still a rarity.
He brought his surplus tomatoes into work and within five minutes had made $40 selling them. Someone asked him to make a vegetable garden, and her friends quickly followed.
He decided to learn more about gardening through hands-on experience and went to work at Hortus, a nursery in Pasadena (it closed earlier this year) that offered unusual plants and a teaching environment. He joined its landscape division, where he remained until 1999. During the interval, he helped care for hundreds of gardens and analyzed plant design and maintenance techniques. In addition to the skills learned on the job, Kienitz researched and tested plants in his own garden.
“I experimented in my home garden with every imaginable type of edible plant,” Kienitz says. He looked for combinations that would thrive together as well as look and taste great.
In 1999, he designed an ornamental edible landscape as part of the monthlong Pasadena Showcase House of Design. It featured a raised bed and two sunken beds densely planted with about 25 varieties of vegetables, salad greens, herbs and edible flowers. The low-budget, highly ornamental display was a resounding success.
The following year, he showcased an imaginative juxtaposition of a cultivated and wild garden. A four-bed parterre contained two highly ornamental beds resembling a patchwork quilt. Ornamental corn kernels adjacent to fragrant quadrants of espresso coffee grounds anchored squares of radicchio, oak leaf lettuce, freckled lettuce and golden oregano plants.
“I did this to show people that coffee grounds are excellent soil amendments,” Kienitz said. His source: local coffee shops that have been happy to give him their spent grounds.
He also demonstrated an unusual type of snail and slug deterrent by placing the jagged seedpods of liquidambar trees at the perimeter of the lettuces. The decorative pods provide a barrier that hungry snails and slugs aren’t likely to cross.
Another portion of the design, called “The Road to Los Angeles,” contained aloes, fescue sod studded with lemon thyme and oregano, perennial arugula, mustard, roses and dandelions.
Kienitz isn’t afraid of letting landscapes go on the wild side and enjoys combining the familiar with the exotic. Artichokes are one of his favorite landscape plants. To those people who think they take up too much space in an urban garden, he says, they need no more room than a rose bush.
He likes to create mixtures of colors and textures such as lime-green loose-leaf lettuce with deep crimson radicchio, dark green chervil and blood red shiso (an edible green leafy plant used in Japan in stir-fry dishes).
“We can grow almost anything in Southern California, and we have so many different cultures here,” he said. “We can really expand the plant palette and use these unfamiliar plants.”
Recently, he installed a densely planted edible garden in the frontyard of Kathy Siegel’s Franklin Hills home. In a space just 10 feet by 20 feet, he planted four apple trees pruned to a vertical espalier effect. He accomplished this by shortening the branches along the trunk. He balanced the vertical lines with a pomegranate shrub trained on a horizontal espalier.
Where a lawn might be expected, instead are three different types of eggplants. Yellow flowers and orange globes of pumpkin and shiso squash vines meander through cabbage and kale, borage, grapes, arugula and other lettuces, lemon verbena and dandelions. These aren’t just common garden-weed dandelions--they’re an import from France: red-spine dandelions, whose multicolored young leaves are flavorful additions to salads.
“Leaves are bitter, but two or three in a salad gives the full range of flavors that good food should have,” Kienitz says.
Kienitz plans gardens that encourage interaction. “The success of these gardens depends on three things--soil, light and attitude. When the owners interact with the plants, they grow so much better. Some people want me to do all the maintenance, and I do, but then they have really, really expensive lettuce.”
Siegel is delighted to do some of her own garden chores. “I can go out my door to harvest fresh ingredients and then immediately eat them for dinner,” she said.
And she enjoys sharing with neighbors. “I couldn’t possibly eat everything I grow, and I encourage the kids in the neighborhood to take some apples.”
Kienitz says ornamental edible planting isn’t particularly complicated and suggests that beginning gardeners can plant parsley, lemon verbena or almost any other herb and scatter lettuce seeds into their existing landscaping.
Other plants that can transform a conventional garden into an edible display include shrubs, vines and decorative vegetables like leeks, “a really overlooked ornamental plant.” Other recommendations include using fruiting vines such as kiwi and passion fruit.
His all-time favorite for Los Angeles: pomegranates, which can be grown as compact shrubs, larger trees or on decorative espaliers. And they taste great, too.
