Pot luck
Though she harvests her own lettuce, snips tarragon for her salad dressing and mint for the fruit compote, the owner of this Montecito potager sees more than dinner when she looks out her kitchen window. Within stone walls, against the neatness of a gravel carpet, herbs sprawl from raised boxes, zucchini creeps from a trough and beans inch up willow pyramids. The scene has been as well-crafted as its plant mix, which makes it satisfying in a way that food gardens often aren’t. “You can weave a tapestry with herbs and vegetables,” says the owner, a retired garden designer who created an acre setting for the stone house she and her husband built in 1999. “If you plant the edibles with non-edible plants that have different leaf textures--things like teucrium, santolina and scented geraniums--you get a look of abundance you don’t expect from a small area.”
Her 35-by-40-foot potager balances structure for spilling greens with plenty of blank space for visual relief. The location, right outside her kitchen door, is ideal, she says. “I can dash out and pinch herbs, pick tomatoes. But I also enjoy the view. I love seeing all the color and pattern. I love the scents. My dogs trail around smelling like rosemary.” The dogs, two yellow Labrador retrievers and a Dandie Dinmont terrier, should get partial credit for the composition. Thanks to their nibbling, digging ways, the garden was built around raised beds, two 5 1/2-foot-square fir boxes at the heart of the space. This configuration left a dog-friendly path on either side and ample edges for more containers and planting borders. Raised beds have other benefits: they discourage rabbits and allow for a custom soil mix that stays warmer than the ground below, coaxing edibles to produce early.
Gardeners Don and David Harris of Santa Barbara, the owner’s longtime friends and landscape helpers, filled the beds with composted fir bark, potting soil and topsoil in equal parts and applied time-release fertilizer during planting. Starting with a large rosemary shrub in each, they filled in with chives, mint, basil, oregano, parsley and tarragon. Between the two beds went a potted bay laurel, while additional trees--pineapple guava, citrus and apples--anchor the corners of the plot. A medley of stone and terra-cotta containers holds a variety of plants and plant shapes. Even some edibles are used ornamentally, such as the lettuces tucked in a trough to show their ruffled, ruddy leaves.
“I’m constantly changing things either because I use certain herbs in cooking or I decide to try something else,” the owner says. “You reach a point where you can’t cut herbs back anymore. They get woody and need replacing.” Some, such as basil and tarragon, die down in winter. Others, such as rosemary and oregano, keep going.
As the seasons turn, she swaps summer tomatoes and pole beans for winter lettuce and sweet peas. Or she might try artichokes in a sunny corner, where a clump of thistles will catch the eye, lead it up the wall over a crown of ceanothus, past an oak and to a ridgeline of the coastal mountains.
She has also experimented with covering the garden’s fruiting plants with wire mesh to keep the dogs from gorging themselves on apples and tomatoes. Mesh also protects plant roots against their digging. “It’s not pretty, but if you want dogs and you want a garden, you compromise,” she says. She and her husband, whose office overlooks the potager, are content to share the turf with their pets, if not the produce it yields.
“When I cook, I just mix things up and throw in herbs,” she says. “A pinch of this and a pinch of that, as much for looks as for taste.” She poaches carrots in orange juice and mint, stews tomatoes with oregano and basil and chops rosemary, thyme and chives over meat. To keep the herbs going strong, she hand-waters three times a week in summer, weekly in winter and fertilizes quarterly. Otherwise, if she’s not gazing at the garden through glass, she makes a point of wandering out daily with the dogs to check her crops, and enjoy the perfumes.
