Via: JS Online

Mix them in with flowers to save space, add texture

When you think of a dramatically colorful garden, vegetables might not enter your mind.

Waves of flowering perennials and annuals create visual excitement in the landscape, but the thought of a tomato plant mixed in with the flowers just doesn’t work. While, indeed, a tomato plant may be a bit too rough around the edges for a flowerbed, many of today’s other vegetable and herb introductions look lovely enough to eat — literally. Their stems, flowers and fruit are equally as showy as any flower you could grow.

Vegetables have, in fact, been grown alongside flowers for centuries.

In sustenance gardens of immigrants and farmers in both the United States and Europe, flowers and vegetables mix and mingle together. Think of farmhouse gardens along country roads. There is often a row of gladiolus, zinnias or marigolds next to beans and corn. Even further back in history, cloistered monks grew flowers with medicinal properties in the same gardens as herbs and vegetables.

The concept is not new, but what is new is a crop of vegetables and herbs that transcend their lowly origins to become works of art.

Along with new vegetable introductions, there seems to be a change in the way Americans garden.

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