The Aesthetics of Vegetable Gardening

Most American home gardeners tend to take a brutally practical approach to designing their growing spaces. We can do better.

A few student volunteers finishing the woven fences of our garden before the gravel paths went in.

These weeks after the Christmas season are a time for bracing walks, halfhearted weight loss goals, and forward thinking. Though winter has only just begun, January brings with it an almost imperceptible shift in atmosphere, a song of beginning rather than of ending to which the gardener within us stirs, and starts to make plans.

Perhaps following the Classical Roots Program’s progress over these last few years has inspired you enough to consider designing and planting your own garden at home. If so, bravo: even a few pots of herbs on a porch count as a garden and will bring flavor and joy to your daily life. It’s best in these matters to start small. However, if you’re lucky enough to own a sunny patch of land that you’d like to turn into a growing space, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There are so many issues to consider: what should I plant? When should I plant it? How do I manage pests? Analysis paralysis can quickly set in, though of course all of these questions will answer themselves with a little time, patience, and experience.

Since they’re a feast for the senses, lovely growing spaces will tend to draw in new gardeners.

Yet, if you’re planning on starting a garden of your own, there’s one additional aspect of the enterprise you may be tempted to neglect: the aesthetics. We here at CCA favor classical education, the central tenets of which are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The second of these is not to be eschewed if we’re to add lasting qualities to our endeavors, even when those endeavors are as humble as digging in the dirt. Luckily, if we make the effort to lay down beautiful bones for our gardens, they’ll actually yield more and better crops, if for no other reason than that we spend more time in them.

The great Monty Don, patron saint of all home gardeners, published a book in 2020 titled American Gardens. Don is not only a practitioner of gardening, he’s a scholar of the theory and practice of making gardens. Sadly, a quick look at his book will be enough to convince anyone that Americans have no strong aesthetic tradition in gardening. If anything, many of our most famous gardens tend to be garish affairs designed more as displays of wealth and eccentricity than as beautiful or comforting places of home and harvest.

Accordingly, most American home gardeners tend to take a brutally practical approach to designing their growing spaces: a few rude metal or wooden raised beds are unceremoniously plunked on the ground, then festooned with acid-blue or sickly yellow tomato cages and left to bear what desperate fruit they will.

Our cottage-style vegetable garden, complete with wooden trellises and waddle-work fences, in its full summer flush.

Yet with a few simple tactics, we can do far better. Living in New England, we at the Classical Roots program decided to embrace the English cottage tradition of gardening that came to this region with its first Pilgrim settlers. That tradition relies on easily attainable and renewable materials, such as hazel sticks, to create trellises and woven dividers. The result is a garden that blends seamlessly into the surrounding landscape, projecting a wholesome and slightly woodsy feel.

Yet before we could build the fences, we had to lay out the plan. If you’re doing this at home, the most important consideration is location: you want to make sure the space gets at least eight hours of unobstructed sunlight per day. A southwest-facing wall on the Logic School side of our building worked perfectly, especially considering that brick absorbs the heat of the sun by day and releases it by night, creating a slightly warmer and drier microclimate that’s perfect for most garden plants. The second is soil quality: you want to have a simple mail-in soil test conducted to find out how quickly your soil drains and whether or not it contains any potentially harmful pollution.

I still keep the original student-generated drawing for our garden pinned to a corkboard in my classroom. Notice the clean lines and symmetry of the design, as well as its incorporation of a path that runs straight from an exterior door.

Once you’ve chosen your location and gained confidence in your soil, remember to orient the garden relative to the house. Too few home gardeners understand the basic principle that, if a path is to run between or beside any garden beds, that path should extend directly from one of the house’s entrances. Doing so will give you a clean sightline from your door through your garden, making it feel like an outdoor extension of your living space instead of a parasite clinging to that space. Once the location and paths are determined, do your best to lay out a plan that involves clean lines and symmetry. Since you’ll be planting all sorts of different crops in the beds over the years, you can’t rely on the size or shape of any one plant to add visual structure to your garden. Thus, it’s vital to ensure that the shape and layout of the beds will visually stabilize the space. Once this layout has been established, you’ll still need to make a number of crucial decisions: raised beds or ground-level? Grass paths, gravel, or brick? However you choose to move forward, you can’t go wrong if you’ve followed strong design principles from the start.

Much more could be said about the aesthetics of gardening: endless ink has already been spilled on the subject and by smarter designers than myself. But, if you’re considering a growing space of your own, you can make some excellent plans with these simple concepts in hand. With some hard work and a little luck, you’ll create a space whose harvest isn’t only nutrition, but beauty and wonder, too.