Rosalind Creasy, The Edible Landscape

I'm excited to share with you a garden I was privileged to visit a couple of weeks ago. Rosalind Creasy has been gardening and writing about gardening for decades. Back when no one had heard about local foods and heirloom vegetables, much less edible landscaping, Ros was plowing her garden and planting the seeds that are now part of a nationwide movement. Her first book, The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, was published by the Sierra Club in 1982. To get an idea of what she started with in the late 1970s, here's a view of her front yard:

Just an ordinary house on a small lot. The book, and the garden, had not yet been created.

Roalind Creasy is a landscape architect with a great eye for design, so it is no wonder the simple lot went from that, to what you see below. Instead of filling the newly cleared spaces with more green bushy things (the kind of plants I claim don't pay their rent, meaning, don't justify the space they take up in the landscape because they give nothing back) she planted edible plants everywhere. Here's almost the same view just 2 weeks ago:

Rosalind Creasy meets ust curbside in her edible landscape paradise.

Here (above) is that pesky dividing strip between houses, neighbors driveway on the left, Ros' driveway on the right. What's there besides the little hedge that acts as a curb? A few flowers, but if you look close, there are 3 very large eggplants and a planter filled with sweet peppers of several varieties. Just think, most people make this spot lawn that has to be mowed.

Still curbside, the bed is filled with herbs, vegetables and flowers.

 

I took 2 steps to the right after taking the curbside photo, still at Ros' driveway. Remember that photo in the beginning of the blank looking front yard? The street shows in the lower right corner, the driveway in the lower left of the photo, and everything else, between, is edibles. Great, arching rosemaries, potted figs, tomatoes, oregano, nasturtiums. Keep in mind, I'm still in the street, I haven't even stepped into the garden yet!

Standing at the front door, looking toward the street.

If you could look to the left, near the blue-green lattice fence in the left of the photo, you would discover the chicken pens. School children make a bee-line through the front of the garden almost every day to check on and see the chickens.

One of two chicken pens in the back of the photo. This is still curbside, too.

We're still in Ros' front yard. Several kinds of peppers and squash are in this bed, plus some herbs.

I didn't count how many raised beds and planters there were in the front garden, but many. Ros has blackberries, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, herbs, roses (remember my How to Eat a Rose book? Roses are edibles, too) and so many more vegetables and fruit I don't even remember them all. You could feed a family from the front garden and that doesn't even begin to describe the back garden!

Rosalind Creasy's first book, The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping can still be found on Amazon. Her second book, Edible Landscaping, newly released is also available on Amazon as well as through your local bookstore. It includes the basics for how turn your front (and back) yard into something other than grass and bushes. Learn about growing vegetables and herbs in containers, learn about organic pest controls, composting and a whole lot more. This is a large, hefty book, and it's overflowing with information from someone who knows gardening.

When I asked Ros if I could see her compost area, it didn't surprise me one bit to find a wonderful, working, well tended compost system, landscaped, of course! The chicken litter, garden debris, kitchen vegetable scraps and other organic compostables, all go into the compost and get recycled as new, rich soil into the garden beds.

Garden waste in, organic soil out and no fertilizer required to grow a garden.

And one more growing area, in the photo below, still in the front garden between the street and the house. The chicken pens are in the upper right of the photo, near the street.

Click to enlarge.

Edible Landscaping with Rosalind Creasy

This is Ros at a mutual friend's house, with another of her books.

Rosalind (Ros) Creasy is a world-class photographer and talented gardener. As far back as 1970 Ros was pioneering the methods of edible landscaping and her work since has revolutionized the way many homeowners think about their landscape.

"Author, photographer, landscape designer and environmentalist, Creasy has widely influenced the course of domestic gardening over the past 30 years. She kept the then barely flickering flame burning in her best-selling 1982 book, "Edible Landscaping." Newly reissued and substantially reworked, the book introduced a new style of vegetable gardening while rejecting the prevailing model of the garden as a male-dominated holdover from the farm, with discrete crops in rows," (read the complete story): The Washington Post, Nov. 25, 2010.

Pansies are a multi-purpose food, available almost the year around. (Better than lawn grass any day!)

That first book, back in 1982, has been a best seller and has influenced several generations of new gardeners. Her mantra of, "Don't mow it. Eat it" has encouraged countless homeowners to rip out their useless green lawns and replace them with things like lettuce, blueberries, apple trees, arugula and carrots.

Her new book, which is a complete make-over of that earlier stand-by, came out in November. It's already sold out and bookstores are awaiting more shipments from the publisher, not a surprise given the huge numbers of new gardeners.

Not only are tulips, "edible" they also have different flavors and great taste.

Ros is an award winning landscaper, too, so she has an eye for making a landscape spectacular, and at the same time filling it, not with useless azaleas and Japanese yews, but with plants that not only compliment the home, but provide food, as well. (I always call this method, making plants pay the rent for the space they take up in my landscape. It's not enough for a plant, in my opinion, to do nothing more than "be." Just because it's green, like those useless junipers landscapers tend to call, "foundation plantings," isn't justification to take up space in my yard. Ros has been preaching this for 40 years!

A tiny corner of Madalene Hill's garden at Festival Hill, near Round Top, TX.

The book is outstanding, better than the first (although lots of us couldn't see how she could possibly improve on what she wrote all those years ago). In reading through it, I found photos of some of my friends' gardens, including Madalene Hill's garden at Festival Hill, outside Roundtop, TX, which I wrote about some months back. Edible Landscaping, at 400 pages, could well be the only gardening book you would ever need. It will inspire you, encourage you, but most of all it will be the inspiration of future generations of new gardeners to look beyond the lawn and see food in their landscape.

 Congratulations, Ros, on a book that will be the bible of gardeners and homeowners for decades to come!

To see more about Rosalind Creasy's books, calendars and projects, visit her website:  http://www.rosalindcreasy.com/

Happy gardening!