The Garden Decoder: What Is a ‘Potager’?
Is it possible to create a garden that incorporates attractive edibles, bursts with blooms, attracts pollinators and wildlife, plus is easy to maintain?
Photograph by Jennifer Bartley.
What exactly is a ‘potager’?
Potager (pronounced: poe-ta-jay) is French for kitchen garden. In England during the English landscape movement, estate owners, in contrast, didn’t want to see messy working kitchen gardens so they were hidden.
A potager should be near the house for easy access.
Photograph by Andrea Filippone, from The Garden Designer Is In: A Deer-Proof Edible Garden, East Coast Edition.
What are the elements of a potager?
“I think most often people create a row of raised beds and call that a potager,” says Jennifer.
A place on your property where you arrive, shut the gate, and leave your troubles behind.
• Have some sort of enclosure whether it’s a wall, a fence or a strategically placed flowering shrub.
• Plant the potager near the kitchen or entrance to the house.
• Plant as if you were creating a painting with edibles.
Photograph by Jonathan Buckley, from Ask The Expert: Sarah Raven’s 10 Tips for a Kitchen Garden.
Any benefits of a potager?
Expert mingling of blooms and edibles, courtesy of Sarah Raven.
Besides the obvious rewards of creating a haven of biodiversity plus the ability to harvest stellar flowers and tasty edibles Jennifer adds We re creating a garden that feeds the soul as...
...well as the stomach A place we love to be in The key to remember when creating your own potager is to nurture the relationship between nature your garden and your kitchen table