Growing Vegetables, Fruit, and Herbs in Your Garden

Rooftop kitchen garden. It is possible to grow quite a variety of herbs, vegetables and fruit in a small space!

About 25sf of planters and pots supply produce from apple and cherry trees, raspberry and blueberry bushes, strawberry plants, a grape vine, as well as greens, tomatoes, peppers and a dozen different herbs.

Collecting some vegetables, herbs and fruits for the day's breakfast and lunch menu. Photo by Raquel de Favori ©2017.

Tomatoes ripening in the roof garden.

Growing your own berries is not difficult at all. Ask the nursery about purchasing a male and a female plant, and for netting to place over the plants so that the birds don't take the berries before you!

Grow your berries in a sunny spot

Grapes don't have to overwhelm your garden; a lattice fence or even a parapet railing can support them in a sunny spot adequately sheltered from the wind.

The sweetness of growing your own cherries.

A Sense of Place

Gate in an ancient yew hedge at Levens Hall, England's oldest garden.

The art of landscape design is by its nature ephemeral. While we have both histories of architecture and the buildings which date back sometimes millennia to experience our connection to the past, the history of gardens usually relies upon descriptions, drawings and plans from earlier eras to describe what once was (or to recreate what once was). One exception is the extraordinary Levens Hall garden in northern England, which was designed in the 1690s. 

Topiary, Levens Hall, England.

Levens Hall garden has been continuously maintained since its first days, in the 1690s and many of its topiary are 300 years old. It has walls of beech and yew hedging, a potager garden, an orchard, a rose garden, a bowling green, a "wilderness," and other mysterious, less purposeful but extremely atmospheric rooms. Its original owner, before the garden was commenced, lost the property through gambling ("Colonel James Grahme acquired the property, and the old tradition that Levens was won with the turn of the Ace of Hearts probably has some foundation in fact" --the estate's website).

Levens Hall, yew hedge (windows, crenellations, and doorway).

A sense of place abides here with centuries of footsteps, sharing the path with those strolling before by 10, 50, 90, 150, 300 years. At the same time, the architecture is mostly living, and when you realize that the current head gardener is only the 10th since the 1690s, that this living artwork has roots which connect you directly to the past. . . . It is not an ordinary feeling.

Topiary garden at Levens Hall

Levens Hall : house and its topiary garden.

For more about this garden : http://www.levenshall.co.uk/levens-hall-gardens-historic-topiary-in-cumbria/garden-history.html