Edible Landscapes

Today I wanted to introduce you to the concept of edible landscaping by giving you insight into the landscape I’m designing right now!

I’ve done some basic landscaping for people before, but this is the first time I have been given basically free reign by the customer to plant whatever I want with only a few main requests.

I’ll take you through my process and show you the plan, then I’ll update you in spring when the landscape is actually planted and installed!

My goal is to show you that you can do a lot of the concepts I write about in a modern landscape without it looking like an overgrown forest or without creating a high maintenance vegetable garden!

Hopefully those of you who live in HOAs will get some inspiration for what to do in your own yard and how to integrate some cool edible plants or plant guilds!

Key considerations

There are a few requests the homeowner has made:

• They want a landscape that looks pretty particularly in the fall (their favorite season)

• They don’t want to have to take care of the landscape much if at all (low maintenance)

• As a bonus, it’d be nice to have edible plants but not 100% necessary (I’m trying to integrate as many as I can without them feeling obligated to harvest if they don’t want to)

These are pretty easy asks, I think I can work with them.

In addition, we have to keep in mind the climate and the soil where he lives. This is in West Michigan, zone 6a, and the soil leans towards clay.

Plant Selections

The plants I have chosen to make up the bulk of his landscape are:

• Elderberry

• American Persimmon

• Serviceberry

• Highbush Cranberry Viburnum

• Currants

• Strawberry

• Echinacea

• Milkweed

• Bergamot Bee Balm

• Yarrow

This isn’t to say that I can’t fit more stuff in if he wants to later, but this is the foundation of what I’m putting into the landscape.

I have selected largely natives since they will be the lowest effort plants he can grow, and I selected for a good balance of filler (the wildflowers and herbs), groundcover (strawberries, yarrow), and focal plants (elderberry, viburnum, serviceberry, and persimmon).

Layout and Design

There are a few basic design principles we can use in landscape design:

• Focal Points

• Texture & Color

• Repetition

• Transition

That said, I want to use trees as focal points and use plants in descending order to kind of “smooth” out the landscape.

I will do at least a few serviceberry trees and a couple persimmon trees. These can be the big focal points.

Then I’ll put the elderberry, currants, and viburnums between them and the garden edges, and fill in the gaps with taller plants like bergamot, echinacea and milkweed. At the very front of the landscape I can do smaller plants like strawberry and yarrow.

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