The Layered Look A STACKED GARDEN
April/May 1997
By Andy Van Hevelingen
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This garden at a small herb nursery in England is made from barrels stacked on top of barrels. It is planted to overflowing with dozens of herbs and flowers.
Photograph by Andy Van Hevelingen
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NEARLY every gardener eventually runs out of
space. It’s a universal condition. Gardens are seldom large enough
to accommodate every plant we want to grow. As a result, we tend to
overcrowd our plantings to make them all fit. For the apartment
dweller or urban gardener, the problem is even more pronounced. To
have a garden on a small concrete patio or tiny balcony is not
impossible; it just requires more imagination. One solution is to
go up instead of out. If you think in terms of three dimensions
rather than two, the sky’s the limit.
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There are a number of ways to add this element of verticality to
your gardening, as well as products on the marketplace to help you
do it. The most remarkable example I’ve seen was in an herb garden
I visited many years ago at a small British herb nursery near the
border between England and Wales. I remember it clearly because it
was so simple, and it illustrated the ingeniousness of vertical
gardening beautifully. It was an entire herb garden of about sixty
plants in a space no larger than the size of my desktop.
Stack ’em up
The owner of the nursery had stacked three whiskey barrels of
different sizes and planted the exposed soil with herbs. The
resulting raised beds demonstrated all the virtues of a good herb
garden: beautiful foliage and textural contrasts; lush carpets of
flowers; intriguing habits of growth; alluring fragrances; and
plants with a variety of medicinal, culinary, and aromatic
uses.
The plants in the lowest tier were at knee level, and those in
the topmost barrel were at eye level. In addition to providing a
splendid visual treat, this arrangement put every herb within
reach—to touch, smell, and harvest with no need even to bend down.
I suspect that the garden was watered from the top, allowing the
water to drain down to each of the plantings below.
What I enjoyed most about this garden was the variety of plants
that it held. Many common herbs were in this barrel stack,
including some that you might think were too large for container
growing: lovage, fennel, upright rosemary, and culinary sages.
Selective removal of flower or seed stalks, the restricted root
zone, and natural competition among the plants, however, restrained
the growth of the larger herbs and kept it manageable. The owner
avoided growing herbs such as mint, horseradish, and the spreading
artemisias, whose aggressive root systems would have taken over the
planting in no time.
Herbs cascaded over the edges of all three barrels, showing off
the foliage and blooms of upright thymes, prostrate rosemaries,
winter savories, and gray santolinas. Although the barrels were
packed with perennials and biennials, annuals could easily have
been included initially to fill any open spaces until the
perennials grew in.
How to do it
To have a garden on a small concrete patio or tiny
balcony is not impossible; it just requires more
imagination.
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