How to Have Your Hedge and Eat it Too

Here at Thistlebrook, I’m keen to grow as much fresh food for my family as possible, alongside a selection of my favourite ornamentals. It’s amazing though how quickly you can fill up a couple of acres. For the first year or two after moving in, I spent hours scratching my head, asking myself the question “How am I going to find the space to fit in everything I’m keen to grow?”.

It’s taken a while, but I’m now confident that I’ve found the solution. Instead of making a big differentiation between ornamentals and edibles, I’d choose ornamental edibles, and grow those that aren’t so ornamental in beautiful ways. My new gardening philosophy is inspired by a quote from the Scots American conservationist John Muir, who in the 1800′s suggested that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread”.

My guess is that most of you are facing a similar dilemma. Enthusiasm for growing some backyard produce is one thing, but where to fit the plants when only limited space is available. The answer is to look to consider your boundaries, and your divisions.

By choosing appropriate plants, it’s very feasible to establish edible hedging around the perimeter of your garden that will attractively hide the fence, facilitate some privacy and produce a surprising amount of food in one fell swoop. You can also select smaller growers for internal divisions throughout the garden, edging paths and driveways for example, thereby making use of every scrap of space available.

In these situations, you want something small, suited to clipping and evergreen. It’s hard to overlook rosemary. In return for a regular haircut, it will provide year round structure and toughness, not to mention an endless supply of barbeque skewers and Jamie Oliver inspired pastry brushes. There are lots of cultivars available. ‘Tuscan Blue’ is excellent, though for cooking ‘Gorza’ is the one to choose.

Another excellent option for a low to medium height hedge is Camellia sinensis, otherwise known as the tea plant. Like its traditionally grown cousins, the sasanquas and japonicas, Camellia sinensis has beautiful lustrous leaves and smaller, but no less attractive flowers in autumn. Most varieties of tea, including green and black, can be made from the fresh young leaves of this species. Pick them regularly, and you’ll hardly even need to get out the hedging shears.

For intermediate hedges to around two metres in height, the options become much broader. In frost free areas along the escarpment, any of the edible plants in the ginger family, which includes tumeric, galangal and true ginger will work nicely along a boundary, as would a row of coffee bushes, lillypillies, or our native lemon myrtle, Backhousia citriodora. Harvest the citrus scented leaves for use in baking and Asian dishes.

In frostier zones, feijoas are an excellent choice, producing interesting flowers followed by deliciously tangy fruit that remind me of lemon sherbet. Blueberries are great, bay trees make a lovely feature either side of a gate, and then there’s one of my favourites, Punica granatum. Pomegranates are highly underrated both in terms of their productivity and quality as ornamentals, yet to me they are as beautiful as any rose bush, with the added bonus of seriously edible fruit. Try a cutting grown cultivar like ‘Wonderful’ or ‘Galusha Rosavaya’ for best results.

For taller screens or hedgerow use, the options are similarly plentiful. Olives make a tough, interesting screen that can be loosely grown or formally clipped, and the stone pine (Pinus pinea) would make a long-lived alternative to some of the other more ubiquitous conifers in vogue at the moment, especially on the southern Downs. Pine nuts will be ready to harvest after about six to eight years. For a more traditional approach try hazelnuts, hawthorn, and crab apples, many of which produce useful fruit. Then there are oranges, figs, pears, mulberries…you get the picture.

For keen gardeners, space will be tight whether you’re on a small block, or an acre. There’s just so many plants to try, you’ll fill up whatever space you have available. But with some planning and careful selection, you can have your cake, and eat it too. See the opportunities presented by dead spaces like the margins and gaps between different areas, try and think “beauty and bread”, and my tip is that you won’t go far wrong.

First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle, 25th April 2009. Photo by Justin Russell.

Tagged as: camellia sinensis, Edible hedges, hedgerows, pomegranate, rosemary