7 Creative Ways to Grow Food Everywhere—and Make It Look Gorgeous

Landscape designer Christian Douglas’s new book is packed with ideas for beautifully growing vegetables, herbs, and fruit all over your yard.

As popular as edible gardens may be these days, they still tend to be thought of as distinct from the rest of the yard. California-based landscape designer Christian Douglas has other ideas: “What if we embraced vegetables, fruits, herbs, and berries, letting them share the prime real estate in our yards alongside our patios, paths, even our front walks?” That’s the premise of his new book, The Food Forward Garden (Artisan; available for pre-order now). In it, he spotlights the ways in which you can make food crops a vital—and beautiful—part of all kinds of home gardens. Let this sampling of ideas from the book inspire you to think beyond the vegetable bed.

1. Launch a Fruitful Endeavor

This stunningly landscaped backyard bears a sweet secret—it’s full of fruit to harvest. Douglas chose trees that combine beautiful foliage with delicious fruit, including the dwarf ‘Bonfire’ peach and red Abyssinian banana trees in the foreground and the ‘Arctic Supreme’ peach, Fuyu persimmon, ‘Bearss’ lime, ‘Eureka’ lemon, and Nagami kumquat trees along the borders. Around the stepping stones, he also snuck in herbs like thyme, marjoram, and oregano.

2. Frame a Patio

Entertaining space or edible garden? You don’t actually have to choose, as this small suburban backyard proves. Douglas framed a lounge area on the patio with raised beds full of herbs, plus an espalier lemon-and-lime hedge. “Dark purple basil borders the backrest, perfuming the air and offering a stunning contrast to the eye-catching orange and crimson pillows,” Douglas writes.

3. Step It Up

“We’re always looking for ways to blend hardscape edibles,” writes Douglas. In this yard, he and his team cleverly backfilled the timber steps with soil instead of gravel and then planted culinary herbs at either end along with ‘Elfin’ thyme as a groundcover.

4. Share Sunny Spaces

Instead of delegating raised beds to their own, separate spot in this yard, Douglas decided to let vegetables “share the sunshine with the pool.” The stacked redwood structures seamlessly extend from the house, and when overflowing with herbs and vegetables, bring beauty into a high-traffic space.

Related: The 5 Best Raised Garden Beds of 2024, According to Testing

5. Go Front & Center

If you have a sunny front yard, you may want to swap out the front lawn for a more productive landscape. In many cases, “front yards offer unparalleled sun exposure, and hiding-in-plain-sight space” for growing food, writes Douglas. These angular raised beds make a graphic statement and are filled with a mix of edibles and flowers for extra curb appeal.

Tips

Douglas encourages new gardeners to start small. “Plant just a few edibles, in amounts your own household can consume, and add more as your confidence grows.”

6. Create an Herbal Vignette

Douglas’s display of perennial herbs in terracotta pots creates a charming moment that feels right at home in this formal garden. Elevating the pots on a table isn’t just an elegant design decision, but also makes the herbs easier to harvest.

7. Soften Edges

Edibles serve an important design function in this yard, creating a sense of enclosure around the seating area. Douglas filled redwood planters with lettuces, rainbow chard, and herbs, but didn’t stop there. Alpine strawberries, yerba buena, oregano, and marjoram are interplanted around the stepping stone path with alpine strawberries, while Flame Seedless table grapes grow over the pergola to provide shade.

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