Gardening

The very chic-sounding potager garden is better known as the traditional kitchen garden. The Scots quaintly refer to it as "kailyaird " literally meaning a kale yard or cabbage patch located by the side of a croft or cottage.

It's often a structured garden but can be anything from a simple vegetable plot to an enclosed, fenced or walled area, and essentially separate from residential lawns or ornamental gardens.

Basically it's a garden full of edible and medicinal herbs, vegetables, fruit and flowers often planted in decorative designs of repetitive geometric patterns with the function of providing food in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Historically, the potager came from the gardens of the French Renaissance during the last years of the 1400s and heavily influenced by the Italians with whom France had been warring. In turn the English adopted the French potager in the 17th century and sequentially many a Victorian walled kitchen garden provided a large variety of fresh produce as well as flowers for the inhabitants of the home.

Some formal designs use low box hedging to edge, gravel paths between and bricks to section the areas. Some have raised, some have flat beds or even sectioned circular or hexagonal planting spaces for easy working and picking.

Nowadays a much less formal approach to the potager garden sees the growing and careful labelling of various seasonal herbs, salad crops, fruit and vegetables providing fresh ingredients for our more adventurous culinary creations and located close to the kitchen for easy harvesting.

A good local example of a well-labelled potager garden is at Flour Flower in Kerikeri who hire out commercial kitchens and conference facilities. Some named plants even have their culinary or medicinal use on the back of the label. It's helpful and educating to experience gathering fresh aromatic herbs and garden produce to use in mouth-watering recipes.

At Flour Flower companion planting works as a natural pest deterrent so one sees comfrey beneath the apple trees, tagetes amongst the self-seeded lettuce crop, camomile alongside thyme, lemon grass and hyssop thriving near tarragon and rosemary close to the recently planted sweet pea teepee.

The chilli peppers are hotly red and a bumper crop of beans is taking shape along the solid side-fence, built and planted with hedging to reduce road noise. Garnish flowers such as blue borage, stunning sunshine coloured nasturtium, pretty violas and scarlet pineapple sage are all within easy reach of the kitchens.

The truly enthusiastic can grow micro greens in green houses, bean sprouts in a jar on the windowsill and an entire mini potager garden in a barrel by the backdoor. Bon chance tout le monde!