Edible Landscapes

Urban agriculture is about more than just kitchen gardens: it’s about integrating food into the larger landscape. Not only can your regular annual vegetables be integrated into an ornamental landscape, but all kinds of perennial food plants can be utilized, both for their beauty and the nutrition they offer. Your landscape could not only feature your favorite flowers and bushes, but artichokes, asparagus, grapes, berries, kiwis, rosemary, thyme, persimmons, pomegranates, citrus, avocados, oregano, rhubarb, sorrel, guavas, and countless other things that you may eat on a regular basis and could have growing right in your own back (or front) yard.

Design Considerations

Back Yards
Edible landscaping, whatever the size, can be a lovely complement to a kitchen garden. Your kitchen garden could be surrounded by fruit trees and perennial vegetables, creating an edible oasis in your yard. Or you could use edibles in and among the ornamentals you already have: artichokes in the flower bed, blackberries growing against the garage wall, grapes growing on a pathway arbor, herbs making borders and hedges. . .there are many different ways to integrate food into your yard, whether you are going all-out and making a backyard orchard, or just adding some plants here and there. We are happy to help you make your yard (literally) more fruitful, either in combination with a kitchen garden or on its own.

Front Yards
The archetype of Southern California landscaping is a large lawn with some other large shrubs or bushes growing next to the house. Not only is this landscaping standard visually uninteresting, it is ecologically dead, resource intensive, and rarely utilized. Well manicured lawns use our precious water resources and require fossil fuels to be burned in order to maintain them (think of those lawnmowers and leaf blowers), and for what? Grass is great for soccer games and picnics, but how often do we do these things on our front lawns?

Instead of using our resources for a useless sheet of green, our landscapes can help feed us and turn our yards into ecosystems. Fruit-bearing trees and bushes and perennial vegetables can be a part of your productive landscape, mixed in with native and drought-resistant ornamentals.

We are always thrilled to replace a lawn with a landscape that uses the fewest resources for the greatest gain. We are happy to work with you to design a landscape that works with your house, habits, and diet. Take a look at our Gallery page for some examples of edible front yards.