Lacking a potager? The Garden Club will help you with that
SUBMITTED BY THE BOCA GRANDE GARDEN CLUB – Do you know what a “potager” is? It is the French word for kitchen garden and literally means “for the soup pot.” So the potager is a thing, a kitchen garden, but it is more than that. It is a philosophy of living connected to the garden, or so says Jennifer Bartley, our speaker on Wednesday, Jan. 13, at 2 p.m.
Just as the soup pot changes through the year depending on what is growing in the garden, a successful and rewarding garden with edibles does not have to be dependent on a specific place or season but can incorporate the entire landscape.
Taking her inspiration from the grand kitchen gardens of France, borrowing the elements of beauty and dependence on the garden for seasonal food and flowers, Jennifer designs gardens that contain walls, gates, patios, walkways, trellises, gazebos, greenhouses, potting sheds and plants that attract beneficial insects, birds, bees and butterflies.
They are perfect havens in which to live a lifestyle that is built around gathering food for dinner and flowers for the table from a sustainable edible garden that is a reflection of its owner. Thus the potager is a reflection of a “philosophy of living” connected to a personal garden that brings years of joy to its gardener.
Founder of American Potager, a detail-oriented, focused landscape architecture firm in Ohio, Jennifer is the author, illustrator and photographer of two books: “The Kitchen Gardener’s Handbook” and “Designing the New Kitchen Garden.”
Jennifer lectures on the topic of client-driven gardens that are sustainable and edible all over the country. She has presented her talks and her inspirational photographs at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, the Horticultural Society of New York, Longwood Gardens, Coastal Maine Botanical Garden, Kansas City Garden Symposium, Colonial Williamsburg and many other places. She is a registered landscape architect in Ohio, California and South Carolina and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in landscape architecture from Ohio State University.
