Mistress Lijsbet vande Visschereye
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Garden of Period Useful and Decorative Herbs Mistress Lijsbet vande Visschereye |
In the Medieval household, a garden was an indispensable source of food and seasonings for the residents. Gardens could be divided generally into pleasure gardens, kitchen gardens and orchards. At my new home - Corbinham - I have several gardens. The back yard contains the kitchen gardens, the larger part of which is beds of vegetables. In period fashion, the vegetable beds are several small beds rather than the one large "field" layout more common to the modern Midwestern gardener. The veggies are of course, mostly new-world foods. The herb bed is not in a Medieval form, but contains a selection of Medieval useful and decorative plants.
Being kitchen gardens, the beds of useful plants are adjacent to the house, and between house and what will become the trellised herber. A small orchard is planned beyond the trellised herber.
The "herb" garden - the period part of the kitchen garden - is sited at the south side of the yard, in strip of about 48' in a trapezoidal shape which tapers from over 4 feet wide to just over a foot wide. The garden is backed by a cyclone fence, which does not shade the bed. The garden gets full sun until mid-afternoon. The house's downspout empties into the bed.
The trellised herber (work to begin in fall 2008) will be built according to period exemplars. I'm planning on typical things like an exedra, and a flowered mead for the floor or the herber. This is where I'll be planting period roses, lilies, and other flowers. I'm going to try my hand at making the trellises myself, since commercially- available ones are out of proportion to the ones in the old manuscripts. The herber will be backed by a grape arbor, which is really a trasnsition between herber and orchard.
It's going to be a small orchard in any case. I have located a source for some period apples, and they tell me that the two that they carry are cross-polinators. I'm also wanting to try pears and quinces, but I'm not sure of how much space I have until the herber is platted out. In any case, the scale of the available space will require using dwarf trees.
Our zone in Denver is a short-season 5, and we are in a semi-arid climate. Days are warm and dry; nights are cool. Our last frost-free date is generally considered to be Mother's Day, and we will have a freeze by early October. That's about 135 days.
Unlike the native clay soil at Peakview, this soil is nearly river bottom-land. We're within one mile of the Platte River, at the bottom of Park Hill, so we've got very nice friable soil. It's full of earthworms, dark and sandy. The organic content seems to be rather high, so I'm really not sure what kind of flavor my lean soil-requiring herbs will achieve. Suffice it to say that I'm not going to amend the soil with any organics. As a matter of fact, the covering turf and weeds have been removed and composted rather than turned under to keep the soil as lean as I can.
A word about our soil. Our neighborhood is a former Superfund cleanup site. Really. The soil has been found to contain abnormally high levels of lead from the nineteenth-century smelting operations located just to the north. Additionally, the soil was contaminated with arsenic used in lawn-care products in about the same era. In particular, my yard was tested and found "safe"; that is to say that the lead and arsenic levels were not sufficiently high to warrant the removal and replacement of my topsoil. This is good and bad. While I've retained the local soil (one wonders what they used as replacement) it's still got enough contaminants to be of concern. As described to me, it's a matter of scale with herbs. Herbs, being between vegetables grown in the ground (grow in raised beds if you intend to eat them) and vegetables that develop from flowers (safe grown in the native soil) are considered safe in the small quantities that we're likely to eat them. However, I'd think twice about eating a salad-sized serving of them. So, lettuces go in the raised beds.
There will soon be stepping stones situated at intervals in the garden to provide access without unnecessary compression of the soil. The catnip is protected from decimation due to cats - both resident and feral - by a very un-period wire cage, which permits air, sunlight and water, but prevents being ripped out by the roots in fits of kitty ecstasy.
The garden pages are organized by year, and I add to them blog-style as the garden develops, so check back.