The vegetable garden at Villandry is engineered into incredible precision by the team of gardeners who tend it. Each box-edged bed contains just one cultivar of one vegetable, which keeps everything neat and tight and also looks incredible when viewed from a distance. The artichokes fan out opposite the sharp blue leaves of the chive plants, and their big silver leaves contrast perfectly with darker parsnip and celery leaves planted nearby.
In the beds below, young cabbages planted in the straightest lines you could ever imagine are already providing a perfect foil for feathery fennel plants in neighbouring beds. These clever contrasts between shape and colour show how deeply ornamental a working vegetable garden can be.
Contrasting colours are used from bed to bed, too. Here, dark-leaved chillies are set off against green and white chard and the lime-green leaves of celery plants.
The same effect is used in these beds with luscious-leaved beetroot ‘Bull’s Blood’ sitting pretty against blue spiky leaves of young onion plants. Even large and luscious plants like beets and chard are contained neatly within the box hedges that run around every bed, which gives a structure to the garden even when plants are very young and small, or coming to the end of their lives.
Probably the best looking of all the leafy veg grown at Villandry are the chicories, which have such thick, bold, sharp-edged leaves. They look marvellous packed in tightly into a box-edged bed.
The cultivars planted are chosen for their own special beauty. These white aubergines stand out beautifully in their beds.
The whole garden at Villandry is managed using organic methods, which shows how spotless a plot you can create without resorting to synthetic chemical fertilisers and pesticides. It was the first garden of its size to go organic, and now uses beneficial insects such as lacewings, ladybird larvae and cochineal insects to keep pest numbers down.
View more inspiring images in this slideshow of other vegetables at Villandry.
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