The Townhouse Potager, Brighton
With Ben Macdonald having cut his teeth working as a potager* gardener for English garden design luminary Rosemary Verey, the opportunity to work with a pair of excellent amateur cooks on developing their own potager was something of a dream come true.
Keenly aware that their townhouse potager serve the kitchen and its culinary designs while at the same time function as a space for contemplation, relaxation, and entertainment, we worked with the clients on a design that carefully considered the practical and aesthetic relationships between the home and garden.
As such, the different areas – the herb and vegetable garden, entertainment and contemplation, flower beds, garden shed – flow into each other, the loose borders softening the brick pathway, the hierarchy of design ensuring that the client-cooks were seconds away from harvesting a recipe’s worth of fresh produce, the companion planting giving colourful structure down the centre of the garden, the odd tree providing height and shade.
* A medieval French invention, a ‘potager’ is a vegetable garden that is ‘ornamental’ in so far as it includes herbs and companion plants, inedible flowers that (often) smell wonderful, always look beautiful, attract insect pollinators, fight off pests, and serve as the life-giving building blocks for a functioning ecosystem. The English version of the potager is much less formal than its historic French cousin.
"We can’t even begin to tell you what it looked like before – we were gardening in these barrels, nothing worked, and it always felt like an effort. That’s all changed: the garden now feels part of our kitchen, its often our dining area, and its where we spend all our time."
Tom and Fi Mercer