7 Ideas to Create a Potager Garden

A potager is a french word for a kitchen garden. There are no limits on size or style, the main purpose is growing vegetables and fruits. However, a potager garden has also come to mean edible plants are arranged in a beautiful way that is visually pleasing.

After spending the last 10 days in France visiting many potager gardens, I saw many common themes among these beautiful kitchen gardens and so many good ideas! Here are 7 ideas to create a potager garden of your own. 

This post contains affiliate links. Here is the full disclosure.

1. Use natural raised bed borders and edges

One common theme among many potage gardens is to use natural items around each garden bed to delineate where the edges are located. The most common we saw are stone, willow branches, and small shrubs like boxwoods. 

Shrubs

The natural elements are beautiful but there is also a practical element as well. There are many types of shrubs that can work for borders. Most commonly we saw the boxwoods but there were a couple others that I had trouble identifying that looked great too.

Oftentimes, shrubs naturally grow large, so be sure to get a dwarf variety or something that doesn’t get taller than a foot if you want to step into a garden bed. 

Do some research and find a type of plant that is low maintenance and works in your growing zone. After talking to several french gardeners they said sometimes boxwoods can get a boxwood blight and will need to be replaced because of it. It’s common in France but may not be common where you live.

Other ideas for borders are herbs.  We also saw rosemary being used as edging since it is a perennial in France. I also love the idea of using something easy to grow like thyme or chives as edging for a potager garden.

Branches

Another option is using branches as edging for a potager garden. We most commonly saw willow because they can be grown in France and  weaved together to make a basket like structure to hold in garden soil. 

As a practical side note, I did notice that for garden beds 12 inches high or less the willow was sufficient to hold in soil. In a garden (see photo below) with a taller raised bed, they used metal around the bed for structure and then the willow was weaved around that so it looked more natural.

Many types of branches work well for building living fences. With this type of border against garden soil it will decompose and need to be replaced. How often it would need to be replaced depends on what type of branches are used. 

Stone

Stone was the least commonly used border but I still saw it in a few places. I think this is because of the cost and permanence of stone. I think stone could work well if you have some pretty and flat stones that are naturally in your landscape or use a limited amount of stone as a feature like the fountain below.

2. Create a unique potager garden design

Many potager gardens look beautiful both standing on the ground and from a birds eye view. You can use your own creativity to create a visually pleasing design.

One of my favorite places to visit with a beautiful view from above was Villandry. It was a symmetrical design using the color of flowers and vegetables to create patterns. 

An important thing to remember keep in mind the use of the garden. Is the main purpose aesthetics and beauty or do you want some function and productivity? 

Based on personal experience, garden beds are most functional when they aren’t larger than four feet wide. This allows a gardener to access the garden bed without stepping on it. 

However, during our potager garden tours, there were many garden beds that were larger than this. The gardeners sometimes created walking paths within the borders using hay or wood chips to mark walking area.

Alternatively, they stepped on the bed to weed and work it. Even though this isn’t ideal, as long as the garden is not walked on often it doesn’t cause too much compaction. 

Other design elements to consider are creating a center focal point and symmetry. 

3. Use hedges or stone walls as windbreaks

We visited the potager at Chateau Colbert and the entire garden was in a valley surrounded by stone walls. The gardener told us that the stone walls made the area up to 5 degree celsius warmer than the surrounding area in the winter. It also helped to moderate the temperatures.

The stone walls also acted as a windbreak. And most of all, they added such a beautiful backdrop to the garden! 

Putting up a stone wall around a garden is expensive and most likely cost prohibitive. However, if you already have a brick or stone building, you can use a wall of it as a backdrop for a garden. Just make sure any walls are not shading the garden; vegetable gardens need full sun to thrive.

The more realistic option is to plant shrubs to create hedges around the garden. Hedges look nice and can moderate temperatures and wind within the garden as well. It’s less expensive than stone but takes patience for results and growth. Depending on the type, you also need to maintain hedges with pruning.

One of the things that really stood out to me when we first visited France was how often hedges were used as fences and for privacy in both suburban neighborhoods and rural areas. It is so much more beautiful! 

I think often here in the US we focus on what is fast, easy, and cheap. Sometimes it is necessary to put up a fence immediately for protection from animals but a hedge could also be planted at the same time. 

My sister Amy mentioned to me that you don’t need to buy a bunch of expensive shrubs from a nursery. Buy a few to start and then the next year take cuttings from those shrubs and let them root. Then the next year when they have roots you can plant them all! 

4. Use varying heights of plants and types of plants to create interest

Even though a potager garden is mostly filled with kitchen vegetables, flowers and shrubs fill in other areas for interest. 

One of the things I saw in almost every potager we toured in France was roses that were trained to make what looked like a little tree. These little “rose trees” added height, interest, and beauty to the garden. There is a specific type of rose that can be trained this way.

I kept trying to envision how the gardens would look without those little roses. Without them, it seemed the gardens were more plain and uninteresting. 

Other things that we saw a lot were shrubs and bushes that were trimmed into shapes. Anything goes for shapes. Yew trees are very popular in France for shrubs and hedges but they are VERY POISONOUS to humans and livestock.

So I don’t recommend growing yew trees but there are lots of suitable alternatives. If growing the US, in a search engine like Google, type “cooperative extension” and your state. Many times it will say what local plants are good for hedges in your landscape.

5. Create sculptures and fences with fruit trees

Creating art and fences with fruit trees is common for a french potager garden. To fence a garden area, apple trees are trained to one or two vertical branches. Those become a living fence. Apple trees shaped to create a little fence like this are often called stepover apples.

The fence isn’t functional for keeping animals out, it is mostly for looking pretty. What you can’t see is usually a taut metal wire running along the line of apple trees. This wire helps the gardener to train the tree branches perfectly horizontally.

Aside from pruning apples into a living fence, you can also train apples into a shape. You can make a pyramid shape, a cube, or rectangle! 

First, a structure is made with metal so you can see what lines the tree needs to follow. Then it is trained up the metal structure. 

For the most part, the structures we saw were made of rebar cut to size and bent or welded together at certain points. It was very interesting and a unique idea!

I don’t recommend doing this with pear trees. Every pear tree I saw in France that was espaliered, pruned into a living fence, or climbing a metal structure was very sick looking. The pears don’t like it at all! 

6. Let plants go to seed and become ornamental elements

In a potager garden, if you plan ahead, you can let a few plants go to seed. This serves three main purposes. One purpose is saving the seeds.

The second reason to do this is that many vegetables flower when going to seed and bring in pollinators. And the third reason is for beauty! They can add height or color to a garden. 

One plant that we saw a lot in french kitchen gardens at the seed stage was fennel. It was 5-6 feet tall and so ornamental looking. I also saw onions going to seed, kale, and other leafy vegetables. 

7. Create trellises made from natural materials

Last but not least, create trellises made from natural materials. In my own garden, I often resort to using metal cattle panels and T Posts for trellises. However, they aren’t pretty.

In a potager, they use a lot of bamboo, willow, and occasionally metal to make a trellis. I didn’t see a single ugly looking trellis!  Instead there were bean teepees with netting to hold the vining plants filled to the brim. 

I also saw grape trellises made of wood into beautiful structures. Most tomatoes were pruned and tied to a single post in the ground. 

Conclusion

A potager garden is filled with beauty and edible plants. There are so many ways to make them and here are 7 ideas get started, all in one list 🙂

1. Use natural raised bed borders and edges
2. Create a unique potager garden design
3. Use hedges or stone walls as windbreaks
4. Use varying heights of plants and types of plants to create interest
5. Create sculptures and fences with fruit trees
6. Let plants go to seed and become ornamental elements
7. Create trellises made from natural materials

Share this post!