Between the world of the regular white onion and the nodding delights of the ornamental garden, lies a world of delicious, beautiful under-appreciated alliums. This is exactly where so much of my garden interest lies: where beauty and flavour come together. When I first met garden designer friend James Alexander-Sinclair he defamed the land of the kitchen garden: ‘ the trouble with a veg patch is that the moment is starts to look great, you pick it all’. This has more than a little truth to it…unless you shift from the traditional emphasis on annual vegetables to perennial edibles.
Alliums - the onion family - are about the best example of how this works so well. So much veg patch space is dedicated to the familiar white onion - trickyish to grow really well, prone to disease, widely available in the shops, and in no way a looker - when beautiful alternatives abound. Red onions* are a decent upgrade (unfathomably more expensive than white, and they are a pleasing colour), but if you take a step or two from the traditional kitchen garden towards (yet never quite arriving fully) in James AS’ purely ornamental garden, you end up in the beautiful and productive world occupied by alliums such as Babington’s leek, Egyptian walking onions and Siberian chives.
I’ll post more over the seasons about this intersection of the ornamental and delicious, and how to bring them together (after all, the plants don’t know if they are edible), and post some more windows into this bed that’s evolving to the front of the house.
*I know of no better example of how we can be convinced to go unthinkingly along with a barefaced lie than in the case of the red onion**
**I’ve never seen a red onion; they are all purple
I have a few Siberian chives ready in the nursery if you are keen to add them, with more ready in autumn I hope.
Into The Garden: Siberian chives