Garden Design Magazine: Natural Dye Gardens - 2017 Trends in Garden Design
"Backyard homesteading has been going strong for a while, and edible gardens, chicken coops, and beehives are ubiquitous even in urban neighborhoods. The latest addition to the grow-it-yourself movement is natural dye gardens: plants used to make dyes for coloring textiles, yarn, and clothing. “Last year, I put in my first natural dye garden here in Berkeley,” says Leslie C. Bennett, owner of Pine House Edible Gardens in Oakland, California. “It's really beautiful and includes a lot of vegetables, fruit trees, and pollinator-attracting flowers, but we've selected varieties and quantities so that the harvests can be used for natural plant dyes as well.” Multiple recent books including Sasha Duerr’s Natural Color, Kristine Vejar’s The Modern Natural Dyer, and Chris McLaughlin’s A Garden to Dye For also attest to the growing interest in dye gardening.
Just-harvested flowers are laid out on wet fabric as part of the dyeing process. Photo by: Jonny Thomas for Pine House Edible Gardens.
Bennett favors coreopsis, cosmos, Japanese indigo, marigold, ‘Moonshine’ yarrow, blue cornflower, and purple basil for making dyes. “Many of these are kitchen and cutting garden favorites too,” she points out. “So it’s pretty easy to integrate a natural dye garden into an edible garden.”
Detroit Flower Week: Leslie Bennett Presentation - Create Your Own Dream Garden
Presentation in the Jam Handy Main Space, 3 – 5pm
"leslie bennett is the owner of pine house edible gardens, an oakland-based landscape design firm that creates beautiful edible gardens and productive outdoor spaces. she is co-author of the beautiful edible garden (ten speed press, 2013).
leslie designs gardens that provide as much visual enjoyment as they do harvests of delicious organic food and organic flowers and foliage for cutting. her company puts together a unique set of design, fine gardening and organic food and flower farming skills, for people who want help creating aesthetically designed, organic edible gardens. pine house offers design, installation, full service maintenance & harvesting, floristry and garden coaching services.
leslie's work has been featured in sunset magazine, c magazine, los angeles times, san francisco chronicle, and gardenista.com. visit www.pinehouseediblegardens.com
you will learn how to create your own dream garden -- you know, the one that produces delicious fresh fruits and vegetables to eat, is overflowing with blooms and foliage for arrangements to bring indoors, and that also looks so awesomely gorgeous all the time it makes you crazy inspired and happy to come home and and hang out in all weekend! using a plant palette that includes fruit trees, berries, vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, cutting flowers, and unusual foliage, leslie bennett, co-author of the beautiful edible garden, shares how to create beautiful and productive outdoor spaces. join leslie for a discussion of how to grow food and flowers beautifully at home, including designing dedicated kitchen and cutting flower gardens, and utilizing perennial edible and ornamental plants throughout your landscape for year-round beauty and harvest."
Sunset Magazine: Hillside Yard Family Garden
"A young family’s hillside yard becomes their go-to snack bar.
Kids who run toward their veggies? It’s a parent’s dream. And it’s a reality in the San Anselmo, California, backyard of photographer Rachel Weill and her husband, David Levitt. When their sons Daniel, 11, and Joshua, 7, get home from school, they head straight outside to pick tender cucumbers, beans, lettuces, and carrots. “They constantly bring in food at random times, wanting to make a salad,” Weill says. “And when they have friends over, they like to show off the garden.”
Formerly a dry, rocky corner of the yard occupied by a couple of gnarled grapevines, the garden got its structure thanks to four raised beds built into the hillside. To fill the boxes, Weill looked to landscape designer Leslie Bennett (pinehouseediblegardens.com), who came up with a plan in which trellised cucumbers shade speckled red lettuces, variegated ‘Alaska’ nasturtium trails out of the boxes, and feathery tops of carrots and fennel contrast with the wide leaves of summer squash. Bennett’s approach is to design gardens that are so beautiful, they don’t have to be hidden away.
“All those different colors as well as textures and herbs make your garden look interesting, ” says the designer, who managed to fit 40 different crops into the family’s roughly 8- by 8-foot plot. “But they also make your dinner look interesting.”
