Formal Potager Defined

Step inside this Formal Potager kitchen garden designed for our great client, Kris Vallee in Hunters Creek Village inside the Memorial Villages in Houston.

A Formal Potager is defined in our book, Kitchen Garden Revival, as a garden designed for a landscape that’s more than 20 feet wide and long. Formal potagers are large and ornate, so much that we had to call in the French language to help us describe them.

Potagers go well beyond a few raised gardens and include additional features such as fountains, fruit trees, seating areas, and more. We’ve designed and installed more than a handful of formal potagers for our Rooted Garden clients throughout Houston and we just love the magical spaces this design creates.

Formal potagers include garden beds with unique angles and curves and the gardens work together to create something of a maze or enclosure. If your space is ready for a formal potager, the Rooted Garden team would love to help you with the design and installation.

Psst-see this garden featured in this great feature in the Houston Chronicle here.

This Hunters Creek Village Garden is a True Getaway

We set up this kitchen garden to be a true getaway space for our client, Kris, and her family. While Kris already had a beautiful pool and pergola, this new kitchen garden space was created to feel like a third space in the yard- an outdoor room that would feel like a true enclosure when Kris and her family come to tend and enjoy the harvests from the garden.

When I first started Rooted Garden in 2015, I was studying the true definitions of a ‘garden’ and was intrigued to find that the word, ‘garden’ derived from the word, ‘enclosure.’ It was that definition that inspired much of the Rooted Garden designs I implemented then and that we still use today.

The four L beds of the formal potager provide space for the gardener to approach the beds both from the outside and the inside of each corner of the garden where there’s always something to pick and enjoy, no matter the angle you use to enter or leave the garden.

CorTen Steel Garden Beds Provide Durability with a Small Footprint

When I first started designing kitchen gardens in Houston, I was intrigued by the up and coming trend of Corten steel in more and more gardens. But I wondered how well they would do in the Houston area, especially knowing that Houston’s temperatures can be so hot in the middle of the summer.

I even had several clients in the first few years request Corten steel but I let them know I didn’t think it was possible to grow food successfully in steel beds as I was afraid they’d get too warm in Houston’s summer temps.

Then, two years in, one of our great River Oaks garden clients was up for the challenge and wanted Cor Ten steel to match her beautiful fire pit.

We found a great steel designer and installed in June that year-not exactly the coolest season for growing in Houston.

And to my surprise and delight, the garden beds thrived!

Tour this River Oaks Corten steel garden in this post and see it in Kitchen Garden Revival.

And just a year or so later, I toured the new Levy Park in Houston and saw loads of Corten steel vegetable garden beds that were all thriving. It was now official: steel gardens in Houston weren’t just possible, they were incredibly productive, durable, and with a very small footprint.

With the thin edges of the steel gardens, the actual container for the raised gardens takes up significantly less room than our raised gardens made of cedar and especially less than those made of stone.

So, if you’re looking for a raised garden material that will last for decades but takes up the least amount of space, steel garden beds are the perfect fit.

In this Houston garden, the Corten steel provides a unique formal yet earthy feel to the garden space and makes the most of every square inch of growing space.

We know these Corten steel beds will be here in this backyard for many decades to come.

Large Arch Trellises in this Houston Garden Double the Growing Space

It’s no secret that arch trellises are one of our favorite things at Rooted Garden. My love for the arch began when I first installed some cattle panel arches for myself and one of our first clients the spring of 2016.

While I loved the squash and cucumbers that grew up those trellises, I didn’t love the extra support I had to install every few weeks to keep the cattle panel from buckling under the weight of those growing vines.

Enter these strong and sturdy metal arch trellises.

It took us a few tries to find arch trellises wide enough to fit the walkway of a formal potager like this one. In fact, in one of our other formal potager gardens, our team built trellises and set up for the install only to find out our usual size of trellises just wouldn’t stretch to fit these larger walkways.

In grander gardens like this one, we often use custom or near custom trellises to fit the space perfectly. We love how this large arch trellis ties the beds together and provides both extra growing space for our vining plants as well as a more established entry point for the garden itself.

In Houston, we use arch trellises in the garden to grow sugar snaps and snow peas in the winter, and cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and pole beans in spring and fall. In the summer, we can use arch trellises to grow beautiful malabar spinach, luffa gourd, Armenian cucumber or yard long beans.

In other words, the arch trellises in Houston are always full of some kind of beautiful and edible plant (and we’re not sad about it).

If you are creating a formal potager garden, using arch trellises is one of our favorite design points. Arch trellises also work well in the Four Garden Classic and the Twin Garden design too.

You can shop some of our arch trellis kits here.

And during a Rooted Garden consultation, you can request any of our original RG trellis designs for your own garden space.

The Fountain is One of Our Favorite Features in this Houston Garden

Often times, with the formal potager design, deciding about the center of the garden is the hardest step. You can place a birdbath, a small fruit tree, a Bay Laurel, a mint or herb box or even a bench in the center of your space.

For our client, Kris, she was excited about a bubbling fountain to center the garden space and we were pretty excited about it too. Bringing water features into your kitchen garden design is always a great idea. Water source is one of the essential elements of providing wildlife habitats and often, pests that are tempted to snack from our cherry tomatoes are usually simply in search of water. So, a birdbath or simple fountain can be just the thing to quench our little ‘garden friends’ thirst (and perhaps keep them off our tomatoes!-at least one can hope!)

Bringing a fountain into the kitchen garden space means there’s a need for electricity lines in the garden but the payout with the sound of running water and the added beauty is totally worth it. We were able to utilize a previously owned pot to create this fountain and we love the patina feel of it in this space.

We love this central feature of the formal potager and can’t wait to bring more fountains in our kitchen garden designs.

Herbs and Greens Grow Year Round in this Houston Formal Potager Garden

One of the best things about the garden in Houston is the fact that we can grow so much year round. It’s one of the reasons we call Houston the ‘non stop kitchen garden.’

While we don’t grow sweet salad greens year round, there is always some type of delicious, nutritious green that grows in each and every month in our Houston gardens.

The Rooted Garden style of planting includes lots of perennial herbs along the borders of our kitchen garden installations. We plant this way to make the most of the corners of all our clients’ gardens and also because we know that many of the herbs we plant in the gardens will stay there for years to come.

While seasonal greens are planted and harvested every 45-75 days, the perennial herbs like rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage, and mint grow year round, every year.

So, the plants in the center of this formal potager garden will come and go as we pass through each new season in the Houston garden. But the herbs will simply need a trim, a prune and a good harvest and will just keep on growing.

It’s because of this that we promise our clients they can say, ‘goodbye’ to grocery herbs. Our expectation is that you can grow enough herbs to either enjoy fresh or to save for another season even in our smallest of kitchen gardens, and especially in larger spaces like this one.

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Stepping Stones Make Gardening Easy in this Houston Garden

It was one of our Piney Point Village clients who first requested stepping stones in her kitchen garden space. Her garden was just outside her kitchen door and she wanted to be able to step out into the garden barefoot each and every morning.

So, we began with a few stepping stones and soon, she asked for a few more.

We love using gravel in our garden spaces to keep the area clean, aid with drainage and prevent the competition between the lawn and the kitchen garden growing space. But the tiny rocks aren’t always comfortable to walk on, especially if you’re barefoot.

The stepping stones don’t need to cover the entire garden area but provide enough of a flat surface to make barefoot gardening a thing again.

We designed this space with stepping stones both outside and inside the kitchen gardens beds so our client, Kris, could access the beds from all sides comfortably…and then head inside, take a seat in the pergola or even go for a swim-she’s barefoot, after all!

Vining Plants Need a Little Tending In Your Houston Garden

While our trellises are set and ready to hold all the vines your kitchen garden can grow, we do have to regularly check on our cucumber and tomato vines to be sure they’re using the structures we’ve provided for them.

Oftentimes, as seen here, they have a mind of their own.

Cucumbers and other squash in the Cucurbit family have these magical little tendrils that the vines produce that are meant to grab on to climbing structures. When these vines are sent up strong vertical supports, you often end up with healthier and more productive plants.

While vines can survive when growing horizontally in the garden, they’re often more subject to pests and disease with limited access to better airflow and sunlight. But growing UP changes all of that. As the vines cling to each new level of the trellis, more leaves are exposed to sunlight, fresh air and slowly get further and further away from soil borne disease and pests.

But, all this growing magic doesn’t just happen on its own. We have to catch each vine as it’s growing and gently attach the tendrils to the rungs on our trellises. You can do this by using twine or string or sometimes accomplish it simply by hanging part of the vine over a section of the trellis.

I’m often amazed to return to the garden the next day and see that the little tendril has already attached itself to the next level on the trellis overnight. If you ever doubted the magic of plants, seeing a vine grow and connect itself to your garden trellises will make you a believer for good.

But take this beautiful vine as a reminder: the trellises only work if we do a little work too.

Creating Magical Houston Garden Getaways Is Our Favorite Thing

One of the neat things about this formal potager garden is the timing of its creation. We met with Kris at the very beginning of 2020 and designed and installed this space for her before Valentine’s that year.

None of us, Rooted Garden included, had any clue all that 2020 would bring, especially the incredible new interest in gardening during Covid and quarantine days.

As we worked hard to add kitchen garden spaces for new clients throughout the pandemic, it was special to think of all our clients who already had their spaces set up and growing before everything changed.

It’s a great reminder that the kitchen garden has and will always be a good idea for all of us. It’s a getaway for rest at the end of a busy day and it’s a getaway when we can’t get away. It’s a place to enjoy beauty-the sounds, the smells and the tastes of nature. And it’s a place to remind ourselves that life keeps going and no matter how things change, some will always stay the same.

At Rooted Garden, we love creating special gardens like this one in Houston and we’re slowly working toward our goal of leading all of Houston to grow a little of their own food. Kitchen gardens like this may our business possible and also provide a showcase for all of us to enjoy and admire and find inspiration for our own spaces where we can grow too.

So many thanks to Kris for trusting us with this space and the Rooted Garden team for installing it.

And especially to Eric Kelley for the beautiful photos.

There’s still time for us to help you in your own kitchen garden this year.

You can book a consult with us right away at the link below.