A COOK’S FRONTYARD

For most of us, fruits and vegetables come from supermarkets. For Rosalind Creasy and a devoted band of followers in Los Angeles, the produce department starts at the sidewalk. Sorrel, tomatoes, peppers, savory and artichokes overlook the front of Creasy’s Bay Area ranch house. Proceeding up the walk to her front door is like entering an oddly flowery green grocery, redolent of damp earth and roses. On either side of the walk, interspersed with lobelia and roses, abutilons and fuchsia, there are caraway plants, Yukon gold potatoes, escarole lettuce, blueberries, loganberries, eggplant.

How many edible plants you spot depends on how much time you have. There will be 60 or so growing at any one time in the 40-by-80-foot frontyard. But once it was like most suburban yards--driveway, lawn and ornamental shrubs.

When Creasy ripped out her driveway and put in artichokes and herbs about 25 years ago, it got a reaction. Vegetable gardening in the frontyard, she says, was “the equivalent of letting the weeds go--I was considered a nut case.”

She kept at it until her frontyard was a sumptuous cottage garden that not only fed her, but fed her well. Presently, amid the artful profusion out front, she has at least 20 sorts of herbs, three types of watermelon, 10 kinds of peppers, five of tomatoes, four of cucumbers, three of squash and three of beans. Except now, this brick front walk crowded by flowers and food isn’t a curiosity, but a California landmark.

Creasy is the author of more than a dozen books on kitchen gardening, and a proud advocate of food out front. Here in Los Angeles, Creasy’s acolytes are switching from ornamental to edible plants in some of the swankiest gardens in Pasadena. Grapes grow in the Arroyo, pumpkins crawl in San Marino.

Master gardeners trained by the University of California Cooperative Extension Common Ground Garden Program are converting frontyards around Los Angeles to orchards and herb gardens; a San Fernando Valley nursery is promoting the idea of hedges made of allspice bushes and, for ornamentals, caper berry shrubbery.

Although it would be premature to write the obituary for the lawn, thanks to Creasy and her acolytes, edible landscaping in the frontyard is now a mark of good taste.

And, OK, a certain eccentricity.

We were not always so shy about food near the front porch. Garden writer and radio broadcaster Andy Wasowski, author of the new book “Landcaping Revolution,” takes the standardization of the American front garden to mown grass back to the 1870s and Cincinnati landscape architect Frank J. Scott. “Scott decreed a ‘smooth, closely shaven surface of grass is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of the suburban home,’ ” says Wasowski. “Lawns became synonymous with wealth and respectability.”

By contrast, growing food came to connote need, even rank poverty. Certainly, lawn was the norm when Creasy decided on a second career in landscaping. This Los Altos mother of two was in her 30s and had an education degree when in 1979 she enrolled at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills for a horticultural degree. The adult student had the courage to challenge the prevailing Scott norm. “When they told me I couldn’t do edible landscaping, I said, ‘Phooey on you!’ ” she recalls.

Two years after graduating, she published “The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping” through the Sierra Club. It addressed everything from garden design to soil conditioning, planting, growing, pruning, grafting and pesticide use, and is still in print.

“It’s the bible,” says Tony Kienitz, a Pasadena garden designer who specializes in landscapes of vegetables and fruit.

Creasy’s success in finessing vegetables back into frontyards owes much to her insistence on defining beauty as the wholesomeness of vegetables. “It’s an accepted cultural norm that the frontyard should be beautiful,” she says. “If you do an edible garden, do it with style. I think that’s the message. I tell people vegetable gardens should have flowers in them because most beneficial insects need flowers. Don’t use old stockings to tie up tomatoes. Don’t use old plastic bottles. Don’t hold out for the last zucchini from a spent plant. Rangy stuff does not belong in the frontyard.”

Her curiosity about plants sparked a new hunger at the table. Friend and Santa Cruz-based seed merchant Renee Shepherd began popularizing new, exotic vegetables. Frilly lettuces and endive, she and Creasy illustrated, could be used like fluffy skirts, or “under planting” for other plants with more arching foliage, such as peppers. Flowers could be studded among vegetables.

As a romantic diversion, after noticing children gravitating to her garden, Creasy began creating special themes to an ever-changing series of plantings. Presently the theme is “fairy garden,” and children bring fuchsia flowers to a little fairy grotto. She also grows sorrel for them to feed her chickens.

But such whim does not cloud a sharply Darwinian attitude to choosing good edible plants. Creasy doesn’t blink at tossing out troublesome or diseased specimens. Many of the vegetables growing around her were planted in trials for seed companies. During growing, Creasy will look for vigor, health and appearance. The trial concludes at the chopping board and on the plate, and then Creasy feeds tips back to us cooks.

For example, gold basil, she thinks, has less minty astringency than standard basil and is best for pesto. For artichokes, she chooses the Italian purples whose baby flowers can be eaten raw. She likes the wild arugula with real punch, and has to have Mexican chiles.

A key Creasy lesson, says Shepherd, is “to have the courage to experiment, to change a garden.”

When Kienitz, the 41-year-old Pasadena designer began creating kitchen gardens for clients nine years ago, the biggest obstacle with the Creasy approach was that his customers would say, “It’s so pretty, we don’t want to eat it.” Undaunted, he opted for immersion therapy, planting more and more food plants until he was creating almost entirely edible landscapes.

Kienitz is one of three gardeners to work on the Pasadena Arroyo villa of Bonnie Saland and Mark Beck. Kienitz inherited the project from garden designers Janie Malloy and Mark Bartos. What would have been another pool and tennis court became a vineyard surrounded by olive trees, lavender beds, pomegranate hedges and little plots of fruits and vegetables tucked all over the place.

Behind the grandiose sweep of hundreds of vines, the garden is pure romance, scent and texture. Thyme grows over stone pavers, rosemary brushes pants legs, lavender smells waft from near the olive trees. The smells are matched by surprising tastes. Foraging in this vineyard, treats await the trained eye. Keinitz eats a day lily petal, which is sweet, strange and oddly decadent. Anise is let to go to seed to create “plant candy,” which Kienitz gives to children, or, in the kitchen, uses as a garnish to brighten a sorrel and potato soup.

This is the deluxe version of edible gardening. Beck bottles about 600 bottles of his own wine each year. There are low-chill apples and pears tucked on ledges, along with 20 varieties of blueberries in oak barrel planters lining a path (blueberries are best grown in pots, says Kienitz, because of their peat moss/acid needs).

Precious few can afford this kind of setup, so it is refreshing to discover that Kienitz’s designs translate easily to a more modest scale. For example, at the 2002 Pasadena Showcase House of Design, Kienitz did a strictly edible garden using materials that could be emulated with chunks of concrete or paving stones. After thoroughly working a deep bed and improving the soil with compost and fertilizer, he placed pavers in a concentric circle, then lined the path with lettuces, tomatillos, blueberries, eggplant and cilantro.

The seed and plant costs, he reckons, were no more than $300. For height, there were artichokes and an apple sapling. Lettuce sat pristine and almost otherworldly against a pebble mulch. This spiraling salad garden is the soul of simplicity and wit.

Mae Powell brought Kienitz in to advise on the edible garden of her Pasadena ranch house three years ago. In an unorthodox arrangement even by guerrilla kitchen-gardening standards, squash grows out of the juniper and pumpkin winds up the lemon tree in the frontyard. “Everyone calls me the pumpkin lady,” she jokes.

The jaunty gourd trellising is Powell’s work, and the technique was mastered at a course at the Arboretum of Los Angeles County. The spooky mask propped on one was a prank, the work of a local doctor, guesses Powell.

Along the path to her front door, there is chard and zucchini and half a dozen different tomato plants tucked here and there, including Brandywine, Japanese Pinks and Beefsteak. Lettuces are packed tightly together. This creates an artful look of abundanceand also holds humidity, says Kienitz. In wet climates, this could lead to disease. In dry Southern California, it’s a good thing.

Back at curbside, Kienitz pops a kumquat in his mouth, chewing it skin and all. Edible gardening, it becomes clear, is a hobby for nibblers. Snacks do grow on trees.

As if Kienitz’s spiraling lettuce gardens, Powell’s Pasadena pumpkin patch and Creasy’s fairy grotto were not evidence enough that edible landscapers are a shade unconventional, Marlena Ross of Culver City proves the rule.

Ross, the manager of a Westside counseling program for senior citizens, lives in a nondescript 1948 bungalow on the edge of Culver City. Twelve years ago, she wanted to do a Zen garden in the frontyard using stone and bowling balls. But somehow she found herself drawn to rare fruits. One tree led to another, and her front garden is now a small jungle of more than 50 flowering fruit trees, including magenta guava, allspice bushes, tangerines, jujubes, peaches, nectarines, Pluots and sapote. Surinam cherries hang ripe for the picking. You can’t see the house.

“We didn’t need a ‘before’ picture,” she says. “You can just look across the street.”

If the garden sounds over-planted, it has been done with great artistry and wit. Five years ago, Ross completed the Master Gardening course, and it shows. The trees are under-planted with salvias, succulents and ornamental grasses. A winding brick path draws you through a small forest with its own microclimate and perfumed fog. Pink flamingos high step among the bowling balls. “Children call it the ‘magical’ garden,” she says.

Ross is working on another garden, of a friend called Milt. “Anytime Milt buys fruit, I say, ‘Milt, are you crazy?’ ” Ross says. “Between us, we have 85 trees.”

Ross is among dozens of trainees in the Master Gardening program working on edible gardens. Projects included putting edible gardens around transition homes for homeless people and in new apartment blocks. Most of their stories ring with optimism and community building. But not all.

“People in this day and age seem to think that if there are fruit trees or other edibles that are easily accessible, they are free to help themselves,” says Monique Bryher, a gardener in the Valley. “They think nothing of trespassing and in fact are indignant when confronted. I had this problem at a home I rented with apple trees out front; if the thieves (that’s what they are) didn’t like the fruit, they just hurled it. I’ve since observed similar behavior in the neighborhood in which I currently live and have concluded that edibles should remain in my backyard.”

Another Valley resident, environmentalist and actor Ed Begley Jr., came to a different conclusion when passersby began picking fruit from his plum trees. What irked Begley wasn’t that they were taking the fruit, but that they were picking it unripe. “I think they were lacking knowledge,” he says. “The plums don’t get sweet that way. So I put a sign up, said, ‘Hey, take some fruit, just save some for the person who planted and waters the tree.” Then he added picking instructions: “By the way, the fruit should nearly fall into your hand, and that’s when you know it’s ripe.”

If produce theft is a common crime, it is not commonly reported. From the Los Angeles Police Department, information officer Jason Lee says, “In 16 years, I haven’t heard of stolen fruit.”

Most of the gardens have a storybook or European look. But one of the most eccentric frontyard gardens could not look more all-American. In La Canada Flintridge, Carrie Mulfinger plants corn interspersed with California poppies along the front walk. It has a sort of American Gothic simplicity to it. The idea started as an edible prelude to Halloween. “We did a corn maze for trick or treaters,” says Mulfinger. “The neighbors didn’t approve, but the kids loved it.”

Repairing the lawn from a full-blown maze proved too much work. This year they were content just to line the walk. The poppies are just coming out to make room for more corn.

It may look wacky to outside eyes, but there is unexpected poetry, a kind of simple rapture, to be had from growing your dinner by the front walk. “I just love the sound of the corn in the breeze,” says Mulfinger.