Edimentals is a new term for growing flowers and vegetables together. Gardens today are often too small to have a separate ‘veg patch.’
15.06.2024 - 05:47 / irishtimes.com / Garden Merit / Fionnuala Fallon
Life, as I like to remind my sons, isn’t always fair. All things are not equal, no matter how much we’d like them to be and some are in fact far better than others, a truth brought home to all of us eventually. Hence the expression “garden-worthy”, that brilliantly concise description used to sum up a particular cultivar or variety’s outstanding qualities.
Plants deserving of this description are exceptionally vigorous, resilient, distinctive and stable in terms of their form or colour, as well as disease-resistant and versatile. They generally require no mollycoddling, are usually capable of enduring a range of weather conditions unscathed, and typically have that valuable quality – a sort of obliging, can-do, let’s-just-get-on-with-it attitude – that earns our respect and affection. Unlike the many kinds of fly-by-night varieties whose novelty is so often a large part of their fleeting appeal, garden-worthy varieties don’t disappear without notice, or succumb meekly to weeds, slugs or benign neglect. Nor do they occupy that terrible horticultural no-man’s-land of forever just about surviving without ever actually thriving. In short, they are doers, the sorts of plants that every good garden needs.
Many, but not all, have had their outstanding qualities formally recognised by the UK’s RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) which, after lengthy trials conducted by a panel of experts, gives an AGM (Award of Garden Merit) only to those varieties it deems to be exceptionally garden worthy. But just as the lord giveth, the lord taketh away, and in the case of an RHS AGM award (the gardening equivalent of a Michelin star), those valuable initials after a plant’s name can also eventually be removed if it’s considered to have been
Edimentals is a new term for growing flowers and vegetables together. Gardens today are often too small to have a separate ‘veg patch.’
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