The ornamental and veg garden

Richard and Ina Steele enjoy the best of both worlds in their Worcestershire garden, as beautiful borders are combined with productive vegetable beds, says Sue Bradley

- Sue Bradley

GROWING vegetables on an allotment was a way of life for Richard Steele during the days he lived in Birmingham, and it was something he was keen to continue when he swapped city life for a rural village in Worcestershire.

Yet with a new garden to maintain, much of which had been a virtual wilderness for several years, he had little time to spare for a separate plot. For Richard and his wife Ina, the solution was to team ornamental beds and borders with a large vegetable patch at home.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” laughs Richard, who lives on the edge of Alfrick. “Our garden combines flowers and ornamental shrubs with vegetables, fruit trees and culinary herbs.”

Richard and Ina’s home is a former barn converted to create a dwelling in 1989. The couple moved in during 2001, at which time the garden was a shrub filled wilderness and desperately needed to be thinned out.

“You couldn’t get in there,” recalls Ina. “The first thing we did was to take out some pretty big shrubs that had been planted more than a decade before.”

Over the years that followed, the Steeles began introducing perennial plants to freshly cleared spaces to introduce splashes of colour.

Using the ‘no-dig method