Your Weekly Voilà: Chaos Gardening - How to Grow a Thriving, Low-Maintenance Garden 🇫🇷

The trend "chaos gardening" is having a moment. The idea embraces the unruly nature of plants that have gone a bit wild. It snubs control, symmetry, and neat garden rows. There can still be a plan, but it adopts a more natural style of gardening. It's an informal approach that considers wildlife, allows plants to go to seed, and encourages the toleration of many "weeds." The argument is that plants perform best when left to their own devices and that plants grown in isolation are more susceptible to pests and disease.

I can get behind a concept that encourages a harmonious blend of plants, such as combining roses with perennials and growing edibles with companion plants. Everything works together to create a garden that is both beautiful and useful.

I wasn't familiar with the term "chaos gardening" until recently. But it doesn't seem like a new trend. It sounds like creating a French potager or kitchen garden.

It's the way I've gardened for years.

More than a decade ago, my kitchen garden in Hawaii fit the perfect definition of chaos gardening: Throw seeds to the wind and see what nature allows to survive. I used lava rock and old banana stalks to create garden beds. Soil was created from materials we foraged around the farm. Everything was willy-nilly. Still, the garden had a sense of rustic beauty and, more importantly, it helped to feed the family.

I like the idea of a more relaxed and informal approach to tending our garden spaces. Some in the chaos gardening movement let nature run its course, and there is no overall plan. It's a let's-see-what-happens-if-we-do-nothing approach. Others suggest a simple layout with a softer, more nature-driven plan. I fall into the latter camp. With chaos gardening, much like designing a French potager or kitchen garden, you decide the rules.

Nature and her seasons shape the design of my garden. While I strive for beauty and bounty, it definitely looks like chaos gardening at times, especially when I'm waiting for seeds to mature. But consideration for size, color, texture, and companion planting all guide my decisions. With a tiny garden, space is at a premium. I need to maximize the number of plants I can squeeze into the bed. Strawberries are grown in my asparagus patch. Edible flowers like nasturtiums, calendula, and marigolds are tucked in empty spots to help deter pests and top a salad. Like chaos gardening, my garden beds are full.

I have space for only one large trellis in my garden. It has to do a lot of heavy lifting - literally and figuratively. On alternate years, I have to wait until the pea pods have dried on the vine before I can remove the dead plants and put in my lemon cucumbers. (Pea seeds are viable for a good two years, thus I don't have to collect every year unless I feel I don't have enough to sow the following year.) Sometimes my impatience gets the better of me, and the cucumber seedlings go in before I've pulled out all the pea vines. So dead vines intermingle with new ones. Actually, I found that this works pretty well. Young tendrils find the thin, dead pea vines a perfect structure to attach to and begin an easier climb onto the trellis. It's a win-win: I get earlier and happier cucumber plants.

A chaotic kitchen garden can be a wonderful, productive mix of surprises that complements nature and requires less work and water. Or, it can be a mess that is quickly overrun by stubborn plants and requires a tremendous amount of work to corral. While chaos gardens require less maintenance than traditional gardens, they do need some attention to avoid unwanted pests or invasive plants. Plus, it's difficult to predict what will grow where and how well. This unpredictability can be frustrating for those who are accustomed to having a lot of control over their garden.

The wild and unstructured method of sowing, or rather, throwing random seeds over a large plot, can be enticing. How easy to grab a handful of last year's seed and toss it into the air? The argument is that this type of sowing encourages a diverse, resilient, and self-sustaining ecosystem. I get embracing spontaneity by allowing flowers, herbs, veggies, and pollinator-friendly plants to flourish together naturally. But there's a middle ground between leaving everything to chance and wasting precious seeds and having a successful, ordered garden: Organize your seeds and then edit the resulting seedlings.

Combine a variety of plant types that work well together and self-sow easily. I like to create separate collections of seeds: flowers, vegetables, and herbs. A mix of sunflowers, cosmos, calendula, and marigolds can be broadcast together to form a beautiful border or fill in a large empty spot in the garden. Cherry tomatoes, carrots, radishes, and beans can be lightly sown over a raised bed, and later the seedlings can be thinned so that each can have a bit of growing room. Basil, parsley, dill, and chives and be scattered together over an area or lightly sown in a large pot near your kitchen door.

Be mindful to gather seed heads from plants that desire to take over your garden if given the chance. Wild mustard and nasturtiums come to mind.

Potatoes take up a lot of space. Here are some that have happily taken over a bed with a renegade avocado tree and a foraged sage plant that has gone wild. Since potatoes are inexpensive to buy, I go back and forth about giving up a precious bed in the garden to grow them. Still, every March, I find myself with a handful of chitted potatoes, and I can't resist. This year, I grew them in a huge basket I wove from the malleable branches of our linden tree. Throughout the growing season, I tossed in organic material to cover the plants. Think "hilling" but without the trenches and hard work. The plants were happy to grow beyond the basket. I planted a variety - Violet - that is not available in stores. It helped to justify the space they took up. Next year, I'm moving that basket to a slope where little grows. They'll be out of the way and hopefully smother any grasses and unwanted weeds. I call that "organized chaos gardening."

Self-sowing plants can do a lot of work for you. I have several patches of parsley that I let go to seed. I'm happy to have it come back year after year, sometimes in the same place, sometimes in a new and unexpected place.

Editing is very important in my potager. Here's where I choose to implement a bit of "organized confusion." I decide what seedlings I want to keep and take out the excess to avoid them choking each other out. I was recently gifted a white borage plant. I can already tell we are going to be fast friends. The seeds can spread, so give it some space. But I love the texture and flowers that the plant provides with little maintenance. Little seedlings are plucked and find a new home around the garden borders.

As for the "weeds," I edit here too. There are the reasonable "polite" ones that aren't aggressive in their rooting. There's this little green-leafed plant that comes up every Spring. I have no idea what it's called. The tiny leaves and pretty blue flowers are edible. It makes a great ground cover under my rose bushes. It can stay. The same is true for the sprawling wild geraniums and purslane. Both do a good job of keeping moisture in the ground for my new seedlings, and the purslane adds a little lemon snap to Spring salads.

But the apple mint has got to go. Like any mint, it will take over valuable real estate. Other vicious weeds, such as brambles or bindweed, are ripped out at the roots and burned. Nature be damned. Anything that spreads at speed and smothers the roots of expensive perennials is forbidden in my garden. Dandelions provide early pollinators with food. They can stay. But I do keep them out of my small patch of clover that is reserved for resting and dining in the garden. Stinging nettles? Lots of great uses: Tisanes, soups, dyes, medicines, and it makes an excellent compost tea. But I can find plenty in the nearby countryside. No need to grow it in my garden and risk burns as I reach in to weed around my plants. That plant can find the tiniest of bare skin every time.

Even if you are a chaos gardenener, I would suggest keeping a record of your garden to note what worked well and what you'd like to change.

You can read more on how to design and create your own potager in my archived Weekly Voilà.

Gardening is a combination of chaos, hope,
and forgetting what I planted where.

Like a French potager, chaos gardening incorporates old walls, large rocks, and dilapidated buildings into its plan. Following the installation of our septic system, we had a pile of rocks and dirt that filled the entire backyard. Slowly, they became terraces, steps, walls, and raised beds. It took two years to move all the rocks, and the unsightly pile is finally gone. In its place is a rustic hardscape that will last for years.

No matter how haphazard you want to be with your garden, you still need to consider sunlight and soil. Plants have growing demands, and you need to accommodate their needs to find success. Perennials will be in your garden for years, so think about how big they will get and where they will best thrive. They are an investment; they deserve a bit of consideration.

I love radish pods. Before the seeds are dried, you can munch on these fellas. Delicious. They aren't as strong as the actual radish. They're yummy in salads, add snap and color on a charcuterie board, and are wonderful fermented or pickled. They spill over the edge of my raised beds and provide pretty white flowers before the pods are set. Grow plenty of radishes for their pods. Trust me.

Other advice for chaos gardening:

Start small. Don't throw every seed you own into your entire backyard. Begin with a dedicated area and let it expand naturally.

Mulch is your friend. An organic mulch, such as straw or composted leaves, will help to suppress weeds, retain moisture, and add nutrients to the soil. This is very important in chaos gardening, where plants are going to compete for resources.

Observe, edit, and record. Pay attention to how your plants grow and adjust as needed. You may need to remove some plants to make space for others. The second year, plants naturalize and reseed. Everyone is fighting for space. You might find yourself pulling out the less desirable plants and adding more things that you like.

Make it pretty. My neighbor has a traditional garden with neat rows dedicated to vegetables. He is fascinated by my "jungle." Creating visual order helps to keep the garden neat. I edge borders and mow the paths to make it look more pleasing. I prefer organized chaos gardening that may look a bit haphazard, but on closer inspection, you sense that everything is working together.

You might be surprised to learn that even in a small garden, you can grow squash or melons. I think of the plants as "mulch" or "ground cover" for my beds. The large leaves keep the soil protected. They can spill out of the bed and meander down a path and visit my rose border. I like the texture of the leaves and if I get a few melons out of the deal, all the better.

At the end of the year, I take all my lettuce greens and combine them together. This mix I sow on the edges of my beds and borders. I may do a bit of thinning but usually I just harvest them small to top sandwiches or salads. Chaos gardening doesn't require you to dedicate an entire yard to "plants gone wild." Think small and work from there.

Chaos gardening is an old technique with a new name. It's a sensible approach to echo nature and avoid allowing weeds to take over and create no end of hard work. In other words, you're not striving for a garden that resembles an abandoned roadside ditch. Rather, you want to organize your chaos to create a simple natural look.

At its core, chaos gardening is a joyful rebellion against the pressure to do everything "right." It's about letting go of the guilt and expectations and reconnecting with the natural rhythms of life. My garden does appear to be chaotic. Some of that is by design. Some of it is because - well - life happens. Embracing chaos in your garden plan means you don't need to be perfect. Go ahead and toss a few seeds, step back, and let nature sort it out.

And if it gets to look a bit much and someone peers over the wall in confusion, just smile and say, "It's French."

À la prochaine fois,

Karen 🇫🇷