A Painterly Vegetable Garden Until...

“A row of red cabbage set against golden celery and bronze fennel will certainly please the eye, but when one cabbage turns into salad, will the result be like a smile with one front tooth missing?”
The Art of French Vegetable Gardening by Louisa Jones

The kitchen garden evolves faster than any other: The cycle of growth to maturity can take as little as eighteen days, in the case of the famous high-speed radishes. The gardener has to begin again constantly throughout the season. In decorative vegetable gardening, the greatest challenge is maintaining a harmonious picture all year round, taking into account the bare earth common at the time of sowing which may appear again in even more irregular patches when vegetables are harvested. A row of red cabbage set against golden celery and bronze fennel will certainly please the eye, but when one cabbage turns into salad, will the result be like a smile with one front tooth missing? Even before harvesting, irregularities creep in: Inevitably two or three cabbages will grow less well than the other eight or nine… No ornamental garden is perfect all the time. One consolation for unwelcome surprises is that time works for as well as against the gardener, and that bare patches will not remain empty for long.
The Art of French Vegetable Gardening

But that ‘Rogue d’Hiver’ romaine lettuce that went missing was added to this garden gift tray for a friend.