Kitchen Garden

Were it located in the genteel wilds of Birchrunville, Chester County, say, or Malvern, even, green farmlands lapping at the doorstep, Osteria's poignant gesture to fresh and local might not be that much worth the noting. But for those who haven't had occasion to visit, let us set the scene: The casual sister to Marc Vetri's eponymous Vetri is just a handful of blocks north on Broad Street from Vine, though still south of Temple University, which is to say in a stretch of faded urbanity to which the noun revival cannot (yet)

Flowers go in one bed, vegetables in another. That's how many of us learned to garden. But there's another way, one that combines edible and ornamental, functional and beautiful, in a riotous mix of peas and tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, with sunflowers and sage tossed in. Scholars call this garden a potager, from the French potage, meaning soup. It's also known as a combination garden or, more popular, a kitchen garden. Rooted in the Middle Ages, this all-in-one approach enjoyed Renaissance renown at the grand French chateaux and now resonates through our own era of gloom and recession.

By George Ball For six months, President Obama has been struggling to save the economy, improve international relations, craft a universal health-care plan, and grapple with a Wall Street meltdown that has stunned the nation and conjured up fears of a worldwide depression. Yet, oddly enough, there is a bright spot on the horizon, and, in the president's case, it's shining just outside his window. On the first day of spring, the Obamas planted a relatively small (990-square-foot)

I'm dreaming of a spring garden. At my house (and probably yours), mail-order seed catalogs are arriving in a thick stream, pages falling open to colorful temptations of new vegetables to plant, new flowers to grow in a little kitchen garden. But this is the first year I'm not dizzied into indecision. My dream garden has a theme, and it's based on a trip to southern France - the lovely, vegetable-studded paradise of wine grapes and lavender they call Provence. We were lucky to visit Provence in the harvest season, when the tourists are gone but street markets are still heaped with glorious tomatoes, eggplants, beans, lettuces, grapes, pears, apples and the last sweet summer melons.

First Lady Michelle Obama has invited the sixth graders from Chester's Stetser Elementary School to join her and schoolchildren from around the country at the White House Monday for the spring planting of her kitchen garden, the White House announced this morning. The children wrote to Mrs. Obama, who has made healthy eating her cause, about having planted a butterfly garden at the school and their plans to start a vegetable garden there. Principal Janet Baldwin wrote that the garden will "make connections for our students around growing and tasting fresh fruits and vegetables," Baldwin wrote in the letter to the first lady.

Penny Soppas says she always has gardened. These days, with three children and a busy pediatric practice in Drexel Hill, time is limited, but gardening is a family tradition and she's not about to break it. About 10 years ago, she started adding herbs to the vegetable garden, and she now grows culinary and medicinal herbs in a little kitchen garden beside the back door. The herbs in the kitchen garden are mainly perennials. Annual herbs, she finds, "are best suited to the vegetable garden.

The year-round usefulness of a kitchen garden proves itself when you set a harvest or holiday table. Along with herbs and roots for the cook-pot, vegetables can take a starring role in holiday decorating all through your house. Little squashes and gourds from the garden, arranged along a mantel or grouped in a basket, have been a favorite for holiday decorating among generations of kitchen gardeners. The great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll urged their use, over dried arrangements, in the stuffy Victorian parlors of her time.

Flowers, everywhere. Flowers in the mountains of Kenya, flowers in the Everglades, flowers in the Pine Barrens. Flowers on a Dutch barge, flowers in an Italian piazza, flowers at a weathered seaside home. Flowers in wicker baskets, flowers in Grecian urns, flowers in window boxes. Flowers in full bloom on a frigid day in early March. Inside the Civic Center at 34th Street and Civic Center Boulevard yesterday, flowers covered six acres, dazzling an estimated 20,000 at the opening of the 1991 Philadelphia Flower Show, which runs through Sunday.

Ellen Ogden didn't want to look out her living room windows at a bare stretch of lawn, so she designed the prettiest garden she could think of: A vegetable garden. Ogden is cofounder of Cook's Garden (www.cooksgarden.com), a mail-order business specializing in salad greens. But both her catalog and her garden offer much more than just lettuce: She has strawberries, flowers, and lots of fresh herbs. A neat garden, planted with straight rows of vegetables, is a thing of beauty, Ogden says.

Last summer, a group of students at Stetser Elementary School in the Chester Upland School District planted and tended two schoolyard gardens as part of a healthy-eating initiative promoted by first lady Michelle Obama. The vegetables they grew were later prepared and served in the school cafeteria. Earlier that year, some students helped prepare the weekly menu for the meals served in all the district's elementary schools. The menus included stories of how the food related to the lives of famous African Americans or to historical events like the 1960 Greensboro, N.C., lunch-counter sit-ins.

Begin pruning rosebushes. Start by removing dead, damaged, or diseased branches, then look for crisscrossing branches that can rub together and cause long-term damage. If your roses tend to get too big each year, trim them down to 18 to 24 inches, removing the oldest canes and leaving newer ones. If you're a passionate rose grower, think about joining the American Rose Society, which will keep you up to date on rose introductions and care tips. Information at www.ars.org/ Continue pulling invasive plants.

One morning last week, the force of nature that is William Woys Weaver was getting his hands dirty at Roughwood, his rustic manse in Devon, planting flats of heritage seeds that had been tottering dangerously close to expiration. Various pole limas were on the menu this particular day - Sadie's Climbing Baby Lima, among them, and one of Doctor Martin's coveted Chester County beauties (once sold for a whopping 25 cents a seed), and the purple Blue Shackamaxon Treaty Bean, and old Quaker beans, and seeds that his late grandmother had squirreled away in jars in her own freezer.

You could detect a new step in the spring last week at Noble on Sansom - Grace Wicks, an "edible gardener," pacing the rooftop, plotting a themed kitchen garden (lemon verbena, lemongrass, lemon balm, lemon thyme); the new chef Brinn Sinnott (well-seasoned at Lacroix and, later, Supper) looking to lighter treatments of lamb and Alaskan halibut; the bartender, Christian Gaal, making his own tonic water, for goodness sake, and recasting old-school rum drinks - into the Nor'easter, for one - for an inventive, borderline geeky cocktail menu.

By George Ball For six months, President Obama has been struggling to save the economy, improve international relations, craft a universal health-care plan, and grapple with a Wall Street meltdown that has stunned the nation and conjured up fears of a worldwide depression. Yet, oddly enough, there is a bright spot on the horizon, and, in the president's case, it's shining just outside his window. On the first day of spring, the Obamas planted a relatively small (990-square-foot)

Were it located in the genteel wilds of Birchrunville, Chester County, say, or Malvern, even, green farmlands lapping at the doorstep, Osteria's poignant gesture to fresh and local might not be that much worth the noting. But for those who haven't had occasion to visit, let us set the scene: The casual sister to Marc Vetri's eponymous Vetri is just a handful of blocks north on Broad Street from Vine, though still south of Temple University, which is to say in a stretch of faded urbanity to which the noun revival cannot (yet)

Flowers go in one bed, vegetables in another. That's how many of us learned to garden. But there's another way, one that combines edible and ornamental, functional and beautiful, in a riotous mix of peas and tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, with sunflowers and sage tossed in. Scholars call this garden a potager, from the French potage, meaning soup. It's also known as a combination garden or, more popular, a kitchen garden. Rooted in the Middle Ages, this all-in-one approach enjoyed Renaissance renown at the grand French chateaux and now resonates through our own era of gloom and recession.

Ellen Ogden didn't want to look out her living room windows at a bare stretch of lawn, so she designed the prettiest garden she could think of: A vegetable garden. Ogden is cofounder of Cook's Garden (www.cooksgarden.com), a mail-order business specializing in salad greens. But both her catalog and her garden offer much more than just lettuce: She has strawberries, flowers, and lots of fresh herbs. A neat garden, planted with straight rows of vegetables, is a thing of beauty, Ogden says.

In the quest for knowledge of foods and flavors, instruction can take many forms. For some students in Drexel University's culinary arts program, that means studying one aspect of their chosen vocation literally from the ground up. They are currently sowing, tending and harvesting many of the vegetables that will be cooked and served in their kitchen classroom and student-run Bistro. Under the tutelage of William Woys Weaver, about 10 students each semester participate in the Kitchen Garden - otherwise known as Culinary 425 or "Weeding 101. " Through this elective course, they gain hands-on experience in organic gardening, awareness of heirloom vegetables, and appreciation for the flavors and textures that fresh and varied foods bring to the table.