One of the most satisfying things I get to do is walk through a garden that has been completely transformed. In our Spring Bloom Tour, that is exactly what you will see. What started as a plain patch of lawn is now a lush, layered food scape where several roses grow alongside herbs, fruits, and vegetables in what I can only describe as an edible paradise.
Something I’ve noticed in my own garden over the years: there is always something beautiful happening, no matter the month. In Feb and March, the fruit trees are in full bloom. With blossoms everywhere, bees everywhere, the whole garden buzzing with early spring energy. By March and April, the damask roses, and David Austin roses take over and that is really their moment. Then as the heat kicks in through summer, hardier roses, petunias and salvias shine, and the vegetables are in full production and the garden shifts into a different kind of abundance. With cooler Fall weather, roses come back alive for another show, along with mums and fruits of all kinds. Each season hands off to the next. You’re never waiting for something to happen, it’s already happening.
Rose Additions to the food scape
Over the past couple of years, I have added somewhere between 50 and 70 roses throughout the garden. Not all at once, it has been a gradual process of finding the right varieties, colors, the right spots, and figuring out how they fit into a space that is already full of perennial fruit trees and vines, annual edibles, and pollinator plants. What I can say is that the roses have completely changed how the garden feels. They anchor every section, attract an incredible number of bees, humming birds and beneficial insects, and give the whole space a cohesion and visual interest that is hard to achieve with edibles alone.
And this is not a backyard-only project. My front yard is where most of this happens. A front yard designed as a true foodscape with roses and fruit trees anchoring the space, edimentals and pollinator plants woven through every layer. It is one of the most beautiful and functional things you can do with a lawn. It feeds your family, feeds the bees, and looks stunning from the street. Neighbors stop and ask questions. That alone is worth something. With 63% of gardeners actively reducing lawn in 2026, this is exactly the kind of less-lawn transformation more people are ready to make.
If you have been thinking about turning your lawn into something more intentional, something you can eat from, something that supports a pollinator pathway right outside your front door, and something you genuinely enjoy walking through every day – this post breaks down the design ideas from the tour that I think are worth borrowing.
Watch a short Spring Bloom Tour here: https://youtu.be/PDFxfuNX5Fk
Think About Tone and Texture, Not Just Color
When I first started adding roses to my edible garden, I picked mostly by color. It took a few seasons and understanding of color theory from my watercolor explorations, to realize that tone matters just as much, maybe more.
Tone is the depth and warmth within a color. In the garden from this tour, you’ll notice the roses aren’t all bright and saturated. Some are deep and velvety, which gives the space a grounded, settled feel. Others are what I’d describe as a “faded petal” pink, a dusty, soft, and a little nostalgic. That combination is one of the dominant color directions in garden design, and it works especially well in a foodscape because it doesn’t fight with the greens and browns of raised beds.
Texture is the other piece of this. Full, many-petaled English roses have a completely different visual weight than the fine foliage of rosemary or the broad leaves of a squash plant. Layered planting, a fluffy bloom against fine herb, bold vegetable leaf against ruffled rose petal is what creates real depth and makes a mixed garden look intentional rather than accidental. Without it, even a well-planted garden can feel flat.
A simple thing I do: before committing to a rose variety, I take a photo of it and layer it on a photo next to whatever else will be growing nearby. This helps me intentionally design spaces that look cohesive.
Roses as the Backbone of an Edible Garden
Here is something I learned over time. Edible gardens are inherently seasonal, and that means there are always transition periods where things look a little rough. Separate sections for ornamentals and edibles meant lesser pollinators. The fruit trees finish blooming in April and are just leafing out. The summer vegetables are still small and the beds feel sparse. That gap between spring blossoms and summer production is exactly when roses and pollinators like salvia earn their place.
A well-placed shrub rose gives your garden a permanent structure. It is something with presence and form that holds the space together even when everything around it is between cycles. Early blooms from damask roses fills the air as I seed and transplant my summer garden. And in April and May, when the David Austin roses are at their peak, you don’t need anything else. They carry the whole garden on their own before beans and tomatoes take centerstage.
In my garden, I use darker, more richly colored roses as visual anchors. In a sea of soft pastels, they have a “weighted” quality that keeps the eye from drifting and gives the whole space a sense of intention. As the season moved out of early spring pastels, varieties like ‘Boscobel’ (a warm apricot-salmon with a strong myrrh fragrance) and ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ (a soft pink with a very full, cupped bloom) stepped in with deeper color that tied the different sections together.
Both are David Austin English roses, and both earn their space many times over.
Plant Your Most Fragrant Roses Where You Walk Every Day
This is the design idea from the tour that I think more people should try. Fragrant and incredibly beautiful Strawberry Hill David Austin rose is planted right along the walkway leading to the greenhouse and overlooking my office. Its placed strategically to drape over the greenhouse, and close enough that you catch the scent just passing by.
It completely changes the experience of moving through the garden. Gardening chores could be intense at times, a utilitarian walk from one task to another becomes something you actually look forward to. This is what purpose-driven gardening means to me: designing a space that rewards you every time you use it, not just when you stop to look at it.
If you are planning new rose placement, think about the paths you walk every day. The route from your back door to the compost bin, the way you walk to your raised beds in the morning. Those are your best fragrance spots. Don’t save your best-smelling roses for a corner you visit twice a season.
Intermixing Roses, Edibles, and Pollinators — What This Actually Looks Like
I know a lot of gardeners keep their flower areas and vegetable areas completely separate. My front yard is a good argument for mixing them.
What I grow is sometimes called edimentals. Plants that are both edible and ornamental, chosen as much for how they look as for what they produce – some examples like calendula, comfrey, chamomile, damask roses and many more. In my garden, roses grow right alongside fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs. A pale yellow rose next to a persimmon tree along with the tall spires of deep purple salvia. Strawberries or oregano spilling at the base of a rose shrub. Tomatoes and beans climbing a trellis a few feet away. Onions, hot peppers and chives tucked in between. It sounds chaotic but it looks completely intentional because every plant is chosen with the same eye for form, color, and function. The roses bring height, structure, and long-season color. The edibles fill the middle and lower layers. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is purely decorative.
The whole garden also functions as a pollinator pathway. Because I don’t use any pesticides or insecticides in our year round fruit garden with over 100+ fruit trees ( Watch here), it is genuinely safe for bees from the first fruit tree blossoms of blueberries, citrus and almonds in Feb all the way through the vegetable blooms in summer. The bees work the roses all through May and then move on to the herb flowers, the strawberry blooms, the chilli flowers. If you are using systemic pesticides on your roses, you are undermining the very insects that make the rest of your edible garden productive. It is worth rethinking that approach entirely.
A few companion plants that work well with roses in a front yard edible garden:
- Onions and chillies — one of my favorite front yard tricks. Deer tend to leave both alone, so interplanting them with your roses gives you a natural, low-effort deterrent without any fencing or sprays. Onion foliage is upright and fine-textured, which looks great tucked between rose shrubs. Chillies add a vivid pop of color in summer that actually complements the roses beautifully — and you get a harvest out of both. If you have deer pressure in your front yard, start here before trying anything else.
- Lavender and rosemary — fine, upright foliage that creates beautiful contrast against the loose, ruffled form of an English rose. Same growing needs: full sun, good drainage. Both are indispensable in the kitchen, and lavender draws bees from early spring onward.
- Thyme, sage, and oregano — low-growing herbs that fill gaps between rose beds naturally. They bloom at different times, feed pollinators throughout the season, and earn their keep twice over in the kitchen.
- Strawberries — one of my favorite underplantings for roses. They spread to cover bare soil, suppress weeds, and fruit right as the roses come into bloom. Hard to beat visually or practically.
- Supertunia Vista — used in the tour garden as a low-growing filler to carpet gaps between beds. They made it through the winter and has been pumping out blooms all year. Not edible, but excellent for adding color when roses are taking a break.
The key is not to overcrowd. Give your roses room to breathe. Everything else should support the composition, not overwhelm it.
Which Rose Is Right for Your Garden?
Every garden needs a statement piece — the plant that anchors the whole space and gets noticed first. In a mixed edible garden or front yard foodscape, I think a well-chosen roses does that job better than almost anything else. My first in the collection of David Austin roses was Bathsheba rose, where I feel in love with the color, shape and petal count. Ever since, I have added several of these to the garden along with other rose breeders such as Kordes, Meilland, Japanese and Star. I have several old roses in the garden and my absolute favorite ones are the Damask roses, in the picture below, for their intense fragrance and thin petals suitable for making fragrant oil infusions, tea blends and gulkand, an ayurvedic jam with honey. David Austin roses are delicate and cannot handle the intense inland California heat. They take a break during the hotter months. Sunbelt series, Mr. Lincoln, Molineux, Princess Anne, Grand Dame, Boscobel, Princess Alexandra of Kent, Gabriel Oak, poets wife tend to do fine during summer.
If you want a big, dramatic bloom that feels almost over-the-top, look for full-petaled varieties with a high bloom count. If you want the classic old-rose form cupped, quartered, deeply fragrant, David Austin’s catalog is where I’d start. Either way, you are choosing a plant that pulls triple duty: structure, beauty, and a magnet for every bee in the neighborhood.
Watching the Spring Bloom Tour will give you a much better feel for how these roses look in context than any description I can give you: Watch here
Before You Start: A Few Things I’d Do Differently
Prepare the soil first — and then let it do its job. Roses are often described as demanding plants that need constant feeding. In my experience, that is only true if you are starting with depleted soil and compensating with fertilizers. Once you build a living soil and commit to a few consistent cultural practices such as no-till, mulching, leaving roots in the ground at end of season, adding compost annually, the soil becomes largely self-sustaining. I have not added any additional amendments to my rose beds in years. The plants are healthy, they bloom beautifully, and the soil life does the work. If you want to understand how I got there, start here: How to Build Rich Soil in Your Home Garden. I would read that before buying a single bag of fertilizer.
Choose your roses before everything else. Let the roses set the tone, the color palette, and the structure of your foodscape. Then build the companion plantings around them. It is tempting to plant the edibles first because they are faster and more immediate, but you will end up with a garden where the roses feel like an afterthought. A few garden sketches will go a long way in designing a harmonious food scape.
Think in layers. Tall roses at the back or center, medium herbs and perennials in the middle, low-growing fillers and ground covers at the edges. This is the foundation of layered planting, and you can see it clearly in the tour. It is what gives the space that lush, full look without feeling overcrowded.
Are you working on a lawn-to-garden transformation? Or already growing roses alongside your edibles in the front yard? I’d love to hear what’s working for you. Drop a comment below!
Happy Gardening!
