More Than a Garden You Can Eat

A conventional American garden is often divided into tidy categories: vegetables in one rectangular plot, flowers in another, shrubs along the foundation, and lawn everywhere else. Food belongs in rows. Beauty belongs by the front walk. Habitat belongs somewhere wilder, preferably beyond the property line.

But at Edgewood Nursery in Falmouth, Maine, founder Aaron Parker is planting a different kind of landscape, one alive with overlapping purposes.

Parker specializes in unusual edible and medicinal plants, perennial vegetables, and local ecotype native plants, which he grows and sells from his nursery located on Wabanaki territory, about 20 minutes from downtown Portland.

“I was interested in anything that was alive,” Parker says of his early years. He gardened as a child with his mom, learning the basics of watering and weeding. As a teenager, he worked for his neighbor, a longtime landscaper who first hired him to water her potted plants.

The job soon expanded into hands-on landscaping projects, and over roughly 10 years, she became his boss and mentor. Soon, Parker started taking on landscaping jobs of his own, continuing to work with his former boss part-time, designing traditional and edible landscapes and gardens.

When he couldn’t find the plants he wanted to use in his projects, he started growing them himself. Eventually, in 2020, he founded Edgewood Nursery.

Since then, his nursery has become a place where curious gardeners might encounter wood nettle, sea kale, self-heal, or American spikenard, and begin to see the yard differently — not as a static plot, but as a living pantry, medicine cabinet, wildlife refuge, and climate adaptation project.

Garden For All

The idea at the heart of Parker’s work is deceptively practical. Perennial food plants, once established, return year after year. They can stretch the harvest season into the earliest days of spring and late into fall. They ask less of the gardener than annual vegetables that must be started, transplanted, watered, weeded, and replanted each season.

“A plant that you only have to plant once but still produces a lot of food,” Parker says, is an appealing proposition, especially in a region with a short growing season and increasingly unpredictable weather.

But its appeal comes from more than just convenience. Perennial plants also keep living roots in the soil, reduce repeated disturbance, provide stable wildlife habitat over multiple seasons, and help gardeners diversify their food supply.

A perennial edible landscape can also change a gardener’s relationship to management. Instead of clearing everything away at the end of the season, Parker suggests that people leave plant debris and spent stalks where they can shelter insects, feed soil organisms, and become mulch. The plants at Edgewood grow without artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides.

He also encourages gardening with local ecotype native plants, which carry the genetic memory of a particular region’s soil, temperatures, seasons, insects, and rhythms. A species may be native across much of North America, but that does not mean every population of it is interchangeable. A population from the Southwest may bloom at a different time than a population from the Northeast, for example. Those timing differences matter to pollinators, birds, and seed-eating wildlife, who are keyed into seasonal cues.

With all this in mind, the edible garden becomes something larger than personal nourishment. Native plants form the base of local food webs, and even small planting choices can help rebuild biodiversity. At Edgewood Nursery, Parker focuses on plants that support local ecosystems and feed the people. The distinction between “for us” and “for nature” begins to blur.

Where to Start

Parker’s advice for beginners is refreshingly modest: Start with a few species. Choose plants suited to the site conditions. If possible, choose something native. And, crucially, choose something you have tasted and know you actually want to eat. He encourages people to view gardening not as a moral performance, but as a relationship with flavor, place, climate, and curiosity.

Among the plants Parker wishes more Maine gardeners appreciated is self-heal, a low-growing native that many Mainers unknowingly have in their lawns already. It is edible, adaptable, medicinally significant, and beautiful when allowed to bloom. His advice here is almost radical in its simplicity: Give the plant some space instead of mowing it down. In a culture of constant yard control, letting a useful plant reveal itself can feel like a small act of rebellion.

Other perennial edibles Parker praises have a more obvious place in the kitchen. Sochan can be cooked as a spring green. Wood nettle doesn’t sting when properly cooked and is excellent sautéed, steamed, or dried for tea. Sea kale, though not native, offers multiple harvest windows from early spring into fall, including its edible flowers with a honey-like quality. These are not novelty plants so much as invitations to expand the idea of what our food can look like.

Perhaps the hardest thing Parker has to overcome is aesthetic. Many homeowners inherit a visual standard based on traditional lawns, sharp edges, and emptiness masquerading as neatness. But Parker suggests that an untamed look or a little pest damage is proof that the garden is participating in the local ecosystem. “Reframing what some people might see as a problem as a benefit,” he says, is part of the work.

A garden doesn’t need to look completely abandoned to be ecological, but it may need to look less manicured. It may need to embrace seed heads, stems, bite marks, and the visible evidence of supporting other lives.

That shift can be uncomfortable for gardeners trained to read any chewed leaf as a failure. Parker sees it differently. He hopes Maine gardeners will embrace a more naturalized look, not as neglect but as abundance.

Such landscapes can be beautiful, he argues, precisely because they are doing so much: feeding people, sheltering insects, offering fruit and greens, stabilizing soil, and giving wildlife something to eat long after the gardener has gone inside.