Valley Gardens: Beauty for food's sake

By Cheryl Wilson

Published on October 10, 2008

When Ann Renee Larouche graduated from agricultural college at McGill University in Montreal 25 years ago, few people were excited about ecology and sustainable gardens. But times have changed, and the French-Canadian is finding her niche in Northampton by encouraging neighbors to grow food as well as ornamentals in order to change their carbon footprint.

"It is important for us as a society to be growing more of our own food," she explained recently. "People need to be connected to growing of food and preparing of food. I feel compelled to help people in that respect."

Larouche came to the United States to enroll in the master's degree program at the Conway School of Landscape Design. After graduation she worked for an area landscape architect and then for Westfield 2000, a group involved in urban revitalization in Westfield.

On her own small city plot near downtown Northampton, Larouche designed an attractive white picket fence, which was constructed by a carpenter. To beautify her neighborhood, outside the fence she planted an array of flowers, including a butterfly bush, sedums, obedient plant, great blue lobelia, chrysanthemums and annuals like dark-foliage coleus.

Inside the fence is a colorful vegetable garden. There are several kinds of tomatoes, collard greens, two varieties of chicory, a salad green popular in Europe, cucumbers, zucchini and nasturtium plants for color and edible flowers. A Stanley plum tree overlooks the area and in the back yard are raspberries and gooseberries and some new blueberry plants. She also has a sweet cherry tree and a fig tree sporting fruit. The fig will come indoors for the winter since it isn't hardy, she said.

A year ago Larouche sent an email to her neighbors, sharing her philosophy and encouraging them to join in. More than a dozen people responded, saying they would be interested in having her help them grow vegetables and fruits and beautifying the area. She now works for many of them. "The farthest client is a three-minute walk," she said, rolling her wheelbarrow of tools down the street.

"Pure beauty for the sake of beauty is a luxury I'm not certain we can afford any more," she said. "What is to say that edibles aren't beautiful?"

For her neighbors in a three-unit condo, she planted a vegetable garden that included a patch of wheat, grown as part of the the Hungry Ghost bakery's project to encourage local wheat production. Turns out it takes a lot of wheat to produce a loaf of bread. "It was an experiment," she said.

Larouche pointed out the other clients in her area: the gray house and the blue house and the ones around the corner.

Next spring she hopes to order large quantities of vegetable seeds from places like Seeds from Italy, a Winchester-based imported-seed firm, and share them with her clients. This past spring she ordered a load of compost from Bear Path Farm in Whately and shared it with neighbors.

Larouche is fascinated by the European ecology movements in Italy and England with Slow Food, concentrating on food grown within 100 miles, and permaculture, a design system for sustainable living and land use.

She has come a long way from her undergraduate days at McGill when she switched to agriculture and food science from environmental studies because there seemed to be more jobs available in agriculture. When she graduated, most of the offers were from agro-chemical companies like Dupont.

Instead she became a farm volunteer in New Hampshire through WWOOF, World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming. Returning to Montreal she found a job in the agriculture school's Center for Ecological Agriculture Products.

"It's a research center helping students, farmers and gardeners," she explained. She organized classes on urban gardening, ran the soil test lab for another department and translated agriculture articles from English to French.

Then she heard about the Conway School of Landscape Design from a visiting student, David Jacke of New Hampshire, who is in the forefront of the permaculture and edible forests movement. Her boss at McGill, Stuart Hill, believed in "benign design."

"I really wanted to be involved in influencing development in an ecologically based manner," she said. "Now the times are ripe. I'm doing here what I wanted to do a zillion years ago. I like it a lot."

Larouche hopes to continue gardening for her neighbors but also plans to expand her garden-consulting business. She said she likes the intimacy of working in her own neighborhood without having to drive to her job.

"I like to focus on food," she said, "but I'd like to do more designs for people. Site planning I feel is a strength of mine."

She is interested in land use on individual properties, everything from growing vegetables to play areas to providing a clothesline for outdoor drying.

Larouche is putting into practice her training and her belief that even urban dwellers can grow some of their own food while beautifying their neighborhood.