What is the most efficient way of plating five lettuces to a square foot? Planting out is starting in the rooftopvegplot, and as always I’m trying to force a quart into a pint-sized plot. I have been reading about plant spacing, and I have to say the advice is very mixed. One book will advise lettuces being spaced twelve inches apart, others will say four inches. Then again with cut and come again, intercropping, or progressive harvesting (eating small ones and leaving others to mature) the situation becomes even more complex. In desperation I have thrown the whole lot out of the window and decided to make my own rules, governed by my own gardening instinct and by the work of monks who lived in Westminster over a millennium ago.
In my search for efficient planting layouts, I have come across a new watchword and a new planting pattern. It is a very old Latin word, QUINCUNX. When I first read it I thought it sounded slightly rude. And no-one I mention it to - gardener or non-gardener - had the faintest idea what it meant. That seemed to me to be reason enough to find out more.
I know that most gardeners will recognise the shape, if not the word. For it is the five-in-a-square planting layout.
I have found out that this planting arrangement is as old as the hills, or at least as old as the monks who carried on the traditions of gardening during the dark ages. And I know I'm not alone in using it. Only last week @losttheplot235 tweeted his latest planting layout. You've guessed it - they were five to a square.
The lovely pavement pattern at the head of this post is the cosmati pavement in Westminster Abbey that was uncovered for the first time a few years ago for the royal wedding. At the centre of the pattern you can see the familiar five to a grid arrangement. When this pavement was laid in the thirteenth century the Quincunx was still thought to have mystical powers.
Its pattern seems to have endured into our day. It's the pattern on a dice, and it is in every gardening book that you read. It seems so familiar, but I thought it was first used for Elizabethan knot-gardens. It certainly looks as if it would make a fine layout for a modern herb garden or potager.
After 500AD civilization in London started to decline, though how much it declined is still a matter of dispute. There is a wealth of archaeological evidence that Britain, despite lack of strong governance and despite the Viking raids, was still a wealthy trading nation. Ideas would still have spread.
What seems to have happened is that religion took over from kings as the strong influence. Individuals began to dedicate themselves to the religious life. In the Sixth and Seventh Century, every stream and spring round here would have had its religious hermit. These hermits blessed the waters and probably acted as guardians. Near to me there is a Well Street and a Bywell Place. Slightly further afield there is Marylebone, Mary-le-bourne, our Lady Mary’s stream, which was an important river in those days. Its other name is the Tyburn. Its wide alluvial banks were considered to posess the richest and most coveted meadows.
Eventually the religious hermits began to cluster together, realising, no doubt, that living in a community is easier and safer, than living individually. Groups of holy people established small monasteries and worked the land in order to feed themselves. One of those groups of monks seems to have taken over an old Roman temple originally dedicated to Apollo and located slightly up-river to the flourishing Saxon port where The Strand is now located. In AD960 St Dunstan dedicated that monastery. It gained added kudos when, one hundred years later, in AD1065 Edward the Confessor gave the island settlement a Charter and donated to it all the lands across to the Tyburne Meadows and up to ‘the old roman road’, i.e. Oxford Street. So just one year before the Norman Conquest our backwoods location, just north of Oxford Street, would have become a boundary between common land and the monastery gardens. This new monastery became a rival in importance to St Paul’s which was the Eastern Church, located within the walls of the Roman city. The new West Minster, or Westminster, was Saxon and belonged to the King.
The Benedictine monks who lived at Westminster Abbey, borrowed many cultivation processes from the Romans. We know that in the early days they had vineyards and orchards. They grew grains and baked their own bread and brewed ales, as well as wines. They kept bees and cattle. The records report that they ran 100 wild boar in the open woodlands. But despite their spacious estate, I like to think that they, like me, had minimal space in which to grow their vegetables. It was in these times that Quincunx planting was born.
Quincunx, is a Latin term and had been used to describe a battle formation in Roman times. There is a Roman coin called a Quincunx that had five dots upon it, identifying its denomination. But the dark ages mixed religion with myth, science with superstition. For a medieval monk a Quincunx would have looked like this:
This motif is found again and again in the medieval world. It is used in architecture, as a pattern on jewellery and in gardens. The monks realised that if they planted trees in this arrangement, they would achieve the most efficient layout, with the staggering having the effect of reducing overshadowing.
In an orchard, a pleasing diamond pattern emerges.
Because I have so little space in my garden this pattern of planting interests me. Square foot gardening books often include images designed to encourage the gardener to station sow. i.e. to sow individual seeds where they are to grow. My bible, Potager en Carré Suggests a quincunx planting pattern for medium sized plants, like lettuces. It says that five lettuces per square can be sown and then harvested in order, so that a central plant or one of the four corner plants might be left to grow larger. The book also posits planting something larger in the centre, like an aubergine and intercropping with four smaller, faster growing veg surrounding it.
Above is the diagram from L'Art du Potager en Carrés. It looks eminently sensible doesn’t it? But I have discovered a flaw in this planting pattern. This pattern might look efficient for one block of 30cm square, but if I try and plant two bocks I get a very uneven planting pattern. The corner plants are not evenly spaced at all, and overshadow each other:
After some time with the ruler and compasses I have discovered that the next square should be planted like this:
In a larger bed this will give me a regular arrangement of plants, each with the same ground space, each one overshadowing its neighbour as little as possible.
I began to consider what other planting arrangements would work and what would not. If we take, as a starting point, that the diagonal arrangement in a north/south or an east/west plot is preferable, then many of my traditional planting arrangements don’t work. Four-up or eight or sixteen in even rows, all overshadow each other. It’s the cross pattern that does the trick.
Here are a few that do work:
I got quite carried away and worked out some lovely ones, like 12 and 13 per square. But I’ll let you figure those out for yourself. As you might imagine I became a bit of a hermit myself, trying to resolve all these patterns. Perhaps that is what those monks did in the long winter evenings, as they planned their vegetable plots, making the most of every square inch of land?
Nowadays very few of us will be bothered about squeezing in an extra lettuce or making sure that carrots grow in regular rows. But something of the environmentalist in me makes me think that those old monks were onto something. They made a devotion of their planting. They made every seed count, every drop of sunlight matter.
In fact so excited did I get about evenly spacing the plants, I cut out 12inch square pieces of chicken wire. As I lay the wire squares onto the ground to get the station sowing holes just right, I had another thought. Perhaps that itchy galvanised wire might do something to protect the young seedlings from slugs. So I’ve left them in place, sitting just above the soil and hoping that the slugs won’t like walking over the wire to get to my plants. I’ve combined something quite new with something very old – that’s not a bad way to approach 21st Century gardening.
