Add fruit and veggies to flower beds for a beautiful, bountiful garden. Here are tips from Tom Gardner on how you can have it all.

Brightening up your hard-working vegetable garden with a couple of charming marigolds is nothing new, but putting a prolific tomato plant among your delphiniums and dahlias is another story. With food and gas prices on the rise, more and more gardeners are making room for vegetables in their flowerbeds. The result: A flower garden that’s pretty and palatable. Here are our favorite veggies to add to your flowerbeds.

• Give your garden height and let cucumbers, peas, and pole beans grow up a tuteur. Better yet, try growing them up a sturdy sunflower.

• Plant tomatoes at the base of an arbor and let the arbor act as a support.

• Alternate bright pepper plants with complimentary bold bloomers like zinnias, lilies, and dahlias.

• Plant short-lived greens like lettuces and radishes in a front border where you can easily pick and re-plant.

• Artichokes with their tall, ball-shaped heads look great alongside coneflowers and rudbeckia.

• Tuck rainbow chard, with its colorful late summer foliage, alongside spring bloomers like peonies and irises.

Grow up
Heirloom pole beans and giant dipper gourds grow up a pergola in one of the bloom-filled beds along with roses, amaranths, Agastache, hollyhock, Salvia patens ‘Cambridge Blue,’ artichoke, Tithonia, and sedum. Asparagus also shares the bed for a feathery look as spring turns to summer. Herbs for seasoning are sprinkled in along the edge.

Limit bed size
When a garden is chock-full of goodness, there’s no room to step in. Tom limits the width of his beds to 6 feet to facilitate cultivation and harvest from grass paths on either side.

Learn to prune
If fruit trees and berry shrubs exist in close quarters, trim the canopy so sun can infiltrate from all angles. “The fruit trees are almost espaliered,” Tom says. Another reason to cut back: Pruning increases fruit yield.

Exile some plants
Not everything plays well together. Tom plants corn and potatoes in a separate garden. Leeks and onions also need space, and squash demands a room of its own.

Check out a house with lush gardens.