From the article, it seems that many of the people who are rich enough to get these designer gardens ARE actually digging them themselves, and if they are  not then at least the produce is going to employees, friends and dinner party guests. A part of me wishes that some of them expressed an interest in giving the produce to the poor, or to soup kitchens, but I suppose I cannot have everything. It's certainly a better use of land than acres and acres of ornamental lawn.

I'm just jealous that my own little patch isn't anything as wonderful as these!I am getting older and more arthritic yearly, and sometimes just like to imagine having somebody garden for me...

It's a no brainer that an organic food garden is far superior to an ornamental lawn or garden laced with chemicals and sucking massive amounts of water.  However, it's also environmentally destructive to have people driving to your home to do the gardening instead of doing it yourself.  So your first instinct was correct.

... then better to not have a garden, but just let your property grow up like a jungle. Your neighbors will love you.

Victory in Pattani

plant native plants and just let them grow.  And screw any anti-environmental neighbors who don't like natural plants.  Anyone with this attitude should be sent to the moon with eight hours of oxygen.  If you don't like this planet, please leave!

Then the people who tend the garden when they are away can harvest and use the veggies, if there's a surplus they can take them to a farmer's market or donate them to a local food pantry, daycare center, or even a school.

This is a miniscule problem, as the ranks of the people rich enough to do this are a tiny percentage of the population.  It's an encouraging trend though.  Organic gardening carries status.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

I'm a big fan of efficiency.  I don't see how having an organic landscape "greens" a second home.  Having lived in a small town in Maine where 85% of the homes were only inhabited for a few weekends/yr., I have to say that an edible landscape would make almost no difference.  When your gargantuan cabin is sucking down 200 gallons of fuel oil (or a lot more) every month to keep the place heated when nobody is living there, I don't see how growing a few organic brussels sprouts makes the place any better.

As to the idea that a status-carrying trend will spread to the rest of the population, I'll have to disagree entirely.  Most popular trends come from the bottom up, not the top down.  For example, bling bling jewelry and baggy pants.  You didn't see people wearing accessories like that on Cape Cod and then two years later, everybody is doing it.  No, fashionable trends come out of the ghetto.  I think that if organic agriculture is going to move forward as a "trend," it will come from the inner-city community gardens on abandoned lots, not from second home-owners in Cape Cod, Aspen, or Maine.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

By the way, for those of you who didn't catch it, I used the term camel-swallowing because I love the biblical saying "Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel."  Despite being a recovering cultist Pentacostal, I do believe that there is some (very minimal) wisdom to be found in the Bible.

It seems the "fixes" for all of the problems we create are bigger than the problems themselves...like the Big Dig.  Yet we strain at swallowing gnats....

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.