Companion planting Does it really work?

In my mother’s Cape Town garden a large bed is planted with eye-catching multicoloured chards and statuesque kales that grow among flowering perennials and annuals. Here, pollinators land and take off like it’s OR Tambo.

Onions and artichokes and eggplant share this aesthetically compelling border space, with sweet alyssum and thyme forming the edge. Peas climb tepees in pots placed within the bed (they get more grey water that way). Later in the season, cages of potted tomatoes take over, near stately sunflowers. Purple basil flourishes. In the same bed a stand of plakkies (Cotyledon orbiculata) attracts sunbirds and bulbuls. And if you keep still for long enough, you might spy a chameleon giving a white spotted fruit chafer (a beetle) the beady eye.

This is companion planting at its riotous best.

When I am wearing my garden designing and gardening hat (I have a collection of hats), I often coach new gardeners on how to grow plants–especially those that are edible. A question I am getting more often, as gardeners and home farmers become more aware of the environmental and health impacts associated with heavy pesticide and herbicide use, is about companion planting: “Can’t I just plant companion plants, and all the bad things will go away?”

Uhm… Well. I take a deep breath and then I dive in. Still wearing the hat.

What exactly is companion planting?

The term companion planting has come to mean many things, but the consistent underlying assumption, often written as a certainty (and often by beloved and respected authors), is that particular plants should–must!–be grown together in order to benefit one another, and that others should be kept apart.

The dung beetle is in the details, of course, and this is where things