At PARKROYAL COLLECTION Pickering, Singapore’s first hotel-in-a-garden designed by WOHA, Bjorn Low and his team from Edible Garden City have activated rooftop space within the hotel into a productive urban farm and are challenging designers to look beyond aesthetics to bring food sources to the core of their practice.

By switching from a horticulture plant palette to an indigenous and climate-resilient edible environment for human and non-human pollinators (such as birds, bees, insects, and bacteria), edible landscaping attempts to integrate edible plants into existing green spaces; encourage participation in growing and sharing food; create aesthetic, edible, public spaces that delight users; and shed light on food security as well as the need to improve global food systems.

For urban dwellers who are used to thinking of farms as rows and rows of cultivated vegetables, this dispels the myth that edible gardens can’t be beautiful, and beautiful gardens can’t be edible. Hotel guests and visitors can soon look forward to enjoying wild passionfruit, blue butterfly pea, and curry leaves, grown among the verdant tropical landscape of the hotel.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our gardens can be a feast for not only our eyes, but all of our senses?