Leave it to the French to do everything more beautiful, more chic, more manicured. Do those gay Parisian wome let anything run wild, besides their libidos? Yes, but this Chef’s Kitchen garden at The Château de Villandry garden in the Loire Valley does not look like a wanton French woman.

The Château de Villandry garden in the Loire ValleyDesigner Karen Rogers explains to the Financial Times how kitchen gardening is really catching on.

“The interest in decorative vegetables is widespread. People now want to grow their own food on such a scale that their garden (if it is attached to a small townhouse, for instance) is often dominated by edibles. Why not? The allotment can look as pretty as the rose garden and attractive vegetables can be grown in borders amid the flowers. Once upon a time if vegetables were labelled “ornamental” it meant they were grown for looking at, not eating; nowadays people want them to be ornamental and edible.”

Kitchen Gardens were also big stars at this month’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in London. The Growing Tastes Allotment Garden won the prize for Best in Show. (See brief guided tour of allotment garden.)

As a sophisticated, consuming woman who promotes polo on Governor’s Island, my brow is still furrowed (sans Botox) over this home design article in the LA Times: The rich welcome the humble-looking abode.

Correctly calling the “burlap is the new velvet’ trend an ‘arony alert’, writer David Keeps reminds us the looking poor doesn’t come cheap.

The look is based on key Cultural Creative principles, referenced by Jonathan Adler: an organic, modern direction evidenced in tree-stump end tables and other designs that recall the back-to-nature hippie era; the urban loft aesthetic, which embraces castoff industrial furnishings and found objects; and a growing green consciousness, with an emphasis on recycled materials.

I support and totally understand the desire to dial down conspicuous consumption.

Some examples of “dumpster diva deluxe” make sense. “I’ve seen high-end chairs stripped of gilt to the natural wood and upholstered in very plain canvas,” said Brooke Hodge, former curator of architecture and design at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and coiner of the term. “That’s a more refined, less trendy way to show restraint.”