Companion Planting Chart: 48 Vegetables, Herbs & Flowers (Free & Printable)

How to Read This Chart

Most companion planting charts give you two columns, friends and enemies, and stop there. The problem with stopping there is that the companion column is the least binding piece of information on the page. If you put a full-sun crop in the shade, or crowd a plant that needs two feet into six inches, no amount of good neighbouring will save it. So this chart carries the constraints alongside the relationships, and they are meant to be read in a specific order.

Read sun and water first. These decide which plants can share a bed at all. A full-sun, low-water herb and a high-water leafy green will both struggle in the same bed no matter what the companion column says, because you can only water the bed one way. Sorting your plants into groups by sun and water is the single highest-value thing you can do with this table, and it is the step most plans skip.

Read spacing second. Each row gives three numbers: how far apart to set plants within a row, how far apart to set the rows, and how many plants fit in a square foot if you garden in square-foot blocks. Spacing is what turns a companion pairing from an idea into a layout. Two plants are only companions if there is physically room for both, and the most common way a companion pairing fails in practice is that the larger plant simply grew over the smaller one.

Read the relationship columns third. The “grows well with” column is a list of sensible defaults for when you have a free choice about what goes beside what. The “keep apart from” column is the more useful of the two, because avoiding a known bad pairing costs you nothing and the penalties are real: competition, shared disease, or one crop pushing the other to bolt.

Check the zone range last. Two plants can be perfect companions on paper and never actually share your bed, because in a short season one finishes before the other goes out. The zone column tells you whether a plant suits your climate at all; the overlap of their seasons tells you whether the pairing is available to you this year.

One note on the relationship columns, explained in full further down: pairings here are mutual. If you find tomato in the pepper row, you will find pepper in the tomato row.

Where This Data Comes From

Companion planting charts rarely say where their pairings came from, which makes them hard to judge. Here is ours, including the parts that are less tidy than we would like.

What the pairings are. The companion and keep-apart relationships are a compilation of long-standing garden practice and the kind of guidance that circulates through extension-service leaflets, seed catalogues and regional growing guides. They are the consensus of common practice. They are not the output of a trial programme, and we do not claim any individual pairing has been tested under controlled conditions. We also do not grade pairings by strength of evidence, because we do not hold evidence data for them, and inventing a star rating would tell you more about our confidence than about the plants.

This matters because the two halves of a companion chart are not equally well supported. The broad mechanisms are on reasonably firm ground: mixed plantings are harder for specialist pests to exploit than monocultures, flowering plants attract pollinators and predatory insects, and tall plants shade shorter ones. Highly specific pairwise claims are much weaker, and the claim that one plant improves another's flavour is close to folklore. We have kept the traditional pairings because they are a useful starting point, and we would rather say plainly that much of it is untested than imply more rigour than exists.

Spacing, sun, water and zones. These come from standard growing recommendations for each crop and are the figures our planner uses to lay out beds. They are the most dependable numbers on this page. Spacing in particular varies by variety, so treat the figures as a sound default rather than a rule, and follow your seed packet when it disagrees.

Pairings are mutual, by choice. Our underlying dataset records relationships per plant, and some were entered in one direction only, so pepper listed tomato as a companion without tomato listing pepper. We treat every relationship as applying both ways: if either plant names the other, the pairing appears in both rows. We think a one-way entry is far more likely to be an incomplete record than a deliberate claim that a benefit flows one way only, and a chart that contradicts itself depending on which row you happen to read is worse than useless. Symmetrizing turns 235 directional companion entries and 92 directional keep-apart entries into 174 and 64 mutual pairings respectively. If you have seen a chart that shows a pairing one way only, that is the difference.

What we left out. Some traditional pairings involve crops this site does not cover, including a number of orchard fruits, grains, cover crops and a few less common vegetables and herbs. Those references have been removed from the tables rather than shown as blanks, which is why you may find a pairing elsewhere that does not appear here. We would rather the chart be complete about 48 plants than gesture at plants we hold no growing data for. Nothing in the current dataset is listed as both a companion and a conflict, so the two relationship columns never contradict each other.

Corrections welcome. If a pairing here contradicts your own experience or your regional extension guidance, the feedback button in the corner of the page reaches us. Companion planting is strongly regional, and a chart like this is a starting point for your garden, not a verdict on it.