Commentary for Kiddushin 78:1

ארבע על ארבע רוחות הערוגה ואחת באמצע שפיר אלא הכא משום נוי ואי נמי משום טרחא דשמעא היא:

[that he sowed] four [species] on the four sides of the bed and one [species] in the middle.<span class="x" onmousemove="('comment',' I.e., sowing different species in the same bed, yet taking care according to the regulation to leave sufficient space between each for their roots not to intertwine; v. Shab. 84b. The only possible reason would then be that kil'ayim are forbidden outside Palestine.');">1 Here, however,2 he did so on account of beauty, or [to save] the attendant trouble.3

Daf Shevui to Kiddushin

Abaye rejects R. Joseph’s reading of why Rav planted the garden in rows. If he had planted it in the way that gardens were to be planted in order to avoid the mixing of the seeds (four sides of a square, each with a different species and one row of another species in the middle), then we could be sure that he was doing so in order to avoid the problem of kilayim. But since this is not what Rav did, we can offer other assessments of his motivation. He might have done so either because this makes the garden look nicer or to save the attendant, the one harvesting the vegetables, the trouble of having to search for what he was looking for.

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