Creative Vegetable Gardening

by Joy Larkcom

Joy Larkcom believes passionately that a vegetable garden, whatever its size, can be as beautiful as a conventional garden of flowers and shrubs. In Creative Vegetable Gardening she shows how the principles of good design can be applied to a kitchen plot and how to use the vibrant textures, colours, and forms of vegetables, herbs and fruit to create glorious effects and intriguing patterns without jeopardizing their productivity. Inspirational colour photographs of potagers and kitchen plots capture the essence of the creative approach to vegetable growing. Techniques are described in clear stages and illustrated with full-colour step-by-step artworks, while an A-Z directory includes more than 150 edible plants with key facts on their cultivation, supplemented with ideas on how to grow them to maximum ornamental effect. Beautifully illustrated, intricate plans of five types of potager - formal, informal, small, urban and winter - add to the wealth of inspirational information.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

212 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Inder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of pretty pictures and a surprising amount of extremely practical advice on designing your garden layout, building raised beds, putting in paths, and training fruit trees into all kinds of crazy shapes - almost none of which I imagine using in my own potager, which exists on the extreme "informal" end of the spectrum.

My problem with this type of book (the "how to make veggies pretty" genre) is the heavy reliance on "ornamental" strains of vegetables, which may be pretty but don't look very appetizing. Actually, I don't even think they look that pretty. Pink kale? I don't think so. Also, the reliance on more formal styles - as though veggies can only be pretty if they are laid out in box-hedged 18th century designs.

I think vegetables are beautiful in their own right, not just when they're pink, and not just when they are arranged in intricate, formal shapes. Which means I may be the wrong audience for books like this, honestly - I don't have any problems with mixing tomatoes into my flowers, and I don't care if my garden is a bit overgrown and scraggly looking. I kind of like overgrown and scraggly.

The Country Garden, by John Brookes, is not available anymore, but it suits my style far better.

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is definitely for the intermediate to advanced gardener. It's a bit all over the place - not really an instruction manual and not quite a picture book. It gives a bit of history, a bit of instruction and left me feeling a bit like I still didn't know what was going on or if I could use any of the ideas in the book. I think it needs a bit more focus, but I'm willing to come back to it once I become a bit more of a seasoned gardener.

[Beth Lequeuvre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as helpful to Colorado's climate as I had hoped, but still a good read...

[Nilesh]

yes

[Giovanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!