Creative Vegetable Gardening

by Joy Larkcom

Creative Vegetable Gardening contains hundreds of ideas for creating stunning decorative effects in the vegetable garden, where food plants can be combined with flowers and foliage to produce a fascinating “tapestry effect.” Joy Larkcom explains how to mix color, texture, and form, and a plant directory provides a list to suit the tastes of every imaginative garden planner.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

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!