Product Description

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."Creative Vegetable Gardening" will capture the imagination and inspire all those who think that growing garden produce is mundane. From creating a full-scale potager to simply adding some new effects with vegetables, this book has something for beginners and experienced gardeners alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93033 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
"This is a wonderful book for winter reading, filled with ideas for spring and summer sowing and growing." Rosemary Verey The Sunday Times Book Supplement "Joy Larkcom has single-handedly put vegetable gardening back on the map" Jim Buckland Country Living "So filled with exciting and new things that - like the products of the author's kitchen - it goes down in one sitting." David Dunbar The Sunday Times "All aspects of creating an ornamental kitchen garden are covered, from planning to design ideas for attractive boundaries, paths, edges to beds, focal points, and features ... There's a wealth of beautifully photographed detail - textured effects, colourful touches, planting for dramatic effect - to get the creative juices flowing." Andrew Blackford Kitchen Garden "Creative Vegetable Gardening shows that veggies can be grown stylishly in the smallest of places" Jane Powers Irish Times

About the Author
Joy Larkcom has been growing and writing about vegetables for more than thirty years and is considered one of the world's leading experts in the field. Her work has been deeply influenced by travels in Europe, China, Japan, the USA, and Canada, continually searching for new edible plants and cultivation techniques. With the help of her husband, Don Pollard, this has led to the introduction of many exciting salad plants and oriental vegetables. Her eloquent and humorous style of writing has done much to popularize vegetable growing. Over the past ten years she has concentrated on the "potager" concept, making the kitchen plot a beautiful feature in itself. She created four small potagers in the experimental organic market garden she and her husband ran for many years in Suffolk, before moving to Southern Ireland, where a fan-shaped potager is now being made on a windswept slope. Joy is well-known as an author, journalist, and lecturer, and has taken part in many radio and television broadcasts. Her other books include Oriental Vegetables (1991), Salads for Small Gardens (1995), The Organic Salad Garden (2001), Grow Your Own Vegetables (2002), and revisions of the classic The Vegetable Garden Displayed. Joy has won the Garden Writer of the Year award three times and in 1993 was awarded the prestigious Veitch Memorial Medal for services to horticulture. In 2003 she was presented with the Garden Writers' Guild Lifetime Achievement award. She lives in Cork, Ireland.

Customer Reviews

A book to refer to time and again
This is a sumptuous book with an infectous enthusiasm for all things edible and decorative. It has become a firm favourite of mine. It offers loads of ideas of combinations, both formal and informal, which will work in gardens small and large, and the author conveys confidence in her readers' creative abilities which makes you yearn to have a go. She encourages experimentation and letting plants run to flower and seed, with disdain for the rigidly controlled potager. There is a detailed section at the back including 'planning for succession' for year round produce and beauty, and a 'directory' for detailed information on plant requirements and habits. The paper is fine quality and the wealth of pictures are gorgeous. A really lovely book.

Great book
If you're a creative person, and have a veg garden, then this book is for you.

It offers great inspiration on making the vegetable garden look good, getting away from the traditional straight lines, what to put with what in terms of textures and colours among other aspects, and how to create dramatic effects in the potager.

Lovely book.

Creative Vegetable Gardening review.
This is a lovely book to fill you with enthusiasm for growing vegetables. It shows many different ways of incorporating them into the garden as a whole. I liked it and would recommend it.