CREATIVE VEGETABLE GARDENING

by JOY LARKCOM

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Large new softcover book, 208 pages, published 2008

Tells how to create decorative effects in the vegetable garden, where food plants combine with flowers and foliage to create a "tapestry effect". This book 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.

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.

About the author

Joy Larkcom has been growing vegetables for over 40 years and is 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. Over recent years, Joy has concentrated on the potager concept, making the kitchen plot a beautiful feature in itself. She created several small potagers in Suffolk before moving to Southern Ireland, where a fan-shaped potager has been made on a windswept slope.

As well as having built herself an enviable reputation as an author and gardener, Joy is also a well known journalist, lecturer and a radio and television broadcaster. Her other books include Oriental Vegetables, Salads for Small Gardens, The Organic Salad Garden, Grow Your Own Vegetables, 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 November 2003 Joy was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Garden Writers Guild.

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Creative Vegetable Gardening - Joy Larkcom