Creative Vegetable Gardening, Paperback

A new edition of the classic guide to creating stunning decorative effects in the vegetable garden, where edible plants combine with flowers and foliage to create a beautiful outdoor space.
'Larkcom is a marvellous grower and writer, and so inspirational. This book not only offers her many years of wisdom on how to grow edible plants, but also shows many ways of doing so as beautifully as possible.' Monty Don, Daily Mail

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.

Hailed as 'the doyenne of the kitchen garden' by Sarah Raven, Joy Larkcom has been growing and writing about vegetables for more than forty years. Her work has been influenced by travels in Europe, China, Japan, the USA and Canada as she's sought out new edible plants and cultivation techniques.

Over recent years she 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.

Joy is a well-known author, journalist and lecturer. Her other books include Oriental Vegetables, Salads for Small Gardens, The Organic Salad Garden, Grow Your Own Vegetables and her recently published memoir, Just Vegetating. Joy has won the Garden Writer of the Year award three times and was awarded the prestigious Veitch Memorial Medal for services to horticulture. In 2003 she was presented with the Garden Writers' Guild Lifetime Achievement award.