The New Kitchen Garden (Dk Living) - Softcover

Pavord, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0789441195 ISBN 13: 9780789441195

Publisher: Dorling Kindersley, 1999

Synopsis

English gardening expert Anna Pavord guides the reader in creating a productive and beautiful kitchen garden, covering topics from design and structure to cultivar selection. As with most British fruit and vegetable guides, many suggested plants are not available in the US, but the sage advice and inspiring photographs more than compensate. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

Review:

"To Vanessa," runs the dedication to Anna Pavord's yardstick manual of creative kitchen gardening, "who planted a weed garden." None of your boring rows of antediluvian cabbages here then: Pavord's vision of a "new kitchen garden" is a flexible contemporary version of that long-vanished institution, the potager, a garden where special vegetables were grown with flowering plants in arrangements that were both productive and pleasing to the eye.

Pavord's contemporary spins on the theme include an alcoholic hedge and a city larder, but traditional designs get a look-in, too; even the oh-so-precious formal herb garden receives a much-needed fillip of imagination and colour.

Pavord traces the historical accidents that set vegetables off from flowering plants, to the detriment of both, in an introduction full of the "buttery bonus" of artichokes and the "elegiac performance of a mature pear". Past the verbiage lie row upon row of well-tended plant lists, instructions on planting, growing, harvesting and storing, recommended cultivars, and homely recipes to feed that Laura Ashley moment. DK Living's surgical house layout has set many a set of teeth on edge in the past, but there's no denying its clarity and usefulness in a book so rich in information and advice.

For Pavord, growing food is our last and best connection to our earth. Evoking the paradisal gardens of a time when growing food meant survival, Pavord assures the reader that "there is no reason why you too should not be in that same state of delicious fluctuation." And you can't say fairer than that. --Simon Ings

Synopsis:

Explains how to create beautiful gardens with a wide range of fruits and vegetables, details how to incorporate fresh produce into all types of gardens, and provides expert advice on cultivation and garden design.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dorling Kindersley
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0789441195
• ISBN 13: 9780789441195
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208