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.

Two women have moulded and influenced the way I garden. The first is my mother, who gave me the genes to garden as I do, and the second is Joy Larkcom. No one else manages to marry a relaxed, joyful approach to gardening with science and trialling. You can truly trust what she says ... her Creative Vegetable Gardening is, as book go, my happy place, one I head back to whenever I feel uninspired by my own garden. -- Alys Fowler The Guardian Joy Larkcom is the Elizabeth David of veg growing ... Veg growers everywhere owe an enormous debt to Joy Larkcom, the doyenne of the kitchen garden. -- Sarah Raven The Daily Telegraph 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

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. Joy's eloquent and humorous style of writing has done much to popularise 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, Salads for Small Gardens, The Organic Salad Garden, Grow Your Own Vegetables and her recently published autobiography, Just Vegetating. 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.