Inspired by elegant Old World garden designs, Jan and Michael Gertley mingle flowers and vegetables to create gardens bountiful in color and produce. In this book they share their garden designs, including grid drawings, full-color planting plans, and brilliant color photos. These ready-to-use plans are suitable for a yard or garden of any size.

Plant colors, textures, heights, and shapes work together to create lush designs that produce an abundant harvest. Every step of the process, from turning the first shovelful of earth to harvesting, is explained. Growing tips and design ideas come from two experts who make their living producing robust flowers and vegetables and vivid images. These gardens are perfect for the vegetable gardener wanting to add color and artistic flair and for the flower gardener wanting to grow fresh vegetables for the dinner table.

Winner of ForeWord magazines 1999 Book of the Year Award for the Home & Garden Category.

Introduction

1 Lessons from the Past

2 Garden designs throughout history

3 Designing Your Kitchen Garden

A design for every kitchen garden
Finding inspiration for designs
Design decisions
Drawing your kitchen-garden design

4 Plant Selection

Mixing colors
Adding texture
Combining heights
Arranging plants

5 Growing Basics

Growing from seed
Buying seedlings

6 From Graph Paper to Garden

Garden preparation
Installation of garden features
Garden maintenance
Harvest

USDA Plant-Hardiness Zone Map

Sources of Seeds and Supplies

Further Reading

Index

Beyond the flower beds, tucked away at the far corner of our backyard, was a square of well-tilled soil reserved for our yearly plot of vegetables. Each spring, we arranged our garden in the same manner: successive, straight rows of leafy green vegetables, with small, compact varieties in the foreground and taller ones gradually ascending toward the rear. If any plants needed support, we quickly hammered together trellises with materials at hand. This frugal garden was very functional and productive. However, it lacked style.

Several years ago, while searching through a stack of garden books (one of our favorite pastimes), we were captivated by photographs and engravings of old European kitchen gardens. Recent restoration programs have returned many of these magnificent gardens to their former glory, allowing us to glean inspiration from the old master gardeners. The traditional walled Victorian kitchen garden at Chilton Foliat in Berkshire, England, and the grand potager at Chateau de Villandry, France, were two of the beautifully restored kitchen gardens that started us thinking about our own vegetable garden in a new way.

We didn't have the time, space, or desire to care for a large, sprawling garden. However, on a much smaller scale, we were inspired to transform our simple plot of vegetables into a visually stunning kitchen garden that reflected the old-world elegance of the European kitchen gardens. As we began designing our garden--mingling flowers, herbs, and vegetables--we followed the same important rules European gardeners adhered to centuries before: attention to detail, artistic presentation, and color coordination. The result is a beautiful, productive kitchen garden that we proudly display in the center of our landscape.

It's important to note that you don't have to seek your inspiration for design ideas from gardens of the past. If you open up your imagination, potential designs for kitchen gardens are ubiquitous. An heirloom quilt, a Japanese family crest, or a piece of honeycomb can all be the catalyst for what just may be your best garden ever.

The kitchen gardens presented in this book walk a fine line between ornamental gardens and productive vegetable gardens. The majority of the flowers used are not edible, and many of the vegetables are used for their ornamental beauty. There's no arguing that your garden would produce two to three times more vegetables if you laid it out in conventional, straight rows, but we look at the value of our harvest in both aesthetic and utilitarian terms.

This book is a culmination of our experimentation. It's a guide for designing practical, productive, and aesthetically pleasing kitchen gardens. The book takes you step-by-step from inspiration and design through installation and harvest. Whether you design your own kitchen garden or use the patterns we present here, you can create a beautiful and productive kitchen garden.

Customer Reviews from Amazon

The Art of the Kitchen Garden is a visually stunning book. It was on my wish list for a year waiting for a decent copy to come along. But it was like eating a box of chocolates-overloaded and left unsatisfied. I thought there would be "more". But I let the book sit for a bit. I recently returned to it and savored one piece at time and enjoyed it so much more. I appreciate the shopping list of what plants to purchase or to start in the greenhouse if you wanted to copy a design.

I found the negative review about this book being "nothing more then a coffee table book" puzzling since this book is anything but On the contrary it is not a quick read but rather a source for everything from ancient recipes to history and detailed descriptions of choices and plans and more You not only get to decide what type of garden you want your kitchen garden to be YOU UNDERSTAND WHY This book helps you to understand why staples like box and hyssop and lavender for traditional picks of ancient gardens and are still popular in the educated kitchen gardeners plan today Kitchen gardens were not always about what just tasted good but also having a steady supply of those herbs and plants that have multiple uses like medicinal

That is what is mean by the title THE ONLY BOOK YOU WILL NEED FOR YOUR KITCHEN GARDEN because this book is anything BUT a meaningless but pretty coffee table decoration!

Excellent illustrations (pictures and charts) to help define a kitchen garden. Could be more practical for small home gardens.

This book is lovely and inspirational and full of good ideas. I do not have time for such an elaborate garden but I have planted mine using many of their ideas an it is beautiful and functional.

For a couple minutes you may marvel at this book, and then you'll quickly realize it's full of repetition of a theme -- same style, same border plants, sameness throughout. Worse than that, however, is the fact that if you even bothered to lay one of these out it would look just right for only a week or so before you wanted to pick something but decided against it so as not to throw off the symmetry, or worse one part of your composition died away and made the rest useless. Gardening is hard enough work without resorting to this. I have a pretty kitchen garden thanks to borders of allyssum and gravel paths, but it's not as insane as this where I would constantly be dismayed it was dying or wanted to pick something (heaven forbid). There are many books on pretty kitchen gardens. This is a book for people who want to achieve something surreal that will ultimately make them miserable very shortly thereafter. Stop by my house. I'll give you this book for free. Worthless. Sameness. Boring. Useless.

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