Coffee Table Book of: The Vegetable Garden (Hardcover)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: The Vegetable Garden is a large format book about the vegetable garden through the year, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: crops growing in the beds and under glass, the harvest laid out and hung to keep, and the garden in frost and snow.

The garden itself has an arched wooden door in a high brick wall, a potager of clipped boxwood and mixed beds, a raised bed of weathered timber, a round bed edged with woven wattle and a young fruit tree in white blossom. Under glass, tomatoes climb strings in a timber greenhouse and grapes hang from the roof, cold frames stand propped open and glass cloches sit over young lettuces in the frost.

Roots and leaves follow: carrots in purple, yellow, white and orange, a striped beetroot cut in two, potatoes with red, purple and golden skins, onions bent over at the neck, a red cabbage beaded with rain, chard on stalks of crimson and gold lit by low sun, a romanesco head of spiralling cones and a cauliflower wrapped in its own leaves.

Beans, peas and corn climb canes, twiggy sticks and one another. Heirloom tomatoes of many colours lie cut on grey stone beside white and purple aubergines, with sweet peppers and chillies close by, and a squash flower opens at dawn above pumpkins and winter squashes heaped on straw and pale bottle gourds hanging in a tunnel of vines.

Herbs and fruit fill the summer: rosemary, thyme and sage in a stone edged bed, chives, borage and nasturtiums in flower, a pear trained flat in tiers on a sunlit wall, a fan of nectarines, a fruit cage of black netting, translucent redcurrants, raspberries and strawberries on golden straw.

Short notes run through the book, on how the crops grow and are kept, the glass and walls that shelter them, and the old words behind their names: wattle, thin rods woven between upright stakes, has edged beds and made fences since prehistoric times, market gardeners once grew winter salads under rows of glass bells set over beds of warm manure, a striped beetroot cut raw shows rings of pink and white, which blur to an even pink once cooked, and a leek is a biennial, making leaves in its first year and flowering and setting seed in its second.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a hardcover with the art printed on the case.