Product Description

Most gardeners know how rewarding it is to harvest ripe, sun-warmed tomatoes or pungent herbs straight from the garden. But those pleasures can be multiplied a hundredfold by creating a garden that is not only productive, but also a beautiful, well-integrated part of the home landscape. In this handsome volume, Jennifer Bartley shows how the traditional features of the classic kitchen garden, or potager, can be adapted to contemporary American needs and conditions. The book is informed by her conviction that the nurturing, preparing, and eating of fresh, home-grown vegetables contributes enormously both to our ties with the natural world and our ties to each other. Copiously illustrated with photographs and with the author’s delightful watercolors, "Designing the New Kitchen Garden" offers the perfect blend of inspiration and practical guidance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47934 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 222 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780881927726
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Booklist
Although the tradition of a potager, or kitchen garden, dates back to the Middle Ages, its application in contemporary gardens is a concept whose time has come. For those concerned with the freshness and purity of fruits, vegetables, and herbs, having a bountiful garden just steps from one's kitchen is the ultimate guarantor of healthy eating. Creating these intricately patterned outdoor rooms, however, can perplex even the most accomplished gardeners. Understanding the form is essential to creating an authentic potager, and to that end, Bartley provides extensive historical background, tracing the potager's inception in medieval Europe to its development in modern-day France, where the practice of kitchen gardening has been raised to an art form. Liberally peppered with dozens of detailed design plans from America's premier potagers, and augmented by comprehensive lists of suitable plants, Bartley's entertaining and educational guide to kitchen gardening provides well-documented support for everyone interested in establishing an edible garden in their own backyard. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Check out the stunning examples in this 222-page hardback, and then consider a new edible approach using some of this book's suggestions such as enclosing the kitchen garden and planting in modules instead of straight rows."—George Weigel, Harrisburg Patriot-News, July 6, 2006 (George Weigel, Harrisburg Patriot-News )

"The entire book is lavishly illustrated with many color photographs and drawings that should inspire dedicated ornamental gardeners to become more involved with edible plants, so they can have their stylishness and eat it, too!"—HortIdeas, July 2006 (HortIdeas )

"Throughout the book you'll find many easily made, charming garden structures, from blanching devices for rhubarb to wonderful tepees and wattle fencing. I can't wait to use them all in my own garden. Nearly every one of the chapters made me desperate to rush outside and get busy. I read this 222-page, information-packed book in one sitting."—Vern Nelson, Oregonian, May 25, 2006 (Vern Nelson Oregonian )

Check out the stunning examples in this 222-page hardback, and then consider a new edible approach using some of this book's suggestions such as enclosing the kitchen garden and planting in modules instead of straight rows.George Weigel, Harrisburg Patriot-News, July 6, 2006 (Harrisburg Patriot-News )

The entire book is lavishly illustrated with many color photographs and drawings that should inspire dedicated ornamental gardeners to become more involved with edible plants, so they can have their stylishness and eat it, too!HortIdeas, July 2006 (HortIdeas )

Throughout the book you'll find many easily made, charming garden structures, from blanching devices for rhubarb to wonderful tepees and wattle fencing. I can't wait to use them all in my own garden. Nearly every one of the chapters made me desperate to rush outside and get busy. I read this 222-page, information-packed book in one sitting.Vern Nelson, Oregonian, May 25, 2006 (Oregonian )

Review

“This lushly illustrated, 250-page hardback shows layouts for gardens planned to keep their visual appeal throughout the year, gardens that are virtually outdoor rooms.”

Customer Reviews

A great read on vegetable garden design. Buy It.
`Designing the New Kitchen Garden, An American Potager Handbook' by professional garden design consultant, Jennifer R. Bartley is a very serious book, absolutely perfect for the zone 6 snowbound gardener to buy in December, when nothing is growing, and it's even too cold to start hardscaping projects.

What I mean here is that not only does the book give very serious guidance on how to build a potager garden, it gives oodles of historical perspective on how the potager garden design evolved from pre-Christian times, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, with it's flowering in the monastary and royal gardens of France.

One thing to point out early in this review is that the book covers practically nothing about things culinary, in spite of the fact that various methods for categorizing this book put it cheek and jowl with books on culinary subjects, which is how I happened to run across it. But as long as I'm on the subject, its important to note that a good reference on gardening techniques must almost by definition have lots of interesting text and pictures for the armchair. While you can always cook, you cannot always garden, and in temperate climes, there will always be many months of down time. This book is the perfect antidote. In fact, as good as this book is, it is almost completely composed of material for thinking and planning and not about digging, laying stone, or planting. The `Designing' of the title must be taken very seriously. There are no recipes here for laying a gravel walk or laying out a herringbone brick path. Go to your Home Depot manuals and hardscaping texts for theses skills. On the other hand, there is a great collection of ideas one may not have normally thought of, should you have the proper venue to lay out the kind of garden discussed in this book.

I must say that the `potager' of the subtitle is the French word for `kitchen garden', which is how this book landed alongside texts on herbs and vegetables. But, the fact that this notion is originally French has as much or more to do with the subject as the `vegetable' part of the notion. The book does not really discuss your garden variety `victory garden'. It really takes on the design of formal gardens which are build to be grand orniments to the spirit as well as resources for the body.

All in all, this book is a kind of knot joining many different strands of ideas, including design for pleasant sights, design for culinary application, design for historical interest, and design for a refuge for the soul. To these ends, it covers a fair number of rather esoteric techniques such as esplanade and pergola design.

Just like the fact that it does not cover a lot of culinary material, it also does not cover a lot of horticultural material. There are no references in the index, for example, on `mulch', `weeding', or `pruning'. It does, however, cover `Christian Symbols', `Roman garden', and `Holy Roman Empire'.

It also gives a list of gardens one can visit, and I'm surprised that neither Longwood Gardens nor the Winthertur Museum are listed. There is a bibliography which I believe should include Amanda Hesser's `The Gardener and the Cook'. Aside from these miniscule nits, this is a great book for sparking wonder and ideas for the gardener.

Really, a smallish coffee table book
The sub-title for this book might be "A landscape designer dabbles prettily in vegetables" The book is beautifully produced, although I found the strong raking light in some of the photographs actually obscured the plants.

The chapter of historical background is almost worth the price of admission itself (if you're interested in history and the history of gardening) Although somewhat preciously phrased, the author does remind us of the connection of spirit, body, and garden, something we may forget when we in the middle of a vicious battle with cabbage loopers.

But the excursions into real gardens felt to me like a fantasy. If these gardens are meant to be inspiring, they failed with me. Every page I turned reminded me that these gardens are big, and clearly cost a lot of money to build and maintain. I never had a clear sense of the good eating that should be coming out of these gardens. And of course, nothing ever seems to go wrong in these gardens; there is no sense of how the gardeners have learned and evolved their gardens over time.

For a book ostensibly about "American" potager gardening, most of the country was omitted. Including midwest, southern, and western garden would have been a big help.

The design chapter starts off on the wrong foot by discussing a potager garden that was never built. Even worse, it was never built in a large urban space with which few of us will ever have to contend, so I fail to see the point. The second garden design discussed, designed for a small restaurant, also has not been built. The third garden is the author's own, now giving me the uncomfortable feeling that the entire book is a vanity project.

When the winter weather keeps you indoors, this will not a bad book to page through; just don't let it be the only book on your shelf about potager gardening.

Semi-formal vegetable garden?
The concept of edible landscaping is given a boost toward a practical and beautiful kitchen garden in this book. The history behind kitchen gardens ("potagers", that is gardens designed around culinary use rather than solely appearance) is interesting and lively, and the sections on a few modern garden case studies is useful.

The book stumbles a bit in assuming you already know elements of design, and doesn't discuss the practical considerations of some of them. The examples of "shade mapping" could use a little explanation alongside the drawings; I found them confusing. And there's very little discussion of what to plant when -- presumably you'll decide these on your own with various seed catalogs spread around you, if you can find catalogs that detail things such as plant height and habit, colors and seasons. I haven't found many vegetable seed catalogs that spend time on these sorts of topics, and I was hoping this book would provide some illumination.

Still, there are plenty of suggestions and examples for making your vegetable garden a place of beauty as well as a producer of foods and herbs for your kitchen. My personal leanings are toward the concept that a vegetable garden is beautiful if you can see the significant amount of food you'll be eating from it and so regular plots of densely packed plants are just fine; but I'm sure my spouse will enjoy the more formal look the veggies and herbs will take on in next year's garden as a result of this book.

Do you want a vegetable garden that people -- non-gardening people -- would actually want to walk through? Are you capable of designing a beautiful layout but need a nudge in the right directions? Then this is a good book for you. I'd have prefered more meat in it, so to speak, particularly for the $35 I spent on it.