Joy Larkcom

Joy Larkcom (born 1935) is a British organic gardener, gardening writer and lecturer. In 1993 the Royal Horticultural Society awarded her the Veitch Memorial Medal. The Garden Writers' Guild (now renamed the Garden Media Guild) honoured her three times with the Garden Writer of the Year Award and in 2003 with the Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Quotes

• The benefits of shelter cannot be exaggerated. Research has shown that sheltering vegetables from even light winds can increase their yields by up to 30 per cent — which is equivalent to the increase in returns from optimum irrigation or optimum fertilizer use. The bents of sheltering plants from severe winds are considerably higher. In coastal areas, windbreaks also give protection from wind-borne salt spray.
  • Grow Your Own Vegetables. Frances Lincoln. 2013. p. 20. ISBN 9781781011348.  (384 pages; Faber & Faber published the 1st edition in 1976 and the revised 2nd edition in 1986 under the title Vegetables from Small Gardens.)

• By the 1980s we had reorganized our kitchen garden and laid it out in parallel narrow beds — a practical, efficient, centuries-old system, enabling the gardener to develop a high state of fertility in the beds. ...
  Not long afterwards I made my first Little Potager, an area nor more than 6½ by 4½ m/20 by 15 ft. It was later enclosed in an undulating woven willow fence. Then followed a Winter Potage, primarily for edible plants which retain leaf, stem or flower colour in winter; these include leeks, hardy Chinese mustards, purple-flowering pak choi, hardy chicories, Swiss chard, kales, corn salad, 'Parcel' celery and winter pansies. Partially edged with low, stopover apples, the Winter Potager is surrounded on three sides by a trellis of vines, clematis and honeysuckle. With luck it remains colourful and decorative even in mid-winter. The full story is told in my book Creative Vegetable Gardening, but what is relevant here is the decorative potential of so many salad plants.
  • The Salad Garden. Frances Lincoln. 2017. p. 13. ISBN 9781781012260.  (288 pages; 1st edition 1984)

• ... of all the Oriental vegetables, the brassicas (crucifers), a group roughly defined as members of the cabbage family, should prove the most rewarding for Westerners to get to know and grow. An amazingly diverse group, it includes the sturdy, bud-like heads of Chinese cabbage (already well known in the West), the crisp white- and green-stemmed pak chois, choy sum and Chinese broccoli with their delicious flowering shoots, the pretty fern-leaved mizuna greens and the many types of mustard. Within the mustards there are exceptionally hardy varieties with beautiful purple-hued leaves, compact-headed mustards and forms with weirdly swollen but highly prized stems and roots.
  • Oriental Vegetables: The Complete Guide for the Gardening Cook (revised ed.). Kodansha America. 2008. p. 12. ISBN 9781568363707.  (232 pages; 1st edition 1991)

• Vegetable growing is a passion with people from all walks of life, all races, all ages, and the plots they cultivate range from large country gardens to allotments, to tiny urban patches, to window boxes. For me, it is a very personal passion. In the 1970s my husband and I and our two young children spent a year touring western Europe in a caravan, studying vegetable growing and collecting old varieties. We "rediscovered" forgotten salad plants like rocket and chicory, as well as the then new red and green Italian Lollo lettuces. On our return we introduced them to the UK, along with the productive cut-and-come-again technique for growing salad seedlings.
  • (5 April 2008) "The original hunter gatherer". The Guardian.

Quotes about Joy Larkcom

• Her book Grow your Own Vegetables is a masterpiece of good sense; I have read it more than once. And her Creative Vegetable Gardening is, as books go, my happy place, one I head back to whenever I feel uninspired by my own garden.
  So imagine how excited I was when I got an invitation to her retirement vegetable garden that sits on a windswept corner of West Cork. She and Don, her husband, converted it from a paddock in just under 10 years.
  As a garden, it is everything I hoped for. Relaxed, a little messy perhaps to some (but not to the wildlife), joyous with colour and filled to the brim with food. I squished many cabbage white caterpillars in return for some lemon verbena tea. If you want to read more about her garden, buy Just Vegetating. It is much more than simply a memoir – it also takes in her travels in the pursuit of the best vegetables from Europe to China.
  • Alys Fowler, (19 October 2012) "Alys Fowler: ode to Joy Larkcom. 'Her writing is a window into a world of vegetable growing that barely exists any more'". The Guardian.

External links

• Media related to Joy Larkcom on Wikimedia Commons
• Jayes, Phoebe (18 April 2023) . "An interview with the 'queen of vegetables', Joy Larkcom". The English Garden Magazine.
• Profile - Joy Larkcom. grahamrice.com.