HAVE you just about given up on ever finding that local organic vegetable coop, the one that is open every other Saturday except when you go looking for it?
Anna Pavord's new book, devoted to growing fruit and vegetables in and among the flower beds, couldn't come at a better time, what with all the endless talk about additives, hormones, antibiotics you know the dirge. So forget the co-op! Start you own! It's a fine time to start growing things to eat as well as admire.
"It's a very great pleasure to walk through the garden and pluck something edible. It can be deeply satisfying and it's the surest way to know the provenance of the food you're eating," she says with captivating ease.
"Besides, the alternative is too often over priced and tasteless. Have you noticed how supermarkets are selling `ripened on the vine' tomatoes these days as if this was something unique? Where else would they have ripened?"
She speaks convincingly about the "long and resonant" tradition of gardening and of the value of following a calendar which has nothing to do with trains, traffic jams and dentist appointments.
"Think of the sense of pride you get when sitting down to a supper that you have made entirely with produce from your own plot. You need to make the most of those moments. After the pride comes the inevitable fall, when somebody finds a caterpillar, mummified, in the artistically arranged spears of calabrese on their plate. Well, The New Kitchen Garden is a richly informed book, one to encourage every level of gardener to set about discovering calabrese as well as incumbent caterpillars.
Writer and presenter of the Channel 4 series Flowering Passions, associate editor of Gardening Illustrated, gardening correspondent for the London Independent and the author of several acclaimed books, Anna Pavord is one of the most professional and endearing proponents of contemporary gardening. She is a superb plants woman who readily communicates her expertise, gleaned from working her garden in Dorset. Her recent The Border Book sold over 145,000 copies her next project is a less populist study of tulips.
She finds the work being done throughout Ireland very exciting "and it all seems to be happening at galloping speed". She is a great admirer of Darina Allen's exceptionally beautiful as well as functional gardens at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in east Cork. The Allens garden was photographed for the book, the mixture of formality and practicality illustrating perfectly Anna Pavord's notion of the ideal kitchen garden.
And that ideal is clearly illustrated here, thanks in part to the publisher Dorling Kindersley's usual high design standards.
It begins with a section devoted to garden styles from elaborate potagers to plans for the tiniest of apartment balconies. You want to take spade in hand immediately.
Information follows on a wide range of vegetables, herbs and fruit to combine with flowers in a decorative kitchen garden. The third section provides ground rules for planning and cultivation techniques.
"Gardening shouldn't become too precious ... Plants are not scatter cushions, you know," says Anna Pavord.
"And there's no such thing as a bad garden," she says kindly, her bright, cobalt blue eyes fixed on the novice. "Even if you follow all the rules, you may still have disasters. Do, not worry. There is always another spring."