Customer Reviews

Art of the Kitchen Garden

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was apprehensive about buying this book because so many gardening books are mostly pictures with little really good info. Not so with this book. It's full of helpful ideas, great pictures and old-fashioned inspiration. I know I will keep this one handy for years, maybe decades to come.

After reading this book, I am DETERMINED to try my hand at creating a Kitchen garden in this way. Why not have a vegetable garden that is beautiful to look at? The idea of mixing flowers and vegetables is charming and effective. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to put some fun and whimsey into their garden.

The Gertleys' book concentrates on the design styles for a kitchen garden, based on the parterre de broderie, which achieved its ultimate glory at Versailles. They use a series of simple geometric shapes to achieve their parterre gardens as their designs become increasingly complex. They derive design inspiration from Celtic knots, Japanese crests, and quilt patterns.

Their designs are inspirational to view however, their gardens are very demanding of their creators. The designs might raise or fall on the placement of a radish and are not especially functional. I am a cook first, gardener second, and artist last when it comes to potagers.

Their methodology requires far more nitty-gritty planning than suits my preferred approach. It often appears at counter purposes to a kitchen garden that is meant to supply the table since it is so meticulously groomed and cared for and harvested with such additional planning in order not to destroy the patterns made by the vegetables.

The book's approach is much like Charlie Tuna asking; "Do you want tunas with good taste? Or, do you want tuna dat tastes good?"

I admire the design talent and illustrations if not the philosophy.

A gorgeous fantasy for the gardener who wants everything. Replete with color photographs, charts and plans, the Gertleys' combinations of flowers and vegetables in formal designs satisfy the desire for beauty, productivity and the urge to impress the neighbors.

Beginning with an overview of gardens of the past, the authors proceed to design, discussing elements of color, texture and space and offering specific and detailed photos and plans for gardens inspired by anything from quilts to honeycombs to a scaled down version of the kitchen garden at the Chateau de Villandry in France.

In addition to detailed designs, the Gertleys offer guidelines and advice for drawing on your own inspiration, from mixing colors and adding elements of texture (organic or artificial) to plant height and arrangement. On the less creative side of things, they discuss planting timing and harvesting, growing from seed and buying seedlings and garden preparation and maintenance.

The practical advice is basic; useful but almost an afterthought. Weeds, for instance, don't get mentioned until page 134. The designs, however, are well illustrated - from flourishing result back to graph paper plot and plant placement. This is a book for gardeners with time and ambition and dreamers who just love to look.

This is a book for any library. Examples & ideas for large or small gardens. Easy to follow directions with great illustrations & pictures. It helped me in my garden design & I've planted these ideas this year. Have given this book out as gifts. I look forward to more from this author.

I thouroughly enjoyed this book! I found it full of creative and do-able ideas for the avid gardner who wants more than an ordinary vegetable garden. I love the art and color this book brings to the garden. The Gertleys help you through the entire process of garden design, from where to look for inspiration to layout to plant selection. Full of color pictures and diagrams, I was delighted with this book.

I really wanted a useful book that would help to develop a kitchen garden, but this book is really just a beautiful coffee table book with pictures of lovely gardens.

If you want a book that tells you how to go about GROWING things, skip this one.

This book does a fine job of showing us what one can do with vegetables if one wants to make designs in the garden, rather than simply grow and devour the poor plants. The problem is, this only goes so far. After ten or so suggestions for arranging Swiss chard and cabbage, beautiful though they may be, I got the point rather quickly. Though I am glad to have seen this book and spent some time with the pictures, I would not want to reserve a space on my shelf for it.

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.

I love it. It's beautiful to look at. It is creative and has lots of pictures of techniques and colours etc. You can buy a practicle vegie growing book on when to plant tomatoes and avoiding pests anywhere. This book is about how to grow it to look good. It discusses height of plants, border plants, colour (green and texture leaf), styles for different gardens. You will also love anything you can find on Chateau Villandry - The French Kithcen Garden is amazing. They have a great website too.