The Edible Flower Garden is a beautiful collection of flowers that can be used for cookery: from candied violets and roses to decorate appetizers and cakes, to nasturtiums for a colorful shrimp salad, to day lily buds, pink clover, and wild mustard flowers that are tossed together in a spectacular stir-fry.
Rosalind Creasy is an award-winning garden and food writer, photographer, and landscape designer with a passion for beautiful vegetables and fruits combined with the strong conviction that gardening should be an ecologically positive endeavor. Her first book, the bestselling "The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping," written in 1982, stood as the seminal book on the subject for more than 25 years. It was one of the first American landscaping books to advocate organic methods, encourage recycling, and provide alternatives to resource-wasting gardening techniques. It served to move edibles out of their former sheltered backyard existence into the prominence of the front yard. Since the book's publication, the term "edible landscaping" has become part of horticultural, architectural, and common jargon.
An accomplished photographer, Ros was among the first to photograph the then-unknown heirloom tomatoes and melons, blue potatoes and corn, mesclun salad greens, and edible flowers. She popularized these and other outstanding, but little-known vegetables, in her 1988 book "Cooking From the Garden." Once again her writing broke new ground, introducing the American public to a vast new palette (and palate) of vegetables like candy cane striped 'Chioggia' beets; purple, red, white, and yellow carrots; 'Rosa Bianca' eggplants, baby bok choi, 'Rainbow' chard, chipotle peppers, purple artichokes, and other culinary delights that started out in high-end restaurants and now are seen in farmers markets and home gardens across the country.
Frustrated by America's penchant for lawns, for the last twenty-five years Ros has used her front garden to showcase an ever-changing display of edible ornamentals from A to Z, including 'Pink Pearl' apples, thornless blackberries, purple cauliflower, Kaffir lime, variegated peppermint, and golden zucchini and in themes as diverse as a Magic Circle Herb Garden to The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and a vegetable maze. Her engaging gardens welcome friends and neighbors; children regularly stop by to feed the chickens.
Rosalind is a much sought-after speaker and lecturer, addressing groups as diverse as Master Gardeners, Idaho Landscape Designers, horticultural societies from coast to coast, the Garden Writers Association, college landscaping programs, Celebrity Cruises, Seed Savers Exchange Annual Convention, Monticello, and Colonial Williamsburg. Her magnificent photography--not only of her own unique and enviable gardens, edible harvests, and cuisine, but also of gardens and gardeners she has visited--enriches her talks, enticing and inspiring audiences across the country.
Since 1982, Rosalind has written 18 books on gardening and cooking, including "Cooking from the Garden" and "Rosalind Creasy's Recipes From the Garden," and the children's book"Blue Potatoes, Orange Tomatoes, How to Grow a Rainbow Garden." Her works have garnered some prestigious awards: Edible Landscaping won the Garden Writers Association (GWA) Quill & Trowel Award, as did Earthly Delights. Cooking from the Garden won the GWA Award of Excellence, In 1999 Ros was made a "Fellow" in the Garden Writers Association, an honor bestowed on only 64 people in the organization's 60 years, and in 2009 was inducted into the Garden Writers prestigious Hall of Fame.
Her varied and unique skills are in high demand. For more than a decade, she has been the exclusive photographer for a number of calendars, including the best-selling Seed Savers Calendar. In the past few years, Ros' photography and writing have been featured numerous magazines including Mother Earth News, Gardening How-To, Country Decorating, Sunset magazine, The LA Times, and Southwest Airline's Spirit Magazine. She has been a guest on NPR's "Science Friday with Ira Flatow" and APM's "The Splendid Table" with Lynn Rosetto Casper.
An acclaimed landscape designer, her gardens range beyond California, with design installations at The New York Botanical Garden and Powell Gardens in Kansas City.
