Editorial Reviews

Book 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.

Customer Reviews

Great Gift for Garden Loving Friend! by Rachel Kissinger
I bought this book as a gift for my friend Ellen, who loves gardening. She was thrilled!!

Gardener’s inspiration by Catherine E. Bailey
This book is filled with beautiful pictures and explanations that inspire and educate. Ms. Bartley has her own garden and I felt that I benefited from her own experience. After reading this book, I was ready to place a potager’s garden in my own back yard.

Really, a smallish coffee table book by amazon oldster
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? by John B. Batzel
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.

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