Overview

Vegetable gardening has made a comeback as a popular pastime in America. Yet gardeners are creating vegetable gardens with a difference; they are intended to be pleasing to the eye as well as a source for fresh produce. In an effort to beautify traditional vegetable gardens, landscape architects and amateur gardeners are finding inspiration in the elaborate European vegetable gardens of the 17th century. This text examines the historical antecedents of this modern movement as well as the changing perceptions of the beauty of vegetable gardens over time and among different cultures. Illustrated with over 100 historical and contemporary photographs and artwork highlighting material from the Smithsonian Institutions Archives of American Gardens, this book provides a wide-ranging discussion of such topics as the vegetable garden at Versailles, Ming dynasty vegetable gardens, the war gardens of World War I, World War II victory gardens - including those of the Japanese American internees - and vegetable still lifes. As the boundary between vegetable garden and flower garden has become blurred, the same is true for vegetables. Horticulturists have developed popular garden ornamentals fro

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9780520235229

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Using humble materials, Pennington tells a terrific story of the rise and fall of ornamental vegetable gardening between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and its comeback in the twentieth. The allure of her book is in its seamless lamination of scholarship and lucid narrative. The cast of supporting characters is made up of both familiar figures (Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Pope, etc.) and obscure heroes of horticulture and landscape architecture. Captivating and inspiring, this book will appeal to anyone who ever tried to grow something and eat it. -Dean MacCannell, author of The Tourist

Author Information

Susan J. Pennington was Enid A. Haupt Fellow in Horticulture at the Smithsonian Institution from 1999 to 2001. She is curator of the second exhibition in the Smithsonian's American Garden Legacy series and has appeared on PBS's The Victory Garden.

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