Introduction

It is almost impossible to believe, from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, how my garden and gardening ideas have changed since I first started growing vegetables seriously in the 1970s. Then my garden was a very plain plot (an allotment in fact), whereas today our Suffolk kitchen garden includes several picturesque little ‘potagers’ – each carefully designed to have shape, colour and form all year round. Way back then the salad plants we grew could be counted on the fingers of one hand; lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, radish… Today, during the course of two or three seasons, we grow well over 150 salad plants.

Finding these plants and learning how to grow them has been a long and wonderful voyage of discovery. Its first ‘leg’ was what we fondly called our ‘Grand Vegetable Tour’. In August 1976, my husband Don Pollard and I, with our children Brendan and Kirsten, who were then seven and five years old, left Montrose Farm for a year to travel around Europe in a caravan. Our main purpose was to learn about traditional and modern methods of vegetable growing, and to collect the seed of local varieties of vegetables, which, as a handful of far-sighted people had begun to appreciate, were an invaluable genetic heritage that was vanishing fast.

Moving in a southward arc, we travelled from Holland to Hungary, through Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Yugoslavia. We gleaned information from seedsmen, seed catalogues and the backs of seed packets; from research stations and markets; from market gardeners, peasants, cooks, botanists and housewives. We managed to collect seed of quite a number of old local varieties (over 100 samples were safely housed in the seed bank later established at Wellesbourne in the UK), and we learnt a great deal about cultivation methods. But we were totally unprepared for the many new salad plants we found, especially plants that could be grown in the colder months of the year. In Holland, Belgium, France and Italy we found beautiful varieties of lettuce, chicory and endive that were previously unknown to us; in Belgium we ‘discovered’ sparkling iceplant (Mesembyranthemum crystallinum) and winter purslane or claytonia (Montia perfoliata), that pretty escapee from the American continent; and in Italy, in early spring, we saw people parking their cars on motorways to scour the fields for young leaves of wild plants – our first inkling of that vast neglected heritage of wild plants that can be used raw. Coupled with these new plants were new ideas on how to grow salad plants, above all the ‘cut-and-come-again’ concept (see here). This extends from cutting broadcast patches of seedlings up to five times, to cutting mature heads of chicory, endive and lettuce and leaving the stumps to resprout for further pickings. We returned home eager to try out these new plants and ideas.

Shortly afterwards I was asked to take part in an exhibition on the history of English gardening at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and this led me to old English gardening books, a hitherto unknown world to me. I discovered John Evelyn’s Acetaria: a Discourse of Sallets, written in 1699, and his Directions for the Gardiner at Says Court, compiled a few years earlier; I also discovered Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening (1728) and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classics. One day in the British Museum I tracked down a frail, handwritten, fifteenth-century cookery book, with one of the earliest known lists of ‘herbes for a salade’. These books were a revelation, for here were lists, written hundreds of years ago, of the sort of salad plants we had found still being cultivated on the Continent, along with instructions for growing seedling crops, for forcing and blanching salad plants for winter use, for gathering plants from the wild, and even for using flowers, flower buds and shoot tips in salads, either fresh or pickled for winter.

At about the same time, suspecting another untapped treasure trove of useful salad plants, I began to try out some of the Chinese and Japanese vegetables that were becoming available through enterprising seed catalogues. This proved to be the start of a ten-year odyssey, taking me to China, Taiwan, Japan and later to the USA and Canada, unravelling the mysteries of Asian vegetables. The fast-growing leafy greens, above all, came to play a key role in our own salad making.

On our return from our European travels, we turned our garden into a small, experimental market garden run on organic principles. We supplied unusual vegetables to wholefood and health shops, our speciality being bags of mixed fresh salads, which we called ‘saladini’. Even though our winter temperatures were often as low as -10°C/14°F, we found that it was quite possible, using unheated polythene tunnels, to grow fresh salads all year round. We usually managed to produce at least twenty different types of plant for each bag.

Growing salads for sale and researching oriental vegetables ran in parallel for several years. All the while I was becoming increasingly aware of how on one hand many people had only tiny areas in which to grow vegetables, but on the other there was a reluctance to grow vegetables in the typical small front garden, as they were deemed ‘ugly’ or at best ‘inappropriate’. Yet what was more beautiful than the ‘Purple Giant’ mustard, feathery fennel, deeply curled red Lollo lettuce or the glossy, serrated leaves of mizuna greens? What could be more productive and vibrant-looking than a small patch of pak choi, dill or golden purslane? Vegetable plots, I was convinced, can feed the soul as well as the body.

The happy marriage of beauty and productivity lies at the heart of the modern ‘potager’. Although ‘potager’ is no more than the ordinary French word for a kitchen garden (the place where vegetables are grown for ‘potage’, or soup) it has been hijacked to mean any vegetable plot which has been artistically designed, making it a place of intrinsic beauty. So a potager may be enclosed by a hedge, fence, wall or trained fruit; there may be arches and seats to add a structural element; the beds may be of varying shapes and sizes and grouped to form patterns; and thought will have been given to the paths between the beds and edging materials. Above all, the vegetables will be chosen and grown to enhance their natural beauty. They offer a palette with which a living painting can be created. I began to use that palette, and have been using it ever since.

By the 1980s we had reorganized our kitchen garden and laid it out in parallel narrow beds – a practical, efficient, centuries-old system, enabling the gardener to develop a high state of fertility in the beds. My first steps in ‘painting’ with vegetables were making ‘patchwork quilts’ in these narrow beds. Initially I simply interplanted red and green lettuces; then I sowed cut-and-come-again lettuce in parallel drills in small patches. I would have, say, green Salad Bowl lettuce in the first patch, sown in one direction, and red Salad Bowl in the next, the rows at right angles to the first patch. I got such a kick out of watching the seedlings emerge; neat little bands at first, within a week or so merging into a solid, colourful patchwork.

Not long afterwards I made my first Little Potager, an area no more than 61/2 by 41/2m/20 by 15 ft. It was later enclosed in an undulating woven willow fence. Then followed a Winter Potager, primarily for edible plants which retain leaf, stem or flower colour in winter; these include leeks, hardy Chinese mustards, purple-flowering pak choi, hardy chicories, Swiss chard, kales, corn salad, ‘Parcel’ celery and winter pansies. Partially edged with low, stepover apples, the Winter Potager is surrounded on three sides by a trellis of vines, clematis and honeysuckle. With luck it remains colourful and decorative even in mid-winter. The full story is told in my book Creative Vegetable Gardening, but what is relevant here is the decorative potential of so many salad plants.

Here are some of the ways I use salad plants to create visual effects. To get height, a key element in potagers, I train tomatoes up attractive spiral steel supports, sometimes intermingling them with ornamental climbers like Ipomoea lobata (previously Mina lobata) or canary creeper (Tropaeolum peregrinum). Red orache and the purple-hued giant spinach Chenopodium giganteum ‘Magentaspreen’ are plants that reach theatrical heights, both being useful additions to salads in their early stages. I always leave a few clumps of chicory to run to seed in their second season – they too grow over 2m/7ft high, producing fresh flushes of sky-blue (edible) flowers every morning over many weeks. The giant winter radishes will do the same, making glorious pink- or white-flowered clumps in their second spring, and a seemingly endless crop of delectable, edible seed pods.

The patterns in this narrow bed are outlined with a zigzag of multi-sown leeks. The right-hand triangles are planted with gold-leaved purslane, the left with mixed red lettuce.

Lettuces of different types and colours can be used to create delightful effects. Clockwise from left: green butterhead, red Salad Bowl, red Lollo, green crisphead.

To make the most impact with colourful plants, I almost always plant in groups at equidistant spacing rather than in traditional rows. Favourites are ‘Bull’s Blood’ beetroot, with its scarlet leaves, red cabbage, ornamental cabbages and kales, and the many bright red lettuces now available. For textured effects I value the ground-hugging iceplant, glossy-leaved purslanes, dill and fennel. And every year I succumb to the temptation to make patterns with the many salad plants grown as cut-and-come-again seedlings. I sow them in circles, waves, triangles, zigzags – whatever takes my fancy, often outlining the patterns with leeks. Exceptionally pretty, in the ground and in salads, are the purplish-leaved ‘Red Russian’ kale, the crêpe-like Tuscan kale, along with cresses, purslanes, chicories and oriental greens. Lastly, I make full use of the many edible flowers and flowering herbs to infiltrate scent and pure colour into the garden: nasturtiums, pot marigolds, thymes, day lilies… it is an endless list. A favourite edging plant is the ‘Gem’ series of French marigolds (Tagetes) neat and bright all summer long and, to my mind, the flowers adding a real, fruity flavour to salads.

Not everyone wants a potager, but there is plenty of scope for slipping decorative salad plants into flower beds or growing them in containers on patios and balconies.

For over twenty-five years our garden has been run on organic lines, without using chemical fertilizers, weedkillers or pesticides other than the handful of nonpersistent chemicals approved for organic gardening. Bar the endless war against slugs, we have encountered no major problems in growing organically and believe our plants are more robust, better-flavoured, and remain fresh for longer as a result.

When this book was first published in 1984, many of the plants it covered were virtually unknown outside a limited area. Now they can be found in supermarkets, street markets and restaurants, and, crucial for us gardeners, the seed is available mainly through mail-order seed catalogues, and increasingly in garden centres. Sadly, there are also commercial pressures to limit the number of old varieties in circulation. The legal restrictions imposed by the European Union and the vested interests of multi-national seed companies threaten some traditional vegetable varieties. I urge gardeners to support organizations such as Garden Organic, the working name of the Henry Doubleday Research Association in the UK, which runs a heritage seed library, and similar organizations elsewhere, to prevent the erosion of our genetic heritage.

Notwithstanding these pressures, there is still an enormous choice of varieties (or cultivars as they should be called) of the most popular salad plants. New varieties are constantly being introduced, sometimes to disappear a couple of seasons later. It is almost impossible to keep up to date. On the whole, I recommend only varieties I have grown or seen myself, and hope will remain available. But there are many other excellent varieties. Follow the gardening press to keep abreast of good new ones.

Approach salad growing in a spirit of adventure and enquiry. Every garden is unique, and there are few rights and wrongs in gardening. Be prepared to experiment; don’t be bound by rules! Do, however, keep detailed records. Your own notes on sowing times, varieties grown, quantities sown, methods used and harvesting times will eventually become far and away the best guide to producing salads for your household.

An enormous range of plants can be used in salads, from familiar garden vegetables to wild plants and weeds. As space is limited, lesser known plants have priority in The Salad Garden. For in-depth cultivation of mainstream vegetables, see Further reading.

A circular patch of sweet corn edged with colourful Tagetes ‘Orange Gem’.

The photographs for the original 1984 edition of this book were taken by Roger Phillips. Most of the plants illustrated were grown in my garden in Suffolk in one season. This is how, at the time, I described that season: ‘… an unusually odd season it was. We had more than twice the average rainfall in April, followed by an exceptionally cold May, and a very long drought in summer, which included the highest July temperature ever recorded here. So, as can happen in any garden, we had our failures, and a few specimens were not as good as we would have liked.’ When shooting again with Roger for a new edition, eighteen years later, we then too experienced a year when weather records were being broken. Only now everyone is labelling it global warming. Who knows what lies ahead? But rest assured, whether it gets warmer, colder, drier, wetter or windier, there will always be something you can grow from the vast storehouse of salad plants.

Joy Larkcom, May 2001