Joy Larkcom

Joy Larkcom has been growing and writing about vegetables for more than thirty years and is considered one of the world's leading experts in the field. Her work has been deeply influenced by travels in Europe, China, Japan, the USA and Canada, continually searching for new edible plants and cultivation techniques. With the help of her husband, Don Pollard, this has led to the introduction of many exciting salad plants and oriental vegetables.

Joy's eloquent and humorous style of writing has done much to popularise vegetable growing. Over the past ten years she has concentrated on the potager concept, making the kitchen plot a beautiful feature in itself. She created four small potagers in the experimental organic market garden she and her husband ran for many years in Suffolk, before moving to Southern Ireland, where a fan-shaped potager is now being made on a windswept slope.

Joy is well-known as an author, journalist and lecturer, and has taken part in many radio and television broadcasts. Her other books include Oriental Vegetables, Salads for Small Gardens, The Organic Salad Garden, Grow Your Own Vegetables and her recently published autobiography, Just Vegetating. Joy has won the Garden Writer of the Year award three times and in 1993 was awarded the prestigious Veitch Memorial Medal for services to horticulture. In 2003 she was presented with the Garden Writers' Guild Lifetime Achievement award.