Book Shelf: Lauri Kranz’s “A Garden Can Be Anywhere”
When you make potagers this gorgeous, best put them in a coffee-table book.
The book I turned to in searching for an answer to my courtyard/kitchen-garden conundrum is one of the many favorite books of mine that turned up out-of-print when I was adding to my book recommendations at the holidays. It’s “A Garden Can Be Anywhere: Creating Bountiful and Beautiful Edible Gardens” by Lauri Kranz (with Dean Kuipers), and I bought it kind of by accident when I was making my Florida garden a few years ago. I was somewhere in the middle of my planning when I saw the cover of this book beaming at me from a pretty pic of someone’s desktop, and I bought it on a whim.
I assumed from the title that it would be about incorporating edible plants throughout the garden, which isn’t it at all. In fact, I think the title of the book is completely wrong for it! It’s largely about how important it is to have a suitable location when making a dedicated potager — that you can’t just plop one anywhere. But regardless, it’s a fantastic primer on siting, planting and growing a vegetable garden, by a gardener who makes and tends them for clients in LA. (Or did, at least? She has since gone on to open what looks to be an incredibly beautiful little fresh-produce market.) Whoever her clients are, Kranz makes some of the most beautiful kitchen gardens I’ve ever seen. They’re lavishly documented here, in gorgeous photos by Yoshihiro Makino, along with her sage (sorry) growing advice — which I didn’t know I needed to read after my 10-yr hiatus from vegetable growing, but it was a perfect refresher course. So did I buy it by accident or by serendipity? You be the judge.
You can tell how much I like it by the number of flagged pages.
It’s not all raised beds, although I realize that’s what I’m showing you here. I’m especially obsessed with the “garden houses” included. She explores raised, in-ground and container approaches to making a vegetable garden, and the content is at least as much about the actual vegetable gardening as the structure thereof. If you can find a copy through a used-book seller or still sitting on a shelf in a shop somewhere, I highly recommend it. It’s a real shame it was allowed to fall out of print.
I love to page through this book once in awhile and gaze at the beautiful gardens and the abundant produce — total mind balm — so of course I pulled it off the shelf while pondering my next kitchen-garden moves. And I do think it clarified some things for me. More on that to come.
