On the Shelf: Just Vegetating

I’ve got a little behind in my project to read one of the unread books on my shelf each month. Or, at least, I’ve got a little bit behind in publishing the results! My book for March was Just Vegetating: A Memoir, by Joy Larkcom. I eagerly awaited its publication in 2012, and started reading it as soon as it arrived. And then I stopped, part way through, because it didn’t live up to my expectations. I was expecting a memoir, telling the story of Larkcom’s life in plants. Just Vegetating does do that, but it does it through the medium of articles she has published through the years. It’s not a coherent narrative.

Larkcom feels (with good reason) that a lot of her articles deserved to be preserved in this collection for posterity, rather than disappearing from the world forever as the magazines they were published turn yellow and are recycled.

Approaching the book with a different set of expectations this time, I found that I enjoyed most of it. There are reminiscences about Larkcom’s career and the books that she has published.

My favourite part is chapter two, articles about ‘The Grand Vegetable Tour’, when Joy, her husband Don and their two children set off to explore Europe for a year, in a caravan. They visited several countries – including some that were still firmly Communist – looking into what people were growing in their vegetables gardens, and how. There were planned visits to research establishments, together with less formal encounters with farmers and amateur gardeners.

The result of that year was the ‘discovery’ of a wide range of salad plants, which Larkcom effectively introduced into the UK, selling ‘saladini’ salad mixes and breaking us away from the traditional English salad of lettuce, cucumber and tomato.