Rosie Daykin's new cookbook celebrates what the author grows in her amazing garden

Coco, Olive and Regina George—yes, the latter has a Mean Girls streak—give me the eye as I step into their space. It’s not surprising: I’d protect my coop if I were a chicken pecking my way around Rosie Daykin’s ridiculously stylish backyard on Vancouver’s west side.

Alongside the giant fir trees, arrays of flower beds, basalt walls and winding bluestone paths punctuated by an expansive greenhouse, are the three “girls”, star players in Daykin’s new cookbook. That’s because the multi-hyphenated Daykin—known for her well-honed interior design talents and the nearby Butter Baked Goods, which she sold three years ago—can now add ‘gardener’ to her repertoire.

Her fourth cookbook, The Side Gardener, is named not only for the once-languishing, now-neat planters that flank her home, but also for the way Daykin gardens “on the side” with her other ventures. The pages meander beautifully through useful tips on how to grow your own—whether it’s a twoacre plot or an herb garden—and resulting recipes from her plants, edible flowers and, of course, eggs. (Daykin’s Cuckoo Maran, Olive Egger and Ameraucana repay her luxury and loving attention by laying aplenty).

Based on the food she loves to eat, The Side Gardener was “a fun exercise” in creating “veggie-forward” recipes that spring from the yard. She rattles off how zucchinis inspired a chocolate cake, how her red peppers transformed a bisque with crab and how her beets perfected a ravioli.

“After this much time, I have an instinctive feel for what will work pretty quickly—find the base, then you riff on it,” she opines over homemade peanut butter cookies and Yorkshire tea. (Her best vegetable is the radish. “You sprinkle them,” she adds, “then a sneeze later, they’re up. Very