BOOK REVIEWS

The Complete Book of
Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit

Cameron House, distributed by Bookwise International
$AUS49.95, $NZ54.95

THE Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit claims to be "the definitive sourcebook to growing, harvesting and cooking". It's not joking. This 640-page tome combines three best-selling books with comprehensive cultivation guidelines and recipes for a huge range of popular, and less common, edible plants.

Each listing includes pest and disease control, companion planting ideas, propagation and growing pointers and historical tidbits (of broad beans, Dioscorides wrote that they are "flatulent, hard of digestion, causing troublesome dreams" and it was generally accepted that four seeds should be sown - "one for rook, one for crow, one to rot, one to grow".)

If your gardening library lacks a decent vegetable encyclopaedia, this is it.

Weekend Gardener, Issue 123, 2003, Page 28

Reproduced with permission from the former Weekend Gardener magazine. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the RNZIH