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The Great Dixter Cookbook is as much a gardening book as it is a cookbook, and that is precisely the point.
Great Dixter in East Sussex is one of England’s best known houses and home to one of its most influential gardens. The building was remodelled by the architect Edwin Lutyens, while the garden was shaped by Christopher Lloyd, who until his death in 2006 was the country’s most widely read and most debated garden writer. He was notorious for tearing out the rose garden and replacing it with tropical planting, a move that scandalised the English gardening establishment in a way that is still referred to today.
Aaron Bertelsen is from New Zealand, trained at Kew Gardens and has been vegetable gardener and cook at Great Dixter since 2007. He grows what he cooks and cooks what he grows, and the book is built around that relationship.
Each section focuses on one crop at a time and offers both growing advice and recipes. Which varieties are genuinely worth giving space to, when to sow them, how to look after them and then what to do when the harvest arrives all at once and becomes too much. That last point is the question every kitchen gardener faces in August and one that few cookbooks answer.
The recipes are simple, seasonal and English in the best sense, meaning they highlight the ingredient rather than overwhelm it. The photographs were taken in the garden and the house, making this one of the most beautiful books in the range.
All of the author’s royalties go to the trust that runs Great Dixter.
This is a book for anyone who grows, anyone who wants to start and anyone who simply wants an English gardening year on the bookshelf.
Publisher: Phaidon
ISBN: 9780714874005
Language: English
First published: 2017
