The Food Forward Garden: A Complete Guide to Designing and Growing Edible Landscapes

Landscape designer Douglas successfully advocates for combining farming and landscape design to create stunning, productive gardens. He shares eight gardens, ranging from a city garden and a suburban sanctuary to a wild wonderland. Each highlights one of his landscape design techniques, illustrated by multiple beautiful color photographs. He covers the principles of garden design—from layout to plant palette to layering—and gardening basics, such as creating healthy soil, troubleshooting problems, protecting the garden from pests, crop planning, planting, harvesting, and utilizing favorite tools. There’s a selection of over 60 tried-and-true varieties of herbs, edible flowers, pollinator species, vegetables, berries, and fruit trees. Each gets an illustrated description, a color photograph, and an explanation of their landscaping uses. The book concludes with a table listing edibles for use beyond vegetable beds—ground covers, tender and woody perennials, vines, and trees—indicating the harvest season, USDA hardiness zones, size, and sun requirements (and which are Douglas’s favorites). One caveat; the featured gardens are located in warm climates, and some may be beyond the resources of many home gardeners.

[CORRECTION NOTICE: We found an editorial error in the original review; this online version has been corrected.]