Chris Gordon interviews Simon Rickard about his gorgeous new gardening book.

Simon, firstly a huge congratulations from one novice gardener to you, an experienced gardener for your beautiful and accessible book on veggies. Have growing veggies always been a passion for you? Why?

One of my earliest memories is of my father coming home from work and carrying me around his veggie garden, giving me corn silks to smell. I remember the feeling of warmth and wonder. Dad’s mother, who is an Englishwoman, always had a beautiful vegetable garden full of flowers and produce which I loved to explore as a boy. I think this is how most people acquire their love of gardening; as a child given free reign in the garden of a friend or relative. However, like many people, that love lay dormant in me for a couple of decades while I was exploring other aspects of my life. It wasn’t until my thirties that I rediscovered a passion for veggies.

I know you worked in a variety of places, creating gardens including being the Head Gardener of the Diggers Club. You also worked with one of my food heroes, Annie Smithers, on her garden. These seem like pretty great jobs with wonderful people.

One of the best things about working on the nexus between food and gardening is the passionate, like-minded people you meet. People for whom the simple things in life – good food, beautiful gardens – are deadly serious stuff. The same can be said of people in my other career, music. It’s lucky creative people are all so passionate about what we do, because heaven knows there is no pecuniary advantage in any of these pursuits!

I’m quite taken with your vast knowledge on vegetables. I like that this book is essentially a history book with divine photos, and dare I say, a political book as well?

There are already plenty of good ‘how-to-grow’ guides on the shelves already, containing photographs which are illustrative, but seem to lack any romance. I wanted to write a social history of vegetables, illustrated with photographs that convey the sensuous nature of the subject matter.

With regard to politics, I didn’t want my book to become a polemic on the ownership of food but this subject has become so tightly bound-up with the heirloom vegetable movement, that it was unavoidable. I hope my book gives readers something to think about with regard to where humans and our domesticated plants have been together, and where we might go in the future.

We all know about the language of flowers. What about of vegetables? Should we be taking leeks to funerals rather than carnations? Or mother-in-law potatoes to engagement parties?

Ha! What a brilliant idea. I’d like to nominate cucumbers for jealousy and melons for romantic love. If you were clever, you could conceal a whole bunch of hidden messages in a salad…

Come along to hear Simon speak at our Hawthorn shop on Monday 8 September. Read more here.