A Walk in the Garden With Pioneer of Edible Landscape
Rosalind Creasy’s Los Altos yard is almost as familiar to her readers as their own gardens. It is her workshop, laboratory and photo studio, and it helped her launch a career as a landscape designer and gardening-book author.
Creasy’s landmark “The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping” (Sierra Club Books, 1982) presented fruits and vegetables as artful landscape design, not just human fodder.
“Earthly Delights” (1985) featured unusual theme gardens, such as Money Saving, Chaparral, Heirloom Vegetable and Orchid, and it also introduced Creasy’s garden in glorious bloom. Some of the gardeners and themes in “Earthly Delights” recur in her third and largest book, “Cooking From the Garden” (Sierra Club Books: $35). It is a massive tome published this fall that mixes gardening and cooking history, gourmet cooking, unusual vegetables, theme gardens, interviews with chefs and gardeners across the country, wonderful recipes and gorgeous photographs (most of them taken by Creasy).
The book weighs 4 1/2 pounds and took Creasy three years to produce. It may take some of us that long to finish it, because it can be savored slowly, consumed a chapter at a time.
Gardening Experts Helped
Creasy involved master gardeners across the country in her book, asking several to grow a particular kind of vegetable garden. She persuaded two Vermonters, Kit Anderson, managing editor of National Gardening, and David Cunningham, staff horticulturist at Vermont Bean Seed Co., to plant Mexican and Oriental gardens, respectively.
“People on the East Coast think that in California all you have to do is throw a seed in the ground; they don’t take Western gardeners seriously. So I was careful to include Eastern gardens growing what you normally associate with our Western climate,” Creasy says.
She grew many of the theme gardens, in much smaller versions, in her own back and front yards. She also visited experts in each field, including lettuce entrepreneur Andrea Crawford, heirloom-seed preserver Kent Whealy, seed-company owner Jan Blum, cookbook author Diana Kennedy and restaurant owner Alice Waters.
When she and her husband, Robert, and two children moved from Boston to the Bay Area in 1967, she stayed home with the kids, tending the small yard where they lived in Sunnyvale. She resurrected the roses--and was hooked. She enrolled in the landscape-design program at nearby Foothill College, where she pursued her passion for vegetables as landscape and food.
Unorthodox Design Student
“ ‘Edibles’ met with a lot of resistance from the faculty,” she says. “I had to come up with all the reasons it would work.” And that’s also when her photography took off: “I couldn’t find pictures of beautiful edible gardens, so I started growing flowers and vegetables together and photographing them.”
After earning her degree in horticulture, Creasy and a partner designed landscapes--mostly non-edible--until “Edible Landscaping” became a horticultural best seller (more than 100,000 copies sold so far).
The Creasys moved to their present Los Altos home about 20 years ago. (The yard was full of trees then, which she wanted--until she tried to grow vegetables without sun. Out came most of the trees.)
Familiar as her garden is--readers have seen it in every season and from every angle--her kitchen is never pictured in her books. There’s a good reason: As much as the yard has changed, the kitchen has not. A remnant of “Father Knows Best” decor, it has green Formica counters, an old gas stove, plain wood cabinets and a hole in the ceiling over the refrigerator.
“Every time we talk about doing the kitchen,” she says, sipping mint tea at the kitchen table, “we end up with a $50,000 budget, so we put it off some more.”
Book Tour Props
The only sign that this kitchen was the nerve center for her cookbook is the small pile of seeds in plastic bags--Polish beans, popped sorghum (a relative of corn) and turkey crow beans, all heirloom vegetables provided by Jan Blum for demonstrations on Creasy’s book tour.
Creasy has help with her garden--a man comes once a week--and for the book she had a full-time assistant, allowing her to travel the country lecturing, cooking and teaching, reaping some of the rewards of a well-sown career. She is also a consultant to Mudd’s, a restaurant in San Ramon that serves food harvested from its own vegetable garden.
“I go out and look at the garden and talk to the chef about preparing what’s ready, and about what to plant next. I love it,” she says.
The Cox Arboretum in Dayton, Ohio, wants her to work on their edible garden, and she still does edible and drought-tolerant landscape designs for private clients. She’s even had offers to do a syndicated gardening column and a TV show.
“I really do have a great life,” she says.
