Ellen Ogden on Heirloom Vegetable Gardens - A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - February 15, 2021

The subtitle of Ellen Ecker Ogden’s latest book, “The New Heirloom Garden,” tells it all. “Designs, Recipes, and Heirloom Plants for Cooks Who Love to Garden,” is how it reads. Throughout her career of writing, and lecturing, and teaching about kitchen gardening, Ellen always reminds us, it’s not just the literal harvest and what we can cook up from it, but also the opportunity for beauty and for intimate engagement that the vegetable garden can offer.  

Ellen Ecker Ogden, with several books on food and gardens to her credit, was co-founder of the breakthrough seed catalog called The Cook’s Garden, which introduced U.S. gardeners to a whole new palette of possibilities that back then were more familiar perhaps in Europe, but not here. She lives and gardens in Vermont, and I’m glad she’s back today.