Profile Queen of all she surveys – Joy Larkcom in her Co Cork garden
Joy Larkcom: ‘I suppose I did introduce a lot of things (like rocket, purslane, endives and chicories). It would have happened eventually. Even now, I see vegetables and think - 'oh my God, I introduced that'.
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Colette Sheridan meets pioneering gardener Joy Larkcom
West Cork-based gardener extraordinaire, Joy Larkcom, is enjoying her 'retirement garden,' cultivating tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers for the summer while also working on her extensive archive. The 85-year old English woman, the grand old lady of gardening, was described by The Daily Telegraph as having ‘had more effect on the way we grow and eat salads and vegetables than all the celebrity chefs put together.’ It's quite an accolade and one that Joy, modest but quietly assertive, accepts. ‘I suppose I did introduce a lot of things (like rocket, purslane, endives and chicories). It would have happened eventually. Even now, I see vegetables and think - 'oh my God, I introduced that'. Joy wrote gardening columns for years and has published several books including Grow Your Own Vegetables, The Organic Salad Garden, Creative Vegetable Gardening, Oriental Vegetables and her wonderful memoir, Just Vegetating. She advocated intercropping - sowing a fast-growing crop (salad leaves or spring onions) between the rows of slower growing crops (cabbage, kale, leeks). The
standard practice in Ireland, Britain and several regions of Europe was to grow in rows wellspaced and wait for maturity. With intercropping, the fast crop would be harvested long before the slower one needed the space. This was revolutionary at the time. It made for a more productive garden and a more efficient one with less weeding needed. Always interested in gardening having been brought up in rural Berkshire, Joy has a BSc in horticulture from Wye College. She has worked as a teacher and as a librarian before devoting her life to gardening and writing about it. She remembers as a young girl helping her father to create a garden. ‘He would give me wireworms to take to the chickens.’ Surprisingly, Joy doesn't think she has ‘very green fingers. A sign of really green fingers is people who can take cuttings which always strike. I don't think I have that magical ingredient. But I do love gardening. I suppose I know quite a bit but there are so many variables. I'm very suspicious of anybody who comes up with all the answers. Even now if I go to a garden, I always learn something. But I don't have the mega green fingers that some people have.’
60 Senior Times l July - August 2021 l www.seniortimes.ie
What Joy and her late husband. Don Pollard, had in spades was an adventurous risk-taking spirit. Back in 1976, before supermarkets sold bags of mixed salad leaves, they and their two young children, Kirsten and Brendan, set off around Europe with a caravan on what Joy called her 'Grand Vegetable Tour.' While Don did the cooking and taught the children, Joy would set off on her bicycle to find out how people were growing vegetables. She collected seeds of rare varieties. It was a tour that sparked a lifetime of garden writing. Looking back on that adventure, Joy says it was ‘a pivotal year in our lives. It was an absolutely incredible experience. Ever since that trip, I can't bear to see a drop of water being wasted. Finding water was our crucial aim every day as we moved around. The people we met and what we learned was amazing. It was kind of brave. We did take a gamble. Don had to leave his teaching job and he never really got it back. The school refused to give him a year's sabbatical. Afterwards, he had to do supply teaching and things like that. We hoped to have an income from renting our house back in the UK but the people living there went broke so we never got that. We
