One day a couple of decades ago, my six-year daughter, Sabrina, stood in the middle of the garden with her hands on her hips and proclaimed: “This garden is great, but it’s missing something really important.”
I stopped harvesting tomatoes (one of Sabrina’s favorites), and asked, “What’s missing?” “Flowers!” “Are you going to help me plant some?” “Yes!” (And she did—including seeding many flowers you can’t find in the nursery.) Maybe if I’d had Lisa Mason Ziegler’s book, Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty, I wouldn’t have experienced a “lecture” from my 4-foot-tall daughter. Either way, Sabrina and I began planting flowers amongst the veggies, and what do you know. The garden came alive with brilliant blooms and an even more prolific vegetable bounty. If you want to enjoy an abundance of flowers and vegetables side-by-side in your garden and watch them boost each other’s growth and elevate the beauty of your landscape, this is a great book to get you started. Vegetables Love Flowers does a marvelous job of taking you down the garden path of the ins and outs of companion planting. You’ll learn the many benefits of planting flowers and veggies together. Ziegler’s introduction shares her journey to becoming a cut-flower farmer after marrying into a vegetable-gardening family. She owns the Gardener’s Workshop, a small market farm in Newport News, Virginia that offers workshops on flower topics. Says Ziegler, “…flowers are often a casualty of downsizing and practicality, but in fact, flowers more than pull their weight in the garden!” She explains that flowers are ornamental and functional at the same time. For instance, blooms lure pollinators and beneficial insects. This allows Mother Nature to provide pollination, pest control and nutritional systems. The result is a beautiful garden filled with yummy vegetables and fruits and colorful blooms. Chapters full of tip after tip include information on keeping beneficial pollinators like bees and butterflies happy. She also discusses putting out the welcome mat for birds, which she refers to as beneficial predators.