Seeds of change

There was a time, half a century ago, when vegetable gardening was the preserve of old boys on allotments and jobbing gardeners in spacious suburban gardens. No longer. These days, the vegetable grower is as likely to be a 30-year-old female social worker with a small urban garden and a Point of View about pesticides on supermarket carrots, or a young family who have escaped the city for the country, or a recently retired couple on an executive housing estate who want to combine flowers and vegetables in an ornamental potager. Vegetable gardening is now as much a lifestyle choice and cultural statement as it is the cultivation of a variety of (mostly) nutritious comestibles.

Vegetable growing has changed along with the people who do it, thanks partly to the television and the media revolution (which has spawned cheap and plentiful specialist-interest magazine titles) and partly to scientific and technological advances which have introduced inexpensive and innovative materials to the amateur gardener.