Joy Larkcom

Meeting my here… by Orlaith Murphy

Joy Larkom. Pic: Sean Casey

There are some people you carry in your head long before you ever meet them. For me, one of those names was always Joy Larkcom. Long before the internet made everything instant, Joy was there, quietly but determinedly showing us that vegetables could be beautiful, adventurous, and worthy of centre stage in any garden.

To sit with Joy in West Cork, recorder running and raspberries on the table, felt like stepping into the pages of one of her books. What followed wasn’t a formal interview but a meander through memories, stories, and plenty of laughter.

Early Curiosity and a Worldly Start

Joy’s route into gardening wasn’t the straight line you might expect. She studied at Wye Horticultural College in the UK, back in days when everything was deeply chemical, tar washes on fruit, pesticides drilled into students as gospel. Yet even then, she was intrigued by the early whispers of biological control and the idea that there might be gentler, cleverer ways to grow things.

After college she headed abroad. Her father was working in Thailand, and Joy found herself teaching American children in Chiang Mai, writing plays for missionary kids and soaking in a very different world. Later, in Canada, she worked in a university library, surrounded by brilliant, displaced Hungarians, anarchic scientists, and intellectuals whose qualifications weren’t recognised locally. It was there that she made a lifelong friend who, years later, would introduce her to the man who changed her life – Don Pollard.

A Bag of Pig Manure and a Lifetime Together

The story of Joy and Don’s first spark is as earthy as you’d expect. Joy was living in London, growing sweet peas in what she calls “destitute soil.” Don, American by birth but farming-obsessed by temperament, offered to bring her some pig manure from a friend’s farm. He turned up with not one, but two full bags of pig muck. “That was it,” Joy laughed. “Forget roses – this was the man for me!”

Together, they found Montrose Farm, a farmhouse in Suffolk with two acres and a long track leading up to it. It became their playground, their experiment station, and their family home for thirty years. It was also where Joy began to write in earnest, columns for Garden News, and eventually the first books that would cement her reputation.

Questioning the Old Ways

Life at Montrose was full, with children underfoot and vegetables filling the larder. But Joy never stopped questioning the orthodoxy she’d been taught at college. One of her most vivid memories is of planting an orchard while her baby lay nearby in a pram. She followed her notes to the letter, painting tar wash onto the tree trunks to prevent pests and turned around to see her baby covered in black spots.

In that moment she decided: never again. No chemicals, no half-truths. From then on, she would grow organically. It wasn’t fashionable in the 1970s; in fact, many dismissed it as eccentric. But Joy was ahead of her time.

Politics, Courage, and Conviction

Don was as fearless in politics as Joy was in the garden. He threw himself into trade union activism, anti-nuclear campaigning, and later, exposing the brutal exploitation of migrant workers in Britain’s horticultural sector. Some of it was dangerous work, men beaten in fields, gang masters making fortunes off suffering. It was a dangerous time but together, they were part of the movement that pushed through the UK’s Gangmasters Act, protecting vulnerable workers.

Their home life was inseparable from their activism. Their lives at Montrose were as much about justice as they were about carrots and cabbages. The Larkcom-Pollard family believed in speaking up, even when it was unpopular.

The Grand Vegetable Tour

And then came the adventure that changed everything: the Grand Vegetable Tour. In 1976 Joy, Don, and their two young children packed into a van, towing a caravan, and set off across Europe for a year. The aim? To seek out traditional varieties, disappearing techniques, and to gather seeds and stories before they were lost.

A small grant paid for the van, with the condition that the seeds they collected would be deposited in the new UK gene bank. They swapped roles, Don took on the cooking and mechanics, Joy the journalism and photography, while the children learned on the road.

There were disasters, endless failed phone calls, language barriers, and the howling winds of Spain. But there were triumphs too, discovering centuries-old irrigation methods still in use, watching Portuguese gardeners save seeds in the poorest conditions, and unearthing varieties that would later feed back into her books. One seed seller in Porto, when asked for “old seeds,” threw up his hands and exclaimed, “All our seeds are old!”

That trip fed directly into her writing not just the legendary Grow Your Own Vegetables, but the sense that gardening was cultural, political, and profoundly human.

Seeds of the World

The Grand Tour sparked a lifelong hunger. Joy travelled to China and Japan, threading her way through seed companies, communes, and markets. The Japanese, she explains, had the resources to hybridise pak choi, Chinese cabbage, and other crops, and market them to the West. To them, she was the “odd English lady” who wanted to talk vegetables, but she persisted and the results are now familiar to us all in seed catalogues.

She also explored the United States, where immigrant growers were cultivating Chinese vegetables on a commercial scale. In Seattle, she visited the “pea patches,” community gardens bursting with diversity against a backdrop of skyscrapers. Each trip expanded her network, her knowledge, and her sense that vegetables were cultural ambassadors.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Joy changed what we eat. Rocket, pak choi, mizuna, the once-exotic leaves we now take for granted, were brought to our tables because she cared enough to go looking.

The Creative Vegetable Garden

But Joy’s genius was not only about introducing new crops. She reimagined how vegetables could look in a garden. Inspired by Villandry in France and by her friendship with Rosemary Verey, she developed what became known as the Creative Vegetable Garden – a tapestry of edible and ornamental plants woven together.

In her own demonstration plots, she combined Brussels sprouts with red cabbage, herbs with edible flowers, and Chinese mustards with bright calendulas. She created summer plots, winter plots, and even mirrored designs for narrow gardens. To Joy, the vegetable garden didn’t have to be utilitarian; it could be both beautiful and abundant.

That idea, radical at the time, has since inspired countless gardeners (myself included) to see vegetables not as poor cousins of the flower border but as stars in their own right.

West Cork, Battling the Wind

In their sixties, Joy and Don uprooted once more, this time to West Cork. Friends thought they were mad leaving a well-established Suffolk garden for a windswept Irish farmhouse. But they had always loved Ireland, and Don’s family roots pulled them back.

The wind, however, was merciless. Joy remembers standing with her new neighbour on the first day, thinking, ‘What have we done?’ Their solution was ingenious, six-foot zig-zag fences reinforced with stout poles, layered plantings of trees and shrubs, and a fan-shaped garden with fruit cordons forming additional shelter.

They built a greenhouse, raised beds wide enough for a wheelchair to navigate, and continued to experiment, even into their later years. “The words Don most dreaded,” Joy chuckled, “were me waking up saying: I’ve had an idea.”

A Legacy Preserved

Joy is working with the Garden Museum in London to archive her extraordinary collection of notes, journals, and photographs. Decades of meticulous record-keeping, from the Grand Vegetable Tour diaries to seed lists and garden plans, are being carefully catalogued as part of what the Museum calls her “creative vegetable archive.”

It means that Joy’s life work isn’t just in her books or in the memories of those who heard her speak, but is being actively shared with future generations. Joy has always been generous with her knowledge, and this archive ensures that her voice and vision will continue to guide gardeners and researchers for many years to come.

Meeting My Hero

For me, meeting Joy was never about ticking off a bucket list. It was about sitting with someone whose words had long shaped my own path, and discovering that she is every bit as generous, grounded, and inspiring in person as she is on the page.

Heroes don’t always live up to expectations. Joy Larkcom does. I came away reminded not just of the vegetables she brought to our tables, or the books that sit on so many of our shelves, but of the way she has lived her life with curiosity, integrity, and a good dose of humour.

And perhaps her greatest lesson for me, is this – “In a small urban garden, if you can create a beautiful space that also gives you food – well, what could be more amazing than that?”

Article can be found in the Autumn/Winter 2025 edition of The Journal