Joy Larkcom

[4] In 1976-1977 she and her husband Don, with their two small children, spent a year touring Europe looking at vegetable growing methods, on what she called "The Grand Vegetable Tour".

[2] In 1985 she spent five weeks touring China, where she had lived for two and a half years as a child, to study vegetable growing and seed production.

She grew vegetables for many years on a smallholding in Suffolk, and then retired to West Cork, Ireland, where she has a coastal garden.

[3] She has been a regular contributor to publications including The Observer, Kitchen Garden magazine and Organic Gardening magazine,[4] and has been called "the queen of vegetable growing".

[5] In 1993 she was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Veitch Memorial Medal, and in 2003 a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Garden Writers' Guild (now the Garden Media Guild).