Gardens & Landscapes

Eat Your Garden: Edimentals as a Beautiful, Low-Effort Way to Grow Food

‘Harry Holding is one of our most exciting young designers.’ Monty Don

A design-led approach to edible gardening for any size and space.

Eat Your Garden, by award-winning RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden designer Harry Holding, is the first book to focus on a style of edible gardening that is lower in effort, greater in beauty and less demanding of space than the traditional kitchen garden or vegetable plot.

This is a grow-your-own book with a difference: edimentals are plants that are both edible and ornamental. Some offer bountiful harvests and great flavours, others are more unusual, and then there are plants that earn their place in the garden because they are so joyful.

Edimentals can be woven into existing gardens and across different planting styles, whether formal borders, cottage gardens or meadows, and in naturalistic or minimalist designs. Harry emphasises resilient, low-maintenance perennials for a more sustainable way to grow your own food. From familiar plants, such as fennel and wild strawberry, to ostrich fern and king’s spear, Harry shows you how to create a foraging experience on your own doorstep.

Harry’s pioneering design principles are drawn from permaculture, food forests, agroforestry, edible meadows and market gardens, which he brings to every garden from rural to suburban, city gardens, balconies and containers.

Eat Your Garden includes:
• Design plans for spaces from courtyards to borders
• Plant profiles organised by structure and layer
• A guide to creating biodiverse plant communities and mixes
• Harvesting advice for year-round cropping
• Over 150 stunning colour photographs

About The Author

Harry Holding is a leading voice in contemporary garden design and a pioneer of the edimental movement – the fusion of edible and ornamental planting. Since founding Harry Holding Studio in 2016, he has been named among House & Garden’s Top 50 Garden & Landscape Designers and received multiple accolades from the RHS, the Society of Garden & Landscape Designers and other industry bodies. His School Food Matters Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023 won the People’s Choice Award, earning praise from BBC Gardeners’ World, The Times, The Telegraph, and Financial Times. In 2024, the RHS invited him to return and design their Feature Garden, further cementing his reputation as a leading figure in sustainable, plant-led design. Harry and his studio are designing a garden for RHS Chelsea 2026 in collaboration with the Eden Project.

Harry’s work spans private gardens, public landscapes and international commissions, including a dedicated area of the new Shuttleworth Botanical Garden on the Isle of Man and an area of the new Eden Project in Morecambe. In 2025, the British Library selected him as one of ten international designers to contribute to Gardens of the Future, for which he envisioned a Future Food & Medicine Garden exploring sustainable community food systems. A regular tutor at the London College of Garden Design, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Harry is also a sought-after guest speaker on ecological design. Eat Your Garden is his debut book.

  • Publish Date: May 26, 2026
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Category: Gardening - Garden Design
  • Publisher: Chelsea Green
  • Trim Size: 7 x 10
  • Pages: 272
  • US Price: $34.95
  • CDN Price: $47.00
  • ISBN: 978-1-64502-334-0

Author Bookshelf: Harry Holding