Food security - and the absence of it - has been Lolo Houbein's lifelong preoccupation. She regarded every garden where she messed around with plants as a farm to feed her household. Lolo Houbein's great-great-grandfather was a market gardener in North-West Frisia, passing a gardening gene down the generations. Lasting influences were her Uncle Wim's small farm and the famine of 1944-1945 in Western Holland, which she barely survived. She came to Australia in 1958 to escape the Cold War. Lolo had her formal education at the universities of Adelaide and Papua New Guinea and Adelaide Teachers College, in the literatures of Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Pacific and Africa, classical studies, world religions and anthropology. Her novel Walk A Barefoot Road was awarded the Bicentennial/ABC Fiction Award and her autobiography Wrong Face in the Mirror the Dirk Hartog Literary Award.One Magic Square has been an enduring bestseller.
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'This timely guide will assist first-time and experienced gardeners take control of their own food supply at a time of water restrictions and increasing fuel and food prices. An engaging and motivational guide to growing your own food … very easy to follow.' - Sumptuous magazine
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'This is the most useful and most beautiful book of the year.' - Pauline Vijverberg, The Citizen
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'[Houbein is] brilliantly contemporary in organizing each of her 20-plus model gardens into a number of practical culinary groupings … For each three-by-three-foot garden, she lays out a plot diagram, with specific spaces designated for each plant. There follows a detailed, refreshingly candid section on growing each of the veggies listed in the plots.' - Booklist