New cookbook celebrates Rosie Daykin’s garden

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Coco, Olive and Regina George—yes, the latter has a Mean Girls streak—give me the eye as I step into their space. It’s not surprising: I’d protect my coop if I were a chicken pecking my way around Rosie Daykin’s ridiculously stylish backyard on Vancouver’s west side.

Alongside the giant fir trees, arrays of flower beds, basalt walls and winding bluestone paths punctuated by an expansive greenhouse, are the three “girls”, star players in Daykin’s new cookbook. That’s because the multi-hyphenated Daykin—known for her well-honed interior design talents and the nearby Butter Baked Goods, which she sold three years ago—can now add ‘gardener’ to her repertoire.

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Her fourth cookbook, The Side Gardener, is named not only for the once-languishing, now-neat planters that flank her home, but also for the way Daykin gardens “on the side” with her other ventures. The pages meander beautifully through useful tips on how to grow your own—whether it’s a twoacre plot or an herb garden—and resulting recipes from her plants, edible flowers and, of course, eggs. (Daykin’s Cuckoo Maran, Olive Egger and Ameraucana repay her luxury and loving attention by laying aplenty).

Based on the food she loves to eat, The Side Gardener was “a fun exercise” in creating “veggie-forward” recipes that spring from the yard. She rattles off how zucchinis inspired a chocolate cake, how her red peppers transformed a bisque with crab and how her beets perfected a ravioli.

“After this much time, I have an instinctive feel for what will work pretty quickly—find the base, then you riff on it,” she opines over homemade peanut butter cookies and Yorkshire tea. (Her best vegetable is the radish. “You sprinkle them,” she adds, “then a sneeze later, they’re up. Very rewarding.”)

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Beyond the produce, simply immersing her hands in the dirt feeds her, too. “Walking in nature is wonderful,” she continues, “but, not to get too woo-woo, there’s something more when you work in it—digging, planting… Being connected in that way to the earth is a way of getting lost. It brings me peace of mind.”

It’s all part of the courageous thread running through her modus operandi in life: teaching herself. “Put your feet in first,” she exclaims. “Maybe it’s my own stupidity or ignorance, but I don’t have a fear of failure.”

She had, in fact, a few gardening false starts: an “epiphany” that she mistakenly had a rooster in her first batch of chickens—an absolute no-no in the city with its dawn chorus—and not having proper irrigation in the early years that led to a dismal yield.

But she’s clearly driven by curiosity and creativity. “Things can hold people back—a lot of embarrassment, and wondering about what people would say, but they have things to say whether you’re doing good or bad, so I can’t control that,” Daykin says. “My real joy comes when I’m building something. I’d rather be doing something that I find exciting or fulfilling like the act of gardening, and figuring out how to do it.”

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From the frothy English country garden roses and dahlias to chocolate cosmos and violas, the new garden also allows her to revel in growing all the flowers she loves. (Her edible ones make their way to her floral shortbread coins—a nod to L.A.’s culinary artist Loria Stern.)

“I’ve just had another Chiltern Seeds order—just a slippery slope,” she adds, referencing an English supplier. It’s one of many snippets she “siphons” off from her extensive travels in Europe and makes “achievable” back in Vancouver. Take the rustic watering can she packed in a suitcase to bring back from the U.K. or the giant wicker baskets and stone vases (the latter from her friend Thomas Hobbs) that wouldn’t look out of place in an English country pile, either.

The West Coast may be home, but these trips away are essential. “When my ‘lights’ start to flicker it means I need to head off,” she laughs. “Travelling is about refuelling me visually. Then I come back, and I’m so re-energized.”
An energy that clearly fizzes all over the side garden.

The Side Gardener, published by Appetite by Random House, is out April 9.

Photographs by Andrew Montgomery excerpted from The Side Gardener by Rosie Daykin. Copyright © 2024 Rosie Daykin. Published by Appetite an imprint of Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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