Solgar Artichoke

As the formal Keeper of the Kitchen Garden at Hampton Court Palace, Vicki Cooke not only grows historical vegetables and fruit, but spends hours researching them too. For this article, artichokes are under the spotlight.

Note: This article was written for us by Vicki Cooke when she was the Kitchen Garden Keeper at Hampton Court Palace. See Vicki’s bio below for more information.

When I talk about artichokes I mean the delicious, fat, globe artichokes, buds of a type of thistle, with associations of summer, olive oil and the Mediterranean. I shall leave discussion of the other type of artichoke, the Jerusalem artichoke – a pale, unattractive root crop, flaccid of flavour and scourge of the digestive tract, for later…perhaps much later