The forgiving garden: books to help you along the path

If there is a place where hope springs eternal, it is the garden. It is the ultimate expression of forgiveness, of nature giving us a pat on the back, nodding and saying, "It's OK. Let's just try this again."

The caladiums I forgot to water have mercifully vanished. That ill-advised lobelia purchase long ago burned up in our humid summer. And, amazingly, the peonies have returned, as they have for more than 70 years.

If this is the year you would like to make something good happen in your yard, look to the following new guides. And remember -- in the forgiving garden, it doesn't really matter how much of this sage advice you actually take. Something, somehow, will grow in your yard whether you help it or not.

REVIEWS BY ANN SHAYNE

Start at the very beginning

Sometimes it helps to get an overview. If you are new to gardening, you will get a broad picture from Gardening Basics: How to Design, Plant and Maintain Your Garden by Ken Beckett, Steve Bradley, Noel Kingsbury and Tim Newbury. I imagine these guys sitting around, brainstorming about what a new gardener might need to know.

"Flowers? Vegetables? Which to cover?"
"Put it all in there."
"Landscaping?"
"Definitely."
"Bugs?"
"Yep. Everything. Let's cover everything."

While the landscape chapters, plant lists and luscious photographs are inspiring, the section that budding gardeners should read first is "Care and Maintenance." Grunty stuff like soil preparation is certainly not glamorous, but it's like going to the dentist. You may hate doing it, but there is no more virtuous feeling in the world than having done it. Knowing that you have amended your soil properly will make you feel like you've just finished three root canals and a crown.

    Gardening Basics: How to Design, Plant and Maintain Your Garden
    By Ken Beckett, Steve Bradley, Noel Kingsbury and Tim Newbury
    Sterling, $19.95
    ISBN 0806924292

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It's all about structure

Sometimes a house comes with a masterful landscape: the patio is a marvel of masonry, slopes are beautifully terraced, drainage is efficient. More often, it's a mixed bag of old landscape projects, fatigued shrubbery and tired lawn. If you have just purchased a newly built house, that bare swath of ground can be downright intimidating.

Jump right into the big issues of the yard with Better Homes and Gardens New Complete Guide to Landscaping. These BHG folks are not shy about encouraging large projects -- the dry stack stone wall, the vine-covered arbor -- and the fact is, they are correct. As much as you might want to avoid spending on large-scale landscape elements, they can transform your property in extraordinary ways. This book covers plenty of affordable projects as well, but it really shines when giving inspiration for life-changing projects.


What to plant?

I am in the process of creating a small garden, and I have the big issues resolved. There's a cute little boxwood hedge started along the edges, a brick walkway down the middle and some seriously undersized yews planted at one end. Now that I need to decide what goes inside the garden, I'm banging my head against my low brick wall. I may just cheat and refer to page 61 of Dreamscaping: 25 Easy Designs for Home Gardens by Ruth Rogers Clausen.

There it is: "A Fairy Tale Cottage Garden," complete with a schematic drawing, photographs of the 16 lovely flowers and herbs I will plant, and characteristics and care requirements for each. The author does this for 25 different planting schemes and even suggests alternative plants in case, for example, lupine just doesn't do in your part of the world. This is the sort of book that makes the best kind of armchair gardening, full of ideas for new plant combinations. And it's a lifesaver for people like me who must choose from a dumbfounding array of plants.


For the floral specialist

I decided early on in my gardening journey that vegetable gardening is too much like having a really demanding pet, one that needs fresh crickets twice a day or peeled nectarines every morning. The responsibility of nursing along an eggplant for weeks and weeks! Flowers are somehow less goal-oriented -- if you fail to get a lot of blooms, at least you have the foliage. If you fail to get a tomato, well, you're stuck with a bunch of tomato vines.

Flower gardening is plenty for me to worry about anyway. With the utilitarian feel of a Home Depot store, Flower Gardening 1-2-3 covers a lot of ground. Among the book's contributors are dozens of Home Depot staffers, many of whom are master gardeners. All the major aspects of flower gardening are here, including a comprehensive encyclopedia of flowers. Most useful to me are the many lists -- self-sowers, for example, shrubs listed by water needs, drought-tolerant plants, good container plants -- that help me get a quick understanding of likely candidates for special conditions in my garden.


Speaking of dumbfounding . . .

I have much to learn about gardening, and the most fascinating book to me right now is Perennials: The Definitive Reference with Over 2,500 Photographs by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix. This whopper of a reference work, 10 years in the making, includes photographs of perennials great and small, from all over the world. Imagine the sheer effort required to collect eight different hellebores and photograph them all blooming at the same moment in one photograph.

This is not a book for someone trying to fill a patio container -- there's precious little information on anything but the plants themselves. Because this is a comprehensive encyclopedia, many of the plants will not work in your region. And the hardiness ratings are listed in Celsius. How continental! Do we pay for this thing in Euros?

No matter. The joy of this book lies in the opportunity to see so many varieties in one volume. It is a pleasure of the first order.


Ann Shayne lives and gardens in Nashville.

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