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Green thoughts
Guides forecast a bountiful spring for gardeners REVIEWS BY KELLY SUNDBERG SEAMAN Even if a glance out your window suggests otherwise, spring really is on its way. Whether you're a new gardener or an expert, there's something in this year's crop of gardening books to get you growing. A gentle guru
By Katherine Whiteside Clarkson Potter, $29.95 300 pages ISBN 9780307351357
'Garden' is a verb
By Gordon and Mary Hayward Norton, $39.95 240 pages ISBN 9780393059045
Beauty, and brains
By Emily Young and Dave Egbert Sunset, $19.95 156 pages ISBN 9780376030955
Encyclopedia Green
By Susan Carter, Carrie Becker and Bob Lilly Timber Press, $49.95 608 pages ISBN 9780881928204
Love your lawn
By Paul Tukey Storey, $29.95 272 pages ISBN 9781580176552
Down the garden path
By Rae Spencer-Jones Barron's, $34.99 960 pages ISBN 9780764160059
Kelly Sundberg Seaman is a writer and gardener recently transplanted from Virginia to New Hampshire.
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Katherine Whiteside wants you to enjoy your garden. I'd imagine she'd be the perfect companion to have along while touring some breathtaking garden that sparks curiosity and envy in equal measure, one that makes you say "I'd like to try that, but I couldn't possibly . . . " Whiteside's reply, I'd guess: "Yes, you can." The Way We Garden Now: 41 Pick-and-Choose Projects for Planting Your Paradise Large or Small is full of fine advice and comprehensible projects for beginners and for gardeners who are ready to branch out. While you certainly don't have to march through the projects sequentially, they're presented in a wise order (design appears early in the process, for example), and paced for the long haul. These aren't instant makeovers; Whiteside is willing to budget months for opening new beds, and gives a two-year plan for installing paths, for example. And any garden how-to that ranks keeping a journal near the top of a list of important garden tasks is already well on its way to earning a gold star from me. What's particularly "now" about this book, I think, is the way it does more than show and tell you what to do; it begins with "why." Whiteside introduces each project by asking "What's the payoff?" and her own experience shines through the answers, to inspire and motivate the aspiring gardener.
Support your 
Gordon and Mary Hayward have one of those gardens, the sort you marvel at and wonder how in the world. Their answer, in its simplest form: "time and effort." But that's just the point: "Maintenance," they begin, "is gardening." That spirit fills Tending Your Garden: A Year-Round Guide to Garden Maintenance. Photo essays put you right there with the Haywards and their assistants, documenting step-by-step how to keep a beautiful garden. The book is packed full of professional techniques, the sort of traditional skills handed down from gardener to gardener. To-do lists from their Vermont garden are keyed to seasons (early spring, late fall) as well as to specific months, for ease in adjusting the calendar to your part of the world. Spending time with this book might be the next best thing to digging in alongside the masters themselves.
Big Ideas for Small Gardens has its roots on the West Coast, thousands of miles away from the Haywards' New England, and, just as a plant might be, is adapted to a notably different niche in the gardening world. Authors Emily Young and Dave Egbert present a very visual take on translating large-scale garden schemes into smaller quarters. The heart of the book is an abundance of inspiring photos, all of which are helpfully and thoroughly captioned. But there's plenty of garden smarts beyond the eye candy, and in fact, if you can manage not to be distracted by the gorgeous pictures, the section "Big Concepts" offers a lucid overview of essential landscape design principles that are relevant to any garden, of any size, anywhere.
Where you garden matters enormously, of course, for what you can grow, and how well. The Pacific Northwest is a Shangri-la of sorts for gardeners, and although that's where co-authors Susan Carter, Carrie Becker and Bob Lilly gained their vast collective garden expertise, I'm pleased to say that there's no gloating to be found in Perennials: The Gardener's Reference—not even about being able to grow Meconopsis—only the voices of hands-on gardeners who know and love their plants. Together, they have assembled an accessible, information-packed treasury of garden-worthy plants, more than 2,700 of them. An essay on general maintenance complements plant-specific recommendations in the A-to-Z directory, and accompanying lists offer other ways into the data. There are suggested collections of plants for specialty gardens (spring ephemerals, meadow plants, plants "too tall for words"), and my favorite, a list which sorts the plants from the directory into their plant families. That list, I think, has the potential to be very useful, especially for gardeners looking to meet less familiar cousins of plants they already know and grow. I also love the user-friendly tables that accompany each entry, which chart hardiness zones and heights and spreads, details on flowers and foliage, and even notes on the quirks and particularities of individual species and cultivars—exactly the sort of information you need to choose among them. The photography in Perennials is fabulous, too. This book is an appealing new acquaintance which appears quite likely to grow into a very best friend.
In my previous garden, I had been doing my best to colonize the grass for more ornamental plantings. I've been in gardens that had already evolved a long way in that direction—I'm thinking in particular of one garden in North Carolina where what was once a sweep of suburban lawn had evolved into a labyrinth of berms and island beds. But most of us don't want to do without a lawn entirely, and most gardeners have to share their turf (so to speak) with romping dogs, soccer-playing children or lawn sports fans (croquet or badminton, anyone?) Paul Tukey's message in The Organic Lawn Care Manual is that a lawn doesn't need to be chemically dependent any more than a flower or vegetable bed does. You might not expect to hear "right plant, right place" in a lawn care book, but there it is. The essentials for a healthy organic lawn, Tukey suggests: Choose the right grass, water wisely, mow well. Beyond that, the same concepts apply whether you're cultivating tulips, tomatoes or turf, and we'd all do well to listen. Nurture the soil; it will nurture your plants, and they in turn will nurture you.
It's not quite a life list, of the sort that birders keep, but 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die feeds the same sort of drive to go out and look. Its immediate effect on me: I really, really want to go to Kyoto. Even at just shy of a thousand pages, 1001 Gardens does not aim to be encyclopedic; general editor Rae Spencer-Jones marshals garden profiles by dozens of garden experts (horticulturalists, designers and writers among them) into a collection organized geographically, a benefit for readers plotting a grand garden tour. As you might expect, that team approach gives some eclectic results: How else a could a garden gnome reserve in the UK end up on the same "must see" list as Versailles? I'd argue that's part of the charm of 1001 Gardens, all the better for opening the book at a random page and following the path where it leads. Do note that the entries and appendices offer only the slimmest of details on the logistics of actually visiting the gardens—so if you mean to travel beyond your armchair, consider the book an invitation to dig further, in a volume on a regional garden style, or in a travel guidebook. The same goes for the photos—they're only glimpses, but as alluring as a peek through a gap in a garden wall.