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When we first make a garden, we tend to plant for flamboyant bloom: irises, delphiniums, roses, hot flashes of poppies, and great whoops of annuals. These are the stars of [...]

In September of 1989, Roger Phillips wrote a letter to a new acquaintance, the food writer Leslie Land, beginning a five-year correspondence in which the two exchanged recipes, planting plans, [...]

Writers today are no less drawn to the subject of garden making than their predecessors. Of the season's new books, the treasure in the heap is jennifer Bennett's Our Gardens, [...]

All My Edens: A Gardener's Memoir, by Pat Welsh (Chronicle Books; $24.95; 214 pages). As its title implies, this book is Welsh's remembrance of the gardens of her childhood. Welsh [...]

Reflections from a Garden (Trafalgar Square; $27.50; 191 pages) is a collection of essays, a collaborative work by two Britons: the novelist Susan Hill and the garden designer Rory Stuart. [...]

Altogether more serious in purpose, though often light in tone, is People with Dirty Hands: The Passion for Gardening, by Robin Chotzinoff (Macmillan; $22; 205 pages). In a series of [...]

A keen gardener and lifelong nature lover, Bates wrote Through the Woods: The English Woodland - April to April in 1936. Later in life, he was to fulfill an ambition [...]

Gardeners, even those whose gardens are sputtering to a halt at this time of year, are always gardeners; never more so, perhaps, than in late fall and winter. Now is [...]

Eleanor Perenyi's Green Thoughts (Vintage Books; $12 paperback; 289 pages) became a classic the day it was published 14 years ago. It is a landmark of solid research, good sense, [...]

Although her six subsequent books reflect a strong and almost maternal attachment to her garden and its plants, it is her first, we made a Garden (1956; reprint Faber & [...]

By Enid Munroe (Henry Holt; $25; 262 pages). Five years ago, Munroe and her husband sought to make a garden that would suit their busy lives and cost them little [...]

If Thomas is the charming and erudite master gardener, then Thalassa Cruso is the lively grandmother who tends the wonderful garden down the road. In her classic Making things Grow [...]

It must be remembered that not all good gardeners are good writers, but Graham Stuart Thomas should be treasured as both. His many works include some of the best reference [...]

They say that everyone has a novel in him, so it follows that every gardener contains a book about the making of his garden. Still, they don't say that everyone [...]

Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing, edited by Edwinna von Baeyer and Pleasance Crawford (Random House Canada; Can$ 28.95; 354 pages). This collection of letters, articles, and speeches [...]

Horace Walpole's essay The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, first published in 1782, is, if anything, even more indisputably a classic of gardening literature. It has recently been [...]

As beguiling as these two volumes are, they have few peers among recently published works. To find their like - and to fill out the shelf reserved for essays in [...]

William Bryant Logan's compulsively readable new collection, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (Riverhead Books; $21.95; 224 pages), has little to do directly with gardening, but much to do [...]

Unlike other garden writers, the garden essayist tends to be a writer by profession and a gardener by avocation. If the professional gardener owns a bench, he has no time [...]

By Jim Nollman (Henry Holt; $25; 312 pages). This ambitious undertaking is a collection of essays written in appreciation of the earth. It is certainly not a gardening book, which [...]