Each of them, and many other interesting people featured in Druse's book, has a plant speciality. It's fun to understand why they collect the plants they do and to see the fruits of their labors in Druse's marvelous photographs. I would have liked pictures of the gardening greats, but that's a small criticism. Local gardeners in this book include Charles Cresson of Swarthmore, and Lee Raden of Chester County, an expert rock gardener and rare-plant enthusiast.
Sophisticated gardeners will enjoy Druse's book because they will meet the plant fanatics who have made the ``hot'' plants of the '90s available to many gardeners. Beginning gardeners will enjoy it for the diversity of plants that await them as their curiosity expands. Among the resources in the appendices is an excellent list of mail-order addresses for businesses that carry everything from old garden roses to carnivorous plants to ground-cover succulents and aquatic plants.
The title of The New Kitchen Garden, by Anna Pavord (Dorling Kindersley, $20.95), is a giveaway that this book was written by a gardener who lives beyond the United States, where we refer to vegetable, and not kitchen, gardens. I was about to give it a miss from this list because vegetable-gardening books written for other countries are not usually too helpful to local gardeners. But I was hooked by the photographs. Because our vegetable garden is so pedestrian and functional, I am a sucker for beautiful gardens full of luscious produce. Gardeners will find inspiration in Pavord's book and, provided they know how to adapt the growing instructions to our region, useful cultural information too.
