THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412020100
SECTION: HOME PAGE: G1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JULIA BRISTOW, SPECIAL TO HOME & GARDEN
LENGTH: Long : 113 lines
ANY GARDENERS on your holiday gift list? Beginner gardeners? Herb gardeners? Armchair gardeners? Rose gardeners? This year when it comes to gardening books, you have an excellent selection.
For a favorite hands-on gardener, consider internationally recognized author and lecturer Penelope Hobhouse's new book, ``On Gardening'' (Macmillan, 224 pp., $40).
Drawing on her lifetime of gardening experience, Hobhouse frames her text on the layout and maintenance of the gardens of Tintinhull House, a National Trust property in Somerset County, England, where she has been the resident and gardening spirit for 14 years. (When I visited Tintinhull some years ago, its ``garden rooms'' changed my whole concept of garden design.) ``On Gardening'' is a splendid book, and I highly recommend it.
There may be people on your shopping list who don't have full-scale vegetable gardens, but most, I suspect, have at least a couple of tomato plants, maybe even in pots on a balcony. The perfect gift for them is a new paperback from Chronicle Books called ``Terrific Tomatoes'' (95 pp., $12.95). Faith Echtermeyer's photography and Mimi Luebbermann's text (including a few choice recipes) add up to a most attractive addition to Chronicle's Garden Style series.
For someone who is fascinated by gardening and art, try ``The Impressionist Garden'' by Derek Fell (Crown, 144 pp., $35). Fell describes the gardens painted by the French Impressionists as well as the personal gardens of Monet, Renoir and Cezanne. With paintings, photographs and practical plans, he shows you how you can adapt ideas from Impressionist gardens to what he characterizes as ``a modern setting and a smaller compass.'' The book closes with a section on the Impressionists' favorite flowers, illustrated with paintings and photographs.
Maybe you need a gift book for someone who delights in native plants. Or maybe one for a conservationist. ``The Natural Habitat Garden'' by Ken Druse with Margaret Roach (Crown, 256 pp., $40) is going to become a gardening classic.
Even if you can't create a wildflower meadow, you can do something in a small way to help repair the damage done in our country by a lifestyle that has turned 700,000 acres into parking lots. Worldwide, Druse says, it is likely that one quarter of the Earth's organisms will be eliminated in the next 30 years.
Druse writes: ``If even a fraction of America's 38-million gardeners turned a quarter of their landscape into a rewilded spot that recalls roughly its presettlement state, there would be a measurable impact. . . . Perhaps most important of all, a habitat-style garden of native plants welcomes the whole food chain.''
Druse organizes his book into sections on grasslands, drylands, wetlands and woodlands. There is also a comprehensive source guide.
Jim Wilson's fans - and there are many in this area where he is a frequent lecturer - will be happy to hear he has a new book, ``Landscaping with Herbs'' (Houghton Mifflen Co., 220 pp., $35). At one time Wilson and his wife ran a commercial herb nursery in South Carolina that supplied specialty restaurants. When his work with the PBS Victory Garden, his lectures and his writing began to require all his time, the commercial herb venture ended.
Everything you need to know about herbs is here - which to grow; how to grow them in beds, borders and containers; how to harvest; and how to store them. The final part of the book is an encyclopedia of 100-plus herbs for American gardens. The book's photographs will give you more ideas than you can possibly use.
Many of us who grew up in gardening families in the '30s and '40s remember the big green Norman Taylor books our folks looked everything up in. I still have my mother's 1936 edition of Taylor's ``Garden Dictionary.'' Now Houghton Mifflen has brought out ``Taylor's Master Guide to Gardening'' (612 pp., $60), dedicated to Norman Taylor's memory. It contains, among other things, encyclopedic entries on more than 3,000 plants, as well as 1,000 color photographs.
If you are in the market for such a book, you also may want to look at the ``American Horticultural Society's Encyclopedia of Gardening.'' Published in 1993, it is a similar comprehensive reference book, at the same price, and, in my opinion, is one of the best to be found.
Most gardeners love to visit other people's gardens; witness the perennial popularity of garden tours. Two new books take advantage of this interest and combine it with the fashionable topic of ``secret'' gardens. Adrian Higgins' ``The Secret Gardens of Georgetown'' (Little, Brown & Co., 224 pp., $40) takes you into two dozen private gardens in Washington's famous residential district. ``Secret Gardens'' by Rosemary Verey and Katherine Lambert (Little, Brown & Co., 207 pp., $40) has a broader geographic scope - Europe, Canada and the United States. Categories are: ``small-town hideaways, gardens within gardens, formal enclosures, exuberant gardens and natural gardens.'' Virginia is represented by the garden of Charles L. Reed Jr. in Richmond.
Rose lovers on your list are sure to appreciate either of two new books: ``The Quest for the Rose'' by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix (Random, 256 pp., $35) or ``The Rose Bible'' by Rayford Clayton Reddell (Crown: Harmony Books, 252 pp., $50). Phillips and Rix are the co-authors of seven gardening books for Random, including the popular ``Random House Book of Roses.''
``The Quest for the Rose'' begins with the history of roses, followed by a survey of roses from wild roses and old roses to modern hybrid teas and floribundas. A particularly interesting chapter is the diary of the authors' trip to western China to search for wild roses and old cultivated roses in the foothills of the Himalayas. Photographs throughout the book are excellent.
Redell, whose Garden Valley Ranch in California is the largest supplier of garden roses in the United States, is also the author of the popular ``Growing Good Roses,'' published six years ago. He has the justifiable reputation among professional and home gardeners as being straightforward. For example, in ``The Rose Bible'' he writes, ``I've always maintained that there are too many varieties of roses in commerce, and that it's becoming worse each year.'' To help us choose from the more than 16,000 cultivars, he has a fascinating chapter titled ``Fifty Immortal Roses.''
``The Rose Bible'' covers it all from history to care to ``roses headed down the pike.'' Read ``The Rose Bible'' and you will not only learn a great deal, you'll probably become one of Redell's ``rosebuddies.'' MEMO: Julia Bristow is an artist, writer and retired magazine editor who now
gardens in Norfolk and on the Eastern Shore. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
by CNB