Garden Bugs of Alberta: Gardening to Attract, Repel, and Control.

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Garden Bugs of Alberta has the look and feel of a standard field guide from Lone Pine Publishing. When you open the book, you see the familiar format of a large drawing of an insect covering the top third of the page and descriptive text on the bottom two-thirds. However, there are some differences between this work and the field guides. The first clue is the subtitle: “Gardening to Attract, Repel, and Control.”

Although most users of this guide will use it first for identification, the focus is really on the relationships between “bugs” and people. Because Lone Pine books are so heavily visual, they are often collaborations between authors and illustrators. In this case, however, the illustrations are supplementary to the book’s purpose and are done by five different people, who are simply acknowledged. This accounts for the variation in the styles of illustration in the book. While they are all about the same size, the illustrations vary in the intensity of colour, the exactness of detail, the use of shadows and backgrounds.

The second thing that distinguishes this from a field guide is the loose definition of “bugs.” While the authors note that they’re not talking about “true bugs,” they include mollusca and arthropoda. Many people mistake spiders for insects, but few people would look in a “bug” book for earthworms and slugs.

The entries in the “Garden Bug Directory” vary from representing a single insect, such as the painted lady moth, to representing a whole genus, such as 75 species of lady beetles found on the Prairies. The text information is minimally about identification and more about their distribution, how to find them, how to attract the desirable ones, and how they are controlled socially, physically, and biologically.

There is a boyish enthusiasm about this book that assumes that the reader will want to find “bugs,” study them, and learn lot more about them. This joyful appreciation of “bugs” culminates in the “Garden Bug Scouting Chart,” giving directions for best places to go searching for bugs.