Brian Minter's New Gardening Guide

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

Brian Minter has accumulated a wealth of experience since 1978, when he
and his wife Faye began creating their well-known show gardens in
British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. As a garden journalist over the past
20 years, Minter has hosted a phone-in radio show and written a
newspaper column. Although the title may suggest otherwise, this book
(co-authored with Greg Rasmussen) is his first.

Minter’s introduction states that his goal is “to suggest some of
the top-performing plants in many different areas of gardening.” After
an opening chapter on the importance of good soils and adequate
nutrients, he turns to the 12 major groups of garden plants: vegetables,
herbs, bedding plants, herbaceous and woody perennials, bulbs, and lawns
and other groundcovers. While this approach is neither new nor fresh,
the information is solid. Minter’s plant lists (which include
slug-tolerant hostas and mildew-resistant summer phlozes) are useful,
and his “good tips” (such as using rice water to encourage moss or
lambsquarters to lure aphids from other plants) are worth any
gardener’s consideration.

Gardening is best explained graphically, yet this book has only seven
line-drawings and 16 pages of color photos—many with captions that
fail to identify the plants shown. Small icons (a trowel, a watering
can, and a flower pot) enliven the pages but provide a poor substitute
for images related to the text.

Addressing all Canadian gardeners in a single how-to book is difficult.
Minter travels widely and acknowledges the range of hardiness zones that
Canadians experience, but his roots in Zone 6 are barely below the
surface. Readers with shorter seasons may balk when he asks, “Why ...
have your tulips bloom in April along with everyone else?” or when he
comments that evening-scented stock “blooms just two months after
sowing and continues for a couple of months.” Most readers are better
advised to select a title focusing on their own climatic region or
gardening situation.