Vander Zalm's Northwest Gardener's Almanac

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.

Bill Vander Zalm, nurseryman since 1953, has written about gardening for a community newspaper and has appeared on radio and TV talk shows. At the time of putting together the material for this book, he was “... engaged ... in public affairs ...” (p. 9) and “... often tied up with desk work and meetings at the Parliament Buildings ...” (p. 39). He has a winning smile; he chose an attractive wife; both he and she appear to be comfortable around plants. (Nearly every photograph in the book shows one or both of them posing, campaign-style, with a plant.)

The title is directed to northwest gardeners. Surrey, B.C., is mentioned in the text, and the material appears to have been written mainly for Surrey and climatically similar areas. The northwest has a wide range of hardiness zones (from 1a through 9a, in British Columbia), and gardeners there should use the book advisedly.

The style is friendly and down-to-earth, but disorganized. Passages selected at random are interesting and informative, but a succinct, thorough, and well-presented discussion of any subject is sacrificed to the composite nature and almanac format of the book: a chapter, comprised of sections on unrelated topics plus questions and answers, also on unrelated topics, for each month of the year. No clear picture emerges of the interdependence and continuity of the various aspects of gardening. Moreover, the assignment of topics to specific months seems at times quite arbitrary. For example, we find the drying of herbs discussed in April, “some rules to follow if you start your seeds in containers” presented in May, and the summer care of houseplants mentioned in October.

Good indexing can help bring disparate parts together, but this book’s index is incomplete as to the concepts and specifics mentioned in the text, and it does not include matters mentioned in the questions and answers at all.