Favorite Garden Tips

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Torontonian Marjorie Harris is a familiar name as a garden advisor. Some
of her earlier books include Ecological Gardening and The Canadian
Gardener’s Guide to Foliage and Garden Design. She writes a regular
gardening column in The Globe and Mail.

Designed as an alphabetical reference guide, Favorite Garden Tips
offers more than 1200 practical and tested solutions to common garden
problems. Of course if you can’t name your problem, with an expert
analysis of bug or blight, you might not be able to locate the cure. Not
to worry. Many of the headings are general, such as “Insecticide,
making your own” or “Insects, beneficial, attracting.” Moreover,
the text is sufficiently chatty to encourage browsing. Plants are
indexed by name.

In a three-page introduction, Harris admits that gardening is “the
great obsession” of her life. Her garden is library, instructor, and
companion. Walking in her own small downtown garden, with its three
micro-climates, she thinks of “the roiling, intense life” going on
beneath her feet. Harris is a keen environmentalist, an expert on
compost and mulch. Her garden is free of chemicals. She advises
gardeners to know their micro-climates, and to accept that “all
gardening is an experiment.”

Favorite Garden Tips would make a good addition to any gardener’s
library. Many of Harris’s tips are innovative, some unique. All of
them make sense.