Garden Secrets: New Brunswick Gardeners Share Their Stories

Pleasance Crawford, a Canadian landscape and garden-history writer, is
the co-author of The Canadian Landscape and Garden History Directory and
Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian Garden Writing.

Debby Peck, whose background is in plant science and botany, is a garden
journalist known through her newspaper columns, magazine articles, and
CBC Radio broadcasts from Fredericton. She is also a keen gardener and
garden visitor, and in this book she combines her own hands-on
experience with that of dozens of fellow gardeners across the province.

A few of these people tend public gardens, commercial seed farms, and
organic market gardens, but most are the owners/designers of private
residential gardens. Peck introduces her readers to each of her subjects
and their horticultural creations, and lets these gardeners speak for
themselves. She reveals their “secrets” in point-form summaries at
the end of each section of the book but also includes, within the body
of the text, many detailed lessons. (A map pinpointing the location of
each garden would help northern and coastal gardeners relate to the
microclimates described.)

The book is recommended, but with the following reservations. In recent
years we have become accustomed to garden books full of lush, highly
professional photographs. Most of the images in Garden Secrets look like
garden-variety color snapshots and so, to the jaded eye, this
publication is a disappointment. Admittedly, even a poor photograph can
convey a message; but all too often here, the images and captions seem
at odds and the messages are therefore ambiguous.