The Blooming Great Gardening Book

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.

Steve Whysall lives and gardens in Burnaby, British Columbia, and writes
a gardening column for The Vancouver Sun. He is the author of two other
books—100 Best Plants for the Coastal Garden (1998) and 100 Best
Plants for the Ontario Garden (1999)—also published by Whitecap. In
this new one, he brings together snippets of the 1000-plus pieces he’s
written during the past decade, augments them with some new material,
and organizes everything by season. Then he adds the same glossary of
terms and bibliography that appear in the two previous books, plus an
index of only plant names.

In a book on gardening—even one primarily for Vancouver-like
climates—a seasonal approach can create disproportionate and sometimes
arbitrary section assignments. Whysall’s spring has nearly twice as
many pages as his summer or his winter, and his fall—the shortest
section—is devoted mainly to planning for spring. However, the table
of contents informs readers of topics and subtopics covered by the main
text. Interesting sidebars and marginalia can be found by flipping
through the pages.

Whysall’s intention in this book is to create “an eclectic and
entertaining package of general gardening information that you can dip
into any time that you feel like it.” In The Blooming Great Gardening
Book, the most successful of his three books, he has met that goal.