Gardening Hints & Tips

Videos are often the preferred format for presenting how-to information because of their "picture-worth-a-thousand-words" quality and their brief time demands. This book is like a video in print. Greenwood, a BBC garden show personality and author of The New Gardener (W 4/1/95), runs through some general areas of gardening, like lawns, water features, and landscaping, presenting basic information and quick ideas for improvement. A subject like plant propagation does fairly well with this technique; others, like general maintenance, will almost certainly require readers to search out another book before repairing those brick steps. The illustrations re small but clear, and, despite the wealth of sidebars and boxed tips, the pages are not too cluttered. More basic than The Big Book of Gardening Skills (LJ 2/1/93), this will be most useful for gardeners just beyond the novice stage to browse for ideas.--Molly Newling, Piscataway P.L., N.J.