To Everything There Is a Season: The Gardening Year

Dust jacket notes: "Here, in her own inimitable style, Thalassa Cruso shares the pleasure she has experienced and the problems she has faced season by season in her own gardens and in her role as 'gardener-at-large' to thousands of television viewers across the land. Here too are countless practical hints on every aspect of gardening, as well as complete essays on individual flowers and plants: philodendrons, clivias, Easter lilies, heaths and heathers, tulips, orchid cacti, winter-blooming geraniums and regal geraniums, tuberous begonias, gloxinias, amaryllis and other South African bulbs. And the results of her unending quest for new ideas and zestful experimentation: how to transfer water-rooted cuttings to soil, the best ways to grow paper whites, the effect of different lighting and watering patterns on various types of ivy, ways of growing biennials in the New England climate, and how to raise corn, squash , and beans Indian style. There are also helpful suggestion on finding and raising your own unusual varieties of chrysanthemums for indoor use, on the cutting back and control of grape vines, on tomato culture that even young children can master and enjoy, on the care and treatment of lower beds in the fall, on the winter marking of branches and bushes for later selective pruning. To Everything There Is a Season is alive with Thalassa Cruso's keen sensitivity to the natural world. She evokes the tension and expectancy of a garden waiting for the onslaught of winter snow, reminisces about the gardens of her English childhood and the joy of delving into old gardening books, records the wonders of the New England countryside (its wildflowers and wildlife, its flamboyant fall color, its salt marshes and roadside gardens), and writes provocatively of the balance of nature and the need for conservation - both public and private. Like Thalassa herself, her new book is wise, witty, worm, and human.