ALLAN A. SWENSON'S BIG FUN TO GROW BOOK

Swenson, a syndicated garden columnist, mixes practical advice on growing specific flowers and vegetables with bits of the plants' history and suggestions for ""enjoying"" them either as decoration or food. ""Recipes"" are minimal, ranging in difficulty from cutting a cucumber into sticks to frying zucchini with peppers and tomatoes, and when the gardening gets as complicated as making a pyramid of wooden rectangles for a rocky spot, the directions are to ""ask your parents to build"" them. Swenson also calls for adult supervision in handling pesticides, but he does assume that they will be used. That, and his encouragement of competition (4-H or Young American Horticulture Contests), put him out of step with other recent books, such as Burke Davis' Newer and Better Organic Gardening (1976), which offers both more intrinsic ""fun"" and a deeper understanding of the growing process.