THE AMERICAN GARDENER: A Sampler

A compendious answer to the charge that American gardeners have no traditions of their own, and no gardening books other than British to guide them. In seven sections treating the impulse to garden; the uses of color; fragrance; native American plants and their deployment; the poetry of naming plants; the problem of pests and poisons; and the shapes of gardens and their significance, Lacy (Home Ground, 1984; Farther Afield, 1986) allows American gardeners from Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Katherine White and Ann Lovejoy to speak for themselves--and for the special aesthetic and moral climate of gardening in America.