I love using cooking as a metaphor for life--and especially for gardening. I often tell people that preparing a soil mix is a bit like cooking, where the best results come from good knowledge coupled with willingness to experiment...and a bit of intuition.

So when I saw the title of Lorraine Roberts' book, A Recipe for Continuous Bloom, I was immediately interested.

Roberts' recipe for readers who want continuous bloom is simple and easy to follow: she gives them a visual guidebook that shows, month by month, what is in bloom in the perennial garden. There is one section for full-sun and part-sun plants; and one for full-shade plants.

This is a book for gardeners and would-be gardeners who don't want to be bogged down by the history of plants or details about their cultural requirements. Where there are no unusual requirements, Roberts gives the plant name, height, width, and zone. That's it. And that's the beauty of it--it's perfect for those who want to see what plants are in bloom when, so they can stage their perennial garden and enjoy continuous bloom.

Steven Biggs
Co-Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING

This naughty little paper-wrapper treat will titillate even non-gardeners. Paper-wrapped, you ask? Yep. The dust jacket resembles a creased, brown paper bag, the sort used in the past to hide indulgences such as bottles of liquor or...naughty books and magazines. The jacket covers the lower portion of the cover, allowing browsers to see flower-bedecked revellers at the top. It is clear there is more to see under the brown paper...and, yes, there is.

The chapters, which look at our love affair with plants, follow the path of many relationships: innocence, flirtation, romance, anticipation, deception, seduction, desire, lust, denial, passion, rapture, and devotion. Don't worry, there's more. Day advises, "The truth is, the plant world is drenched in s**. Passionate, urgent, unabashed s**." The only thing I could see adding would be a chapter about breaking up...or do gardeners ever break up with their plants?

Day packages the plant cast members in this book amidst snippets of history, folklore, medicinal mythology, and Roman and Greek tales--even a quote from the famous English gardener Vita Sackville-West. And she makes the subject fun, as she does with all her writing. For example, she calls peonies the Dolly Parton of the garden, describing the flowers as, "D-cup blooms strutting atop those precarious chicken-leg stems."

Having a fetish for growing figs, I flipped straight to the index, hoping Day included the fig in her book. I was happy to find the fig as the lead character in the chapter about desire, with a full-frontal picture of the fleshy folds inside the fig. Day talks about the biblical associations of the fig, but did you know that in in some Mediterranean countries--those with hot-blooded males, explains Day--there is a hand gesture referred to as, "do the fig."

And the naughty stuff? Take titan arum, which Day describes as, "One of Mother Nature's most macho manifestations." The suggestive central spike, she explains, can be taller than a six-foot-high man. If you're a Latin-spouting gardener, you might be intrigued by Clitoria ternatea. Day says, "If ever a Latin name fitted, this one does.

Day says in her introduction that if people knew about the sensual aura of plants, there might be fewer non-gardeners. I suspect this book will help change that.

Steven Biggs
Co-Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING

Along with cultural guides for fruit trees, bushes, and vines, there are neat design ideas too. The one that jumped out at me--which I'd love to reproduce in my own garden one day--is a row of dwarf espaliered fruit trees grown so that branches crisscross in an x pattern.

Reich gardens in the US, and some of the plants grow in warmer climates--but much of the content is relevant to conditions in Canada . What I really like is that he highlights little-known fruits such as medlar--and he even tells readers how to "blet" their medlars.

Steven Biggs
Co-Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING

The book is a great resource for vegetable gardeners looking for creative ways to cook garden produce. Recipes are arranged by harvest seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In the beginning of the book there is a guide with storage, handling, preparation, and serving information by fruit and vegetable. There are snippets of food and farm information and food-related anecdotes on many of the pages, making this far more than a cookbook--really more a book about food systems and food choices.

I recently leafed through the autumn section while looking for cooking ideas for fall greens and found a simple, yet delicious chard cheese-bake made with Swiss cheese, green onions, cubed bread, chard, and parmesan cheese.

Steven Biggs
Co-Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING

When I first got The Resilient Gardener, I was turned off by the mention of "uncertain times" in the title--which had me expecting a lot of doom and gloom. But that's not the case at all: Deppe's writing takes us into her garden, where she shares lots of practical growing, seed saving, and cooking advice. There's lots of information, covering a range of topics as broad as the merits of keeping chickens versus ducks, how our bodies metabolize fructose, and the method she finds best for threshing beans--which is putting them on a tarp and walking on them. When I finished the book I felt as if I would love a tour of her garden.

Steven Biggs
Co-Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING

More than just 43 fun things to grow, this is a fun, fun book. I look forward to Sonia Day's column in the newspaper because--whether I agree with her or not--she is never shy about having an opinion, and she articulates it in an engaging way. Talking about the herb epazote, Day says, "Modern cookbooks describe it in polite terms as `musty' or `pungent.' But to me, it's more like paint thinner." Each of her 43 crops comes with brief recommendations and a recipe or cooking know-how.

Steven Biggs
Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING

When I first got this book I wasn't expecting a lot: After all, how could an author in the UK write about crops from the Indian subcontinent and the information be useful for gardeners in Canada? But I think this book is a great resource. While the UK climate differs from ours in Canada (milder winter and they don't get the summer heat we get) the insights from an author attempting to grow tropical and subtropical crops in a temperate climate are very valuable. Along with good photos and detailed growing information, Cunningham gives lots of historic, cultural, and culinary snippets. I had no idea that ripe okra seeds could be ground and used as a coffee substitute!

Steven Biggs
Co-Author, NO GUFF VEGETABLE GARDENING