The New Three-Year Garden Journal: With Regional Planning Guides

The need for keeping a garden diary is as apparent as the limitations of our memories. Not only do we frequently lose plant names, but also freeze dates and garden triumphs as well as failures. Beautiful enough to give as a gift, and practical enough to use yourself everyday, The New Three-Year Garden Journal should work better than the many notebooks one begins and discards over the years.

Each month begins with advice on plants and design; herbs, climbers, shrubs, trees, annuals and bulbs are all discussed and illustrated with color photos. Then for each month, weather warnings are given by region of the country (April: danger of frost continues in the Northeast, September: extreme heat still possible in the mid-South), and tasks for each week of the month, divided by the same seven regions. Pruning, fertilizing, planting, and maintenance tasks are described alongside lined pages for each of the three years.

It is clear that The New Three Year Garden Journal was designed by a gardener. Chock full of information, it is spiral-bound to lay flat so it's easy to write in. Carry it with you into the garden, glue in photos or sketch ideas on the pages of graph paper, dream over the lovely color photos. This is a book to use over and over again during the three-year period it covers, then look back at for years into the future. --Valerie Easton  more