With the books reviewed here and a spade and some shears, you`l1 put your green thumb in the know THIS YEAR`S crop of gardening books is a robust one. The most comprehensive of them is The Ontario Gardener (Whitecap, 204 pages, $24.95 paper), by the Ottawa horticulturalist Trevor Cole. Its subtitle, The Only Complete Gardening Guide Written & Illustrated Specifically for Ontario Gardeners, is a marketing mouthful, but the volume delivers what it promises. This is a sensibly written and adequately illustrated guide for Ontario`s several distinct climatic types. Personally, I found myself wishing that the plant hardiness zone map was more detailed, and that the indexing of plants was more closely related to it. But these are relatively minor quibbles. Cole has provided a wealth of practical information for suburban Ontario gardeners with moderate gardening skills and ambitions. The author is well aware that Ontario`s most glamorous season is the fall, and his suggestions for planting take this into account. He is particularly good in his specialty, which is landscaping; most of the available manuals assume that their readers are rich and obsessive Californians, and so his sections on landscaping are more than welcome. Berries (Camden House, 87 pages, $9.95 paper), this year`s addition to the extensive Harrowsmith Gardener`s Guides, has all the hallmarks of previous volumes in the series. It is well organized and illustrated, elegantly written, and speaks accurately to Canadian gardeners and their limits. Unlike most gardening guides, which are written by a single person or a consortium of experts, the Harrowsmith guides are organized by an editor (Jennifer Bennett, in the case of Berries), who writes an introductory essay and then brings in different gardeners to offer expert advice. Berries offers an excellent quartet of essays, and adds a useful glossary of terms and a list of companies for those who wish to obtain berry seed, bedding plants, or cane stock. The prize in this volume, in my view, is Nancy J. Turner`s chapter on wild berries. It provides very clear advice on which wild berries are - and aren`t - edible, along with some sensitive discussion about which berries can be picked and which ought to be left undisturbed for environmental reasons. The other essays are good on the ins and outs of growing strawberries and other domestic favourites, and some mouth-watering cooking recipes are provided as well. Because berries are difficult to grow in confined spaces and often have special soil and cultivation requirements, the books will be useful mainly for suburban and rural gardeners, or for amateur naturalists; but it will delight berrylovers wherever they happen to live. From Whitecap Books` Pacific Gardening series comes Vegetables (Whitecap Books, 87 pages, $10.95 paper), by Judy Newton. It is aimed at the British Columbia market, and offers very basic information about the soil, water, and light needs of vegetables. It is a useful book for vegetable-garden beginners to pick up: it`s cheap (there are no colour plates and few illustrations) and it sticks to the subject. Despite some occasional vagueness - like the suggestion that beginners can grow bedding plants from seeds inside the house, which isn`t clear about how complicated this can be - I found it on the whole sensible and fairly accurate, although it does make vegetable gardening sound easier than it really is. Easy, of course, is a relative term. Growing roses in many parts of Canada is often so difficult it isn`t strictly gardening. It`s more an obsession, a primeval struggle against the limits of nature. Each spring while I was growing up in northern B.C., I got to hear a new and creative stream of curses as my father dug up and replaced the roses he stubbornly insisted on having in our garden. It enlarged my impolite vocabulary, but it also gave me a deep respect for the Sisyphean challenge of climate, disease, and insect-related difficulties that gardeners face and the tenacity with which they pursue their love of roses. Roses for Canadian Gardens: A Practical Guide to Varieties and Techniques (Key Porter, 144 pages, $29.95 cloth), by Robert Osborne, may therefore sound like an oxymoron, but it isn`t It is 138 pages of deliciously practical information on how Canadians - and particularly northern Canadians - can succeed at this difficult and rewarding horticultural pursuit. At $29.95 it may seem a bit pricey, but for Canadians who have tried - and failed - to keep tender roses alive, it will likely constitute a first-rate bargain. Marjorie Harris, who wrote The Canadian Gardener (1990), has added a slightly off-kilter postscript to that useful volume. It carries the title Ecological Gardening: Your Path to a Healthy Garden (Random House, 197 pages, $14 paper), and its best quality is that it is highly readable. It ought to be more than that, because the subject of how to garden on an ecologically sound basis is -or should beof interest to every gardener. Unfortunately the book doesn`t seem to have been planned and edited very carefully, and the illustrations are minimal and often unhelpful. Parts of the book, however, are excellent - such as the section on Xeriscaping and hydrologye-related gardening - and some of the appendices are first rate. But the chapter on "Old Wives Lore` isn`t given a very clear context, and it has a sub-section on astrology that is downright silly. Similarly, I have yet to see a drawing of a weed that will enable me to identify it in my own garden, and the discussion of good and bad weeds was almost as silly as the astrology -and could cause novice gardeners a lot of grief. Yet for all that, it is one of the liveliest gardening books I`ve come across in years, filled with interesting facts, stimulating ideas, and passages of fine writing. I`ll be looking forward to the second edition, which I hope comes sooner rather than later. This year`s special treat is Butterfly Gardening: Creating Summer Magic in Your Garden (Whitecap, 192 pages, $22.95 paper), created by the Xerxes Society and the Smithsonian Institute. It suggests an alternative form of gardening: a marvellous hybrid of conventional floral gardening, ecology, and literate (and sometimes literary) entomology of the kind popular in the 19th century, in which the purpose of the garden plantings is to attract butterflies - which are perhaps the only things in nature more intricate and beautiful than flowers. The book`s colour plates seem far more beautiful than those of similar books from the 19th century, and the text is quirky; scientific, and eminently readable. Designing a garden to attract insects is along ways away from the motives most people garden with; but as exercises in ecologically intelligent behaviour go, it might be the sort of thing to which we ought to be paying more attention. And it isnt silly. If we designed and built our cities for wild birds instead of real estate agents and developers, they`d be better places to live for everyone. Cities built this way would be ecologically sound - and therefore economically viable for the long term, and the human and other dwellers would be healthier and happier coinhabitants. This book makes the same basic argument for butterflies and gardens. I think it`s a reasonable - and highly entertaining - one.