Nowhere is this anxiety more acute, Pollan says, than in the United States. Wealth, abundance and the lack of a steadying, centuries-old food culture have conspired to make us Americans dysfunctional eaters, obsessed with getting thin while becoming ever more fat, lurching from one specious bit of dietary wisdom (margarine is better for you than butter) to another (carbs kill). Pollan diagnoses a “national eating disorder,” and he aims to shed light on both its causes and some potential solutions. To this end, he embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald’s repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a “Big Organic” meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a “hunter-gatherer” feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

Even if the author weren’t a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and therefore by definition a liberal foodie intellectual, you could guess how this scheme will play out: the McDonald’s meal will be found wanting in terms of nutrition and eco-sustainability; the Whole Foods meal will be decent but tainted with a whiff of corporate compromise; the Virginia farm meal will be rapturously flavorful and uplifting; and the hunter-gatherer meal will be a gutsy feast of wild boar and morels, with a side of guilt and some squirmy philosophizing on what it means to take a pig’s life.

But for Pollan, the final outcome is less important than the meal’s journey from the soil to the plate. His supermeticulous reporting is the book’s strength — you’re not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from. In fact, the first quarter of the book is devoted to a shocking, page-turning exposé of the secret life of that most seemingly innocent and benign of American crops, corn.

The species Zea mays, for all its connotations of heartland goodness and Rodgers and Hammerstein romance (“as high as an elephant’s eye”), has been turned into nothing less than an agent of evil, Pollan argues. Expanding on his articles for The New York Times Magazine, he lays out the many ways in which government policy since the Nixon era — to grow as much corn as possible, subsidized with federal money — is totally out of whack with the needs of nature and the American public.

Big agribusiness has Washington in its pocket. The reason its titans want to keep corn cheap and plentiful, Pollan explains, is that they value it, above all, as a remarkably inexpensive industrial raw material. Not only does it fatten up a beef steer more quickly than pasture does (though at a cost to ourselves and cattle, which haven’t evolved to digest corn, and are therefore pre-emptively fed antibiotics to offset the stresses caused by their unnatural diet); once milled, refined and recompounded, corn can become any number of things, from ethanol for the gas tank to dozens of edible, if not nutritious, products, like the thickener in a milkshake, the hydrogenated oil in margarine, the modified cornstarch that binds the pulverized meat in a McNugget and, most disastrously, the ubiquitous sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Though it didn’t reach the American market until 1980, HFCS has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the larder — in Pollan’s McDonald’s meal, there’s HFCS not only in his 32-ounce soda, but in the ketchup and the bun of his cheeseburger — and Pollan fingers it as the prime culprit in the nation’s obesity epidemic.

Against this backdrop of cynicism and big bellies, Pollan finds his hero in Joel Salatin, an “alternative” farmer in Virginia who will sell his goods only to local customers. A cantankerous self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic,” Farmer Joel has ingeniously marshalled the rhythms and symbioses of nature to produce a bounty of food from his hundred acres. For example, his cattle graze a plot of grass for a day or two and are then succeeded by several hundred laying hens, which not only nibble on the clipped grass but pick grubs and larvae from the cowpats, thereby spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. The chickens’ bug-laden, high-protein diet results in fantastically flavorful eggs, while their excrement enriches the pasture with nitrogen, allowing it to recover in a matter of weeks for the cows to revisit.

Salatin seems to have found the secrets of sustainable agriculture. The shocker is that he doesn’t want to be part of any national solution. He’s an off-the-grid crank who hates the government, home-schooled his kids and declares to Pollan: “Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?” But Pollan, a nice-guy writer whose awe of Salatin is palpable, lets the farmer off lightly, saying that his provocative words “made me appreciate what a deep gulf of culture and experience separates me from Joel — and yet at the same time, what a sturdy bridge caring about food can sometimes provide.”

If I have any caveats about “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” it’s Pollan’s tendency to be too nice. He doesn’t write with the propulsive rage that fueled Eric Schlosser’s blockbuster “Fast Food Nation,” nor does he take a firm stand on figures like the “Big Organic” pioneer Gene Kahn, an ex-hippie farmer from Washington State who decided that the only way to sustain his company, Cascadian Farm, was to sell it to General Mills. Pollan wryly notes that Kahn drives a late-model Lexus with vanity plates that say ORGANIC, but he calls Kahn “a realist, a businessman with a payroll to meet.” Does this mean that Kahn is striking the right balance between mammon and the mission, or does Pollan think he’s a hypocrite?

Likewise, I wish Pollan would stick his neck out and be more prescriptive about how we might realistically address our national eating disorder. We can’t all go off the grid like Salatin, nor can we just wish away 200 years of industrialization. So what to do? Is the ever-growing organic-food industry already on the right path? Or is more radical action needed? Should the Department of Justice break up giant, soil-exhausting factory farms into small, self-sustaining polycultural organic farms? Perhaps it’s greedy to demand more from a book already brimming with ideas, but what can I say? I’m an American, and I’m still hungry.

At least from a business perspective, the fattening of America may well have been a necessity. Food companies grow by selling us more of their products. The challenge they face is that the American population is growing much more slowly than the American food supply—a prescription for falling rates of profit. Agribusiness now produces 3,800 calories of food a day for every American, 500 calories more than it produced 30 years ago. (And by the government’s lights, at least a thousand more calories than most people need.) So what’s a food company to do? The answer couldn’t be simpler or more imperative: get each of us to eat more. A lot more.

Critser doesn’t put it quite this way, but his subject is the nutritional contradictions of capitalism. There’s only so much food one person can consume (unlike shoes or CD’s), or so you would think. But Big Food has been nothing short of ingenious in devising ways to transform its overproduction into our overconsumption—and body fat. The best parts of this book show how, in the space of two decades, Americans learned to eat, on average, an additional 200 calories a day. In the words of James O. Hill, a physiologist Critser interviewed, getting fat today is less an aberration than “a normal response to the American environment.”

Some of the credit for creating this new environment belongs to an unheralded businessman by the name of David Wallerstein, the man Critser says introduced “supersizing” to America. Today Wallerstein is an executive with McDonald’s, but back in the 1960′s he worked for a chain of movie theaters, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn—the high-markup items that theaters depend on for their profitability. Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose sales—two-for-one deals, matinee specials—but found he couldn’t induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. Why? Because going for seconds makes people feel like pigs.

But Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda—a lot more—as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the Big Gulp and, in time, the Big Mac and jumbo fries. Though Ray Kroc himself took some convincing: the McDonald’s founder had naively assumed that if people wanted more fries they’d buy another bag. He didn’t appreciate how social taboos against gluttony (one of the seven deadly sins, after all) were holding us back. Wallerstein’s dubious achievement was to devise the dietary equivalent of a papal dispensation: Supersize it!

Now, you might think people would stop eating and drinking these gargantuan portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn’t work that way. Citing studies in the “growing field of satiety”—the science of human satisfaction—Critser writes that people presented with larger portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they otherwise would. Human hunger is apparently quite elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: it behooved our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, thereby storing reserves of fat against future famine. Researchers call this trait “the thrifty gene.” The problem is that in an era of fast-food abundance, the opportunity for feasting now presents itself 24/7.

What makes supersizing such an effective business strategy is the cheapness of basic foodstuffs in America. Since the raw materials of soda and popcorn, French fries and even hamburgers represent such a tiny fraction of their retail price (compared with labor, packaging and advertising), expanding portion size becomes a way to multiply sales without adding much to costs.

Critser, to his credit, is more interested in ferreting out the political history of “overnutrition” in America than indulging in the usual pseudopsychology or sociology of fat. So “Fat Land” begins at the beginning, with the 1971 arrival in Washington of Earl Butz. Butz, you’ll recall, was Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, a blustering, quotable and foulmouthed agricultural economist from Purdue. The early 70′s marked the last time food prices in America had climbed high enough to generate political heat. Bad weather, a grain shortage and soaring costs for agricultural inputs (fuel, chemicals, equipment) were squeezing farmers; at the same time consumers were protesting the high costs of basic foods like sugar, cheese and, perhaps most sensitively, meat. Beef, that American entitlement, had suddenly become a luxury good.

Recognizing the political peril of cranky consumers and restive farmers, President Nixon dispatched Butz to rejigger the American food system. The Sage of Purdue promptly loosened regulations, beat down trade rules and expanded subsidies. By 1976, when a racist joke he told on a plane cost him his job, Butz had largely succeeded in driving down the cost of food and vastly increasing the output of America’s farmers. Say what you will about the problems of a heavily subsidized industrial agriculture, the cost of food is no longer a political issue in the United States.

Now we find ourselves confronted with the unintended consequences of cheap and abundant food, foremost among them the epidemic of obesity. Critser takes us on a brisk tour, by turns funny and depressing, of a society learning to accommodate itself to its new dimensions: restaurants adding square inches to their seats; government agencies relaxing their weight, fitness and dietary guidelines; Seventh Avenue recalibrating clothing sizes to make for happier visits to the dressing room. Less amusing is what our weight is doing to our health, and Critser is sure-footed and clear in describing the science of obesity, especially the precise mechanism by which our diet has led to an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. What used to be called adult onset diabetes now afflicts millions of children as well as adults, and costs America’s health system billions of dollars a year.

In the last year or so, there have been signs that the fattening of America is emerging as a political issue. A grass-roots parents’ movement to get fast food and vending machines out of the schools is gathering steam, and several lawsuits have recently been filed by obese customers against fast-food chains, seeking to hold the companies liable for health problems. The suits seem absurd on their face (no one’s forcing people to eat this stuff), but then so did the early suits against the tobacco companies. There does seem to be at least one area in which the tobacco analogy is apposite: the ethics of marketing unhealthy products to children.

Indeed, the question of responsibility looms large in the growing debate over obesity, and it is here that Critser loses his footing a bit. While “Fat Land” does an excellent job connecting the dots between government and corporate policies and the fattening of America, by the end of the book the problem has largely, and somewhat inexplicably, been redefined in terms of personal responsibility. Critser expresses the hope that “the food industry might . . . take it upon itself to do something” like resize portions, but nothing that has come before gives us reason to think the industry would ever do any such thing.

George W. Bush has defined this as “the era of personal responsibility” and finally it is under this banner, so congenial to business, that Critser marches, seemingly in spite of himself and his best journalism. So instead of seriously entertaining any public solutions to what he has so convincingly demonstrated is a public problem, Critser ends by imploring us to eat less, get off our duffs and, incredibly, bring back gluttony as a leading sin. Personal responsibility is all to the good, but everything else in “Fat Land” suggests it is probably no match for the thrifty gene and the Happy Meal.

By Susanne Antonetta.

242 pp. Washington:

Counterpoint. $26.

“This is the story of a body,” Susanne Antonetta tells us near the end of her arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the 20th century’s most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chlordane, benzene and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape. Antonetta, the author of three collections of poetry, spent her childhood summers in a bungalow on Barnegat Bay in southern Ocean County, one of the relatively low-income “sacrifice communities” where the toxic wastes of postwar civilization have pooled. We know a little about these places from the news, from books and movies like “Erin Brockovich” and “A Civil Action,” but for the most part we’ve glimpsed them only from a distance, through the eyes of crusading reporters and lawyers. Susanne Antonetta’s considerable achievement in “Body Toxic” is to devise a literary voice for the people who live in such places, for the bodies that have been “charged and reformed by the landscape” of pollution. Hers is one of those bodies.

Antonetta is fully conscious of the ways American writers have traditionally drawn lines of connection between landscape and character, place and psychology. It is precisely these lines she sets out to reconfigure—or blow up. She’s writing against childhood’s summery pastoral, the afternoons spent swimming in the Toms River, crabbing in Potter’s Creek, picking berries on the Bayville Road. All such scenes are doubled here, the childhood idyll recollected in the grown-up knowledge of its poisoning. So Potter’s Creek turns out to flow near Denzer & Schafer X-Ray, a negative-stripping plant that leached lead and chromium and mercury into the water. Along the shores of the Toms River, the Ciba-Geigy Corporation left 14,000 barrels of toxic chemicals and released into the drinking water “a poison plume a mile square and dozens of feet deep.” A nuclear plant five miles from her bungalow left the waters of Oyster Creek “jazzed with radioactive particles.”

Of course there was no way to know then that the landscapes of Antonetta’s childhood harbored such secrets, though hints of the percolating evil do bubble up in her narrative now and then, eruptions of the Superfund Gothic. Her parents on their evening walks notice the growing pile of Union Carbide drums on the old Reich Farm; the tap water “had an odor like food. It tasted like H2O pumped from hell’s drinking fountain: 10 times the legal limit of iron, manganese, a reek of sulfur. We all developed an unaccountable taste for it. Uncle Eddie bottled it and drank it at home.” This is a book in which the simplest acts—washing the dishes, say, or mixing up a pitcher of Tang—take on a retrospective horror. (It is also a book that will set the image of the Garden State back to the time before Springsteen and Roth and McPhee found its romance. This is the Jersey that still smells, of “something mustardy, something corrosive.”)

Like any memoirist, Antonetta is mining her past in the hope of explaining the woman she became, but in this construction of self, chemistry largely takes the place of psychology. This is because the woman she has become is virtually the sum of her body’s betrayals. “I have or have had one spectacular multiple pregnancy, a miscarriage, a radiation-induced tumor, a double uterus, asthma, endometriosis, growths on the liver,” and so on. Elsewhere we learn she is a manic-depressive who has been treated with lithium, has a seizure disorder and is a recovered drug addict.

What Antonetta has written is something new—a postpsychological memoir. For her it is chemistry, more than childhood trauma, that embodies the power of the past to shape the self. While she is an acid (and often quite funny) observer of her dysfunctional family, which brims with nearly as many poisons and unacknowledged secrets as the landscape, the family romance counts for less here than the periodic table and base pairs of DNA. “I wondered how much else of her was in me,” Antonetta writes at one point of her icy mother, “not the what-she-said-to-me and what-I-said-to-her stuff a shrink can pry out but what comes in through the blood and the cells.” She’s thinking here not just of her genetic inheritance but of the real possibility that DDE, a metabolite of DDT that collects in mothers’ milk, is responsible for the fact she has two uteruses and can no longer conceive.

Establishing cause and effect in these matters is never simple, and this presents a problem. Are we prepared, as readers, to accept that the etiology of our narrator’s troubled brain chemistry is to be found in the South Jersey landscape? Or that, as a teenager, she poisoned herself with drugs to compensate for “the years my landscape poisoned me” Not always; the journalist in me bridled occasionally at the easy commerce between biological fact and literary conceit. This is very much a poet’s book, gravitating toward the striking image and away from the linear narrative—which by its nature might have forced the author to try to deal more explicitly with cause and effect than she does.

Instead, Antonetta’s essayistic chapters themselves pool, like migrating chemicals, around such themes as DNA or drugs or water, a familiar literary topos she manages here to completely refresh. Throughout, her approach is associative rather than explanatory, but before long the sheer force of the writing makes the reader accept the agency of her migrating molecules: the DDT moving out of the land to take up residence in her mother’s breast, the calcium-loving isotopes searching out a place to rest in a body’s bones and teeth. (Under a Geiger counter, Ocean County baby teeth “twitch with picocuries of strontium 90.”)

Whatever resistance the reader may erect, Antonetta has anticipated. “I don’t expect anyone to explain what’s wrong with me,” she writes near the end of “Body Toxic.” “No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody, I don’t think. Though I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air. Every vital system of my body disrupted: an arrhythmic heart, a seizing brain, severe allergies, useless reproductive organs. Either it’s Sodom and this is the wrath of God or it’s the wrath of man, which is thoughtless, foolish and much more lasting.”

By the end of this dark, disturbing book, you realize Antonetta has posed a challenge to our prevailing notions of science and journalism and even literary narrative. “No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody”: yet why is it we will so much more readily accept the psychological explanations of self and suffering retailed in the common run of novels and literary memoirs? In books, at least, the Oedipal complex still trumps “what comes in through the blood and the cells.” Why not construct a childhood from the influences of loosed electrons and chemicals “fretted into our DNA” rather than the stuff a shrink can pry out? Science has been moving into this territory for some time now; Antonetta’s aim in her “environmental memoir” is to take literature there, too. It is a testament to her fearlessness and talent that she has largely succeeded.

This notion that the garden is a path out into the larger world is a peculiarly American idea. For most of history, and in most of the rest of civilization, gardens have been conceived as walled-off refuges from the world, places of escape rather than engagement. Maybe that’s why Americans never went for the hortus conclusus, preferring to bring down the traditional walls and fences so that our gardens might, in every sense, connect. Our lawns and even our compost piles have a politics, and moral considerations color our choice of plants (useful or ornamental? native or exotic?) and horticultural practice (chemical or organic?). True, it can get to be a little much—and occasionally it does, as in a couple of this season’s more ideologically minded garden books. But when a writer is as deft as Allen Lacy, the connections traced between a cramped yard in southern New Jersey and such far-flung concerns as species extinction, the symbolism of the American front yard, the migration of plants, the act of naming and the rub of seasonal and biographical time in a garden can be thrilling to follow.

The best of this season’s garden books all share this inclination to find a world of meaning in even the most modest garden, though Lacy takes the prize for finding the greatest variety of meanings. Only when you get to the very end of “The Inviting Garden,” which unfolds as unhurriedly as a Saturday morning schmooze over the back fence with a particularly amiable neighbor, does the ambition of Lacy’s project emerge. He has written nothing less than a defense of gardening, in the classical sense of that word, the one that we associate with Philip Sidney. Lacy’s method is to show us the beauty of gardening’s three faces in turn: its ability to delight the senses (with a chapter each on the Big Five), instruct the intellect (taking up plant hunting, naming and symbolism, as well as American landscape design) and elevate the spirit (chiefly by planting us in time and place). Cynthia Woodyard’s ungushy photographs effectively underscore Lacy’s ideas.

But although “The Inviting Garden” is a genuinely philosophical book (Lacy was in fact a professor of philosophy long before he established himself as the dean of American garden writers), it doesn’t have a didactic, pushy or theoretical sentence in it. Lacy’s writing is a model of clarity and modesty, and all of his insights are rooted in the soil of his long experience growing specific plants in a specific place. (Whatever the horticultural equivalent of being well read is—well planted?—Lacy surely is that.) Both the new and the old gardener will find much to think about here, and to savor.

Laura Simon makes a different set of connections in DEAR MR. JEFFERSON: Letters From a Nantucket Gardener (Crown, $23). As the title suggests, her interest is historical, and her method epistolary: the book takes the form of a half-dozen letters to Thomas Jefferson, the secular patron saint of American gardeners. (“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,” he wrote in a letter most of us can recite by heart, “and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”) The conceit, which for the most part she manages to pull off quite nicely, allows Simon to write casually about doings in her own Nantucket garden (her passion, like Jefferson’s, is for vegetables) and to wander down some of the byways of American garden history. Simon follows in the tradition of Eleanor Perenyi and Katharine S. White, writers who departed from their accustomed lines of work to offer a single book about gardening, an avid testament by a confirmed yet highly knowledgeable amateur.

In Simon’s case, the garden book is a break from the writing of historical novels, and this background serves her well: the historical passages are swift, sure-footed and fascinating.

Those that work best are the ones in which Jefferson himself plays a role, like the history of the tomato (which he helped introduce to America—or, really, reintroduce, since its roots are Mexican); the development of mail-order seeds (Bernard M’Mahon, father of the seed catalogue, was T.J.’s Burpee) and the fate of the vegetable varieties that Jefferson grew at Monticello, some of which are still grown as heirlooms, while many others—like the Ravensworth pea he used to rave about—have been lost forever. Here planting and then tasting a tomato Jefferson cherished becomes an exercise of the historical imagination.

The conceit starts to creak only when Simon needs to impart information about Monticello her correspondent well knows, such as the length of the kitchen garden (1,000 feet) or the “interminable procession of friends, relatives and rubberneckers who would appear on your Palladian doorsteps.” At first her efforts to describe the modern world—McDonald’s, environmentalism, health fads—to someone living 200 years ago seemed a stretch, but after a while you get used to it, and start to appreciate how writing to Jefferson allows Simon to sneak up on our own times, see them afresh. Her account of the contemporary American kitchen garden, brimming with the food plants of a dozen different cultures and historical periods, not only would have wowed Thomas Jefferson, whose garden and table were as radically cosmopolitan as he was, but also succeeds in convincing the reader that we are indeed in the throes of “yet another gardening resurgence.”

STALKING THE WILD AMARANTH: Gardening in the Age of Extinction (Holt, $25) is, as the subtitle gives fair warning, a book with an agenda. Janet Marinelli, director of publishing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, bids us to see the connections between our yards, teeming with exotic plants and smothered in lawn, and the worldwide decline of biological diversity. Our yards are part of the problem, having obliterated native habitats and contributed to the homogenization of the world’s flora, yet, reconceived, they might also become part of the solution. This is a tendentious premise, yet Marinelli is so reasonable, and such a breezy writer, that the reader is happy to follow her deep into the thickets of horticultural politics.

As the Communist Party was to the 30′s or the Vietnam War was to the 60′s, so native plants are the defining political issue to contemporary gardening. Do you believe it is morally responsible to plant a tea rose or burning bush in your yard at a time when so much of our native flora is threatened by the proliferation of such alien species? You might have thought those particular horses are already out of the barn and well down the road, as indeed they have been since 1492: perhaps a third of the plants one encounters in the landscape of the eastern United States, from the roadside day lilies and Queen Anne’s lace to the lawn grasses and the apple trees, are alien species. (Virtually everything still green in October is European in origin, having evolved under milder autumn circumstances.) Even so, the advocates of native-plant gardening contend that we’re obliged to undo the damage, and our yards are a good place to start. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Marinelli and the author of the next book here take me to task for a 1994 article in The Times Magazine in which I criticized native plantmania and drew a connection between nativism in horticulture and politics.)

In the most persuasive part of Marinelli’s gentle polemic, she argues that garden design has always reflected a civilization’s understanding of nature, yet our own esthetics have so far failed to keep pace with the lessons of ecology. (Garden practice is another matter: organic methods have become increasingly well established.) Most contemporary garden design can still be classified as either classical, expressing in its formal geometry a rationalist view of nature’s essential order, or romantic, modeled on our subjective experience of nature. What’s needed now is an ecological garden, one that “won’t try to imitate, like classical gardens, what nature is, or, like romantic gardens, what it looks like,” she writes. Rather it must “act like nature, must do what nature does.”

That this is easier said than done is amply demonstrated in PARADISE BY DESIGN: Native Plants and the New American Landscape (North Point/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), by Kathryn Phillips. Phillips, a journalist (she is the author of “Tracking the Vanished Frogs: An Ecological Mystery”) rather than a garden writer, has written a book that aims to be to landscape design what Tracy Kidder’s “House” was to carpentry. Her unobtrusive narrator trails Joni Janecki, a young California landscape architect, as she designs gardens for the Sands family in Montecito, the Hewlett-Packard Company’s corporate offices in Palo Alto and a public park in Salinas. Janecki is deeply committed to using native plants in her work, though the story of the Sands job suggests what an uphill struggle it is to persuade clients to give up on the Old World plants, lawns and all the other trappings of landscape tidiness that still dominate American dreams of paradise. The reader is surprised at the end of “Paradise by Design” when the Sands actually ditch most of Joni’s ecologically sensitive design in favor of a big old lawn with a sprinkler system.

Luckily for Phillips, Hewlett-Packard and the city of Salinas keep the environmental faith, and we get to look on as a series of habitat gardens take shape. (Though because there are no illustrations, we can only guess what they look like.) Phillips is a very good journalist, and she’s done her homework, not only on the habits of native and invasive plants but on the history and practice of landscape architecture and the workings of the American nursery industry (there’s a fascinating section on the marketing of the new carpet rose). The book makes you realize just how little legwork goes into most writing on gardening in this country, and it’s refreshing to read some genuine reporting on the subject instead of the usual first-person philosophizing. Phillips has been unfortunate in her choice of a hero, however, because much as we come to root for plucky Joni Janecki as she battles the forces of horticultural reaction, she doesn’t have what it takes to carry this book on her shoulders. Maybe it has something to do with being such a visual person, but Janecki is virtually inarticulate, both about the value of native plants and the process of design. “I can see it and I can see what it looks like,” she explains (if that is the right word) in the heat of designing the Sands’ garden, “but I don’t really know what it is. It would help to know that, I think, especially as I go along.” Agreed. Fortunately for us, Phillips keeps Joni’s lines to a wincing minimum and fills the second half of her book with rich, well-reported digressions on the tensions between the business and ecology of the American landscape.

Lest you conclude all gardeners have forsaken human pleasure for the sake of planetary health, I heartily recommend spending some time in A TUSCAN PARADISE (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35), a dazzling photographic essay that takes the coffeetable gardening book to a new level. Irresistible though they may be, picture books on gardens are seldom more than skin deep, the horticultural equivalent of fashion photography, if not pornography. Marina Schinz, whom readers, or lookers, may remember from her stunning work in “Visions of Paradise” (1985), has opted this time around for depth over breadth, choosing to train her lens on a single not-famous garden—Valle Pinciole, near Tuscany’s border with Umbria—over a period of three years. The result is a remarkably intimate portrait of a place that captures not only its considerable beauty, but also the rhythms of its seasons, as well as the everyday life and backstage labor that ordinarily don’t make it into published gardens. (What a novelty it is to see the gardener, Gian Paolo, pruning the boxwood hedges, clippings scattered beneath his plumb line.)

Valle Pinciole, which is the creation and weekend retreat of two Roman friends of Schinz, is a virtual encyclopedia of garden styles, a densely layered landscape of hedged outdoor rooms, pergolas, mazes, orchards, rosewalks (395 roses are in residence), olive groves, an orangerie, a white garden, an herb garden, a Japanese cherry garden and an English Jekyll garden—indeed, just about everything but a native plant garden. Think of it as a habitat garden for classically educated humans.

It would be easy to dismiss “A Tuscan Paradise” as yet another volume of Mediterranean fantasy for the Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes crowd. But Schinz’s accomplishment has been to make her subject seem romantic and completely real at the same time, to render a Pierre de Ronsard rose in such a way that it recalls the sumptuousness of all roses and yet is never anything less than its heartbreakingly specific, timebound self. Her scrupulous eye reminds us how a garden is a real place before it is a representation, which suggests another sort of connection our gardens encourage us to make, the one between the here-and-now of a place and the there-and-then of what Mirabel Osler once called the infinity of gardens.

Which reminds me that Osler’s 1989 book, A GENTLE PLEA FOR CHAOS (Arcade, $19.95), is one of two out-of-print classics of modern English garden writing that we’re fortunate to have back on the shelf this season. Not especially gentle, Osler’s volume of essays sent a blast of fresh air through the stuffy rooms of the English gardening world when it was first published. This is less a handbook of advice (though what there is of that is excellent) than a miscellany of “thoughts” that have “sprouted while I have been deadheading roses, visiting gardens or buying a pair of socks.” Starting out from the garden Osler made with her late husband, Michael, in Shropshire, the narrative comes and goes as freely a cat, touching down on everything from garden design to weather, the quirks of particular plants and gardeners, botanical illustration, laziness, the compulsion of water, garden visiting and even television westerns. This is a smart, spirited, gorgeously written and above all funny book, so open-minded (her outlook is refreshingly international), personal and passionate as to make one wonder if Mirabel Osler is really an English gardener after all.

By contrast, Graham Stuart Thomas’s TREES IN THE LANDSCAPE (Sagapress, $35) is English to its roots, an authoritative treatise on “how tree planting makes landscapes happen,” written in the great tradition of Humphry Repton and Capability Brown. Thomas, who has spent the better part of 30 years supervising the restoration of gardens for the National Trust, looks at big trees as if they were so many tubes of paint in the hands of the picturesque master, focusing on how the particular form, texture and color of the various species contribute to the look and mood of a landscape. This is gardening in broad strokes for the long haul, and while “Trees in the Landscape” reads as if it has been written for gardeners with lots of land and money and help, even the gardener planting a sapling would do well to consult this wise and handsomely illustrated volume about the trees that connect our gardens to the future.

Moral gardeners are still very much with us—just look at the countless tracts on “natural gardening” or the continuing battle over whether Americans should welcome “alien species” to our horticultural shores—but to judge by this season’s harvest of garden books, the party of pure gardening pleasure appears finally to be finding its voice. (Though perhaps I should say image, for most of these books rely as heavily on pictures as on words to tell their stories.) Could this be a sign of a new maturity in American gardening, an indication that we’re finally getting over our moral queasiness about altering the landscape for no loftier purpose than to please ourselves?

As it happens, this season’s most compelling case for the pleasures of the garden comes from England, though I can’t think of a garden book much less English than THE SENSUOUS GARDEN (Simon & Schuster, $32.50). Montagu Don is a rising star in English horticultural circles (he contributes a gardening column to The Observer and frequently appears on television), part of a generation of English gardeners who are willing to declare in public that Gertrude Jekyll is not God, that the Chelsea Flower Show is a bore, and that—most shocking of all—the rest of the world might actually have something to teach the English about gardening.

Indeed, “The Sensuous Garden” is the sort of exuberant, Emersonian book an American gardener might have written—if, that is, American gardeners had the perfect horticultural confidence of the British. “Have faith in your own responses and garden for your own private pleasure,” Don urges his readers. He can sound like Martin Luther nailing his theses to the High Church of English Gardening: “Throw away the gardening manuals and trust yourself,” he writes. “There is no examiner, no moral worth cast over your horticultural efforts. Gardening is like sex: if everyone involved is happy, then you are doing it right.”

This is a message we very much need to hear now, and Don packages it with exactly the sort of images to make converts of his readers: paging through “The Sensuous Garden” is itself a sensuous experience. The photographs are stunning, as they’d better be in such a book, but Don has put up more than the usual gorgeous garden wallpaper: most of these images are highly specific and factual, the kind that repay multiple looks. Fittingly, the book is organized according to the five senses (plus a sixth he calls “intuition”), and each section does an admirable job of evoking the faculty in question in words as well as images. You might expect the text of a book like this to be either vapid or gooey, but Don is a precise, observant and knowledgeable writer who keeps his metaphors and facts nicely poised. I learned things—that bees perceive red as black, that orange roses are doomed to fail because they “make an unhappy combination of brashness and sophistication”—but mostly I was reminded of things, such as the excellent fact that “stones smell, and gravel releases its own bony scent as it is raked.” Montagu Don wakes us up to the sensuous possibilities of our gardens, to the point where one begins seriously to entertain the possibility that the moralism and didacticism of so much garden writing may represent nothing more than repression.

Speaking of horticultural sex, there are now entire books devoted to this highly worthwhile area. NAKED: Flowers Exposed (HarperCollins, $60) is a frequently prurient exploration of “the secret thoughts that flowers can conjure up in our psyches,” as the jacket puts it. Walter Hubert, a floral designer, asked a hundred photographers and celebrities to create expressionistic portraits of flowers; proceeds from sales of the book will go to charity. The work is, predictably, a very mixed bag, ranging from the urban lyricism of Jack Pierson’s “Magnolias, Morton Street”—as winning an icon of a New York spring as I have seen—to the (far too many) effortful stabs at fashion-world decadence that aim to shock but wind up merely annoying. For all the nude models festooned with blossoms (and there are plenty), the sexiest shots turn out to be the ones that really are about flowers—Alison Duke’s tumescent amaryllis, Raymond Meier’s fleshy bisexual orchid and Ross Bleckner’s gritty Gothic close-up of a lily’s private parts. The text, thankfully, is limited to a line or two from the contributing artists (“Garden roses floating in a pool of water. / Hypodermic needles for sale on the street. / About 6 minutes apart”), and the book has been beautifully produced, but you close this volume with a sinking appreciation for just how hard it is for photographers (or celebrities) to see a symbol as freighted as the flower truly afresh.

The other new book devoted to sex in the garden focuses strictly on the entomological variety. John Alcock is a professor of zoology who decided one day to rip out his suburban lawn in Tempe, Ariz., and replace it with a rough approximation of desert habitat. IN A DESERT GARDEN: Love and Death Among the Insects (Norton, $27.50), with line drawings by Turid Forsyth, recapitulates what has become something of a convention in contemporary American garden writing—the exodus from the Lawn and return to the Garden—but Alcock has put a new spin on it. Making no claims to biocentric virtue, Alcock makes clear he’s in it for the voyeuristic pleasure of watching bugs court, mate and, when he’s lucky, bite each other’s heads off postcoitally. Alcock is a fine stylist, deftly joining the keen observation and scientific insight one expects from a nature writer to the lighter (and, let’s admit it, much funnier) voice of a garden writer. The result is a wonderful and informative narrative in which even the compost pile becomes a vibrant stage. Alcock has some of J. Henri Fabre’s gift for bringing insect life to life on the page, and a curiosity about “the frontiers that exist just outside the front door” that proves catching.

William Bryant Logan offers a very different take on the pleasures of nature in THE TOOL BOOK (Smith & Hawken/Workman, $40), an unexpectedly voluptuous garden book that has scarcely a blossom or bug in it. I have to admit I approached this Smith & Hawken production with skepticism. Smith & Hawken sells garden tools after all, so there was every reason to expect that “The Tool Book” would turn out to be little more than a 300-page infomercial—or, even worse, a catalogue we were expected to pay for. It is in fact much more than that. Logan, who is one of our best garden writers, has produced not only a real book but a scrupulously researched, handsomely designed and highly enjoyable one to boot. In pictures and prose, “The Tool Book” is eloquent testimony to the fact that the greatest part of the pleasure of gardening is the work itself, and nothing can deepen that pleasure quite like a well-conceived tool. Among other things, a good tool is a medium for the transmission of cultural knowledge across the generations, and when we use it properly—to dig, to prune, to cultivate—we avail ourselves of the wisdom it embodies. Logan is also very good on the precise physical qualities of different hand tools, able to distinguish the snick-snick of his edging shears from the deeper tock-tock of the hedge shears. The studio photographs of the tools, by Sean Sullivan, are almost anatomical in their precision but somehow manage also to evoke the specific heft and sheer rightness of a good tool in the hand. (The book’s other fine photographs, by Georgia Glynn Smith, show the tools in use in the garden, digging, clipping and chopping.) Sure, there may be more here about tools than anyone really needs to know, but I found myself happily wandering down such seemingly unpromising byways as the history of digging. (The design of different spades and shovels, it seems, closely reflects the genius of the place in which they originated.) By the end of “The Tool Book” I felt inspired to throw out all my discount tools, scrape clean and oil the few good ones that remain and regard them in a whole new light: not just as means to a gardening end but as satisfactions in themselves.

Another commercial force in the renaissance of American gardening has come forward this fall with an ambitious and handsome volume of its own: THE GARDEN DESIGN BOOK (Regan Books/HarperCollins, $50), by Cheryl Merser and the editors of Garden Design magazine. More than any other magazine, Garden Design has raised the level of sophistication of American gardening in the last few years, by showcasing the work of emerging regional designers, teaching gardeners how to apply the basic principles of landscape architecture and, it must be said, by shrewdly changing the image of the American gardener from something out of the pages of the Talbots catalogue to, say, J. Crew. The book is as useful and intelligent as the magazine, and just as calculated. Most of the photography is spectacular—the kind of pictures that are as instructive as they are beautiful—but there are just a few too many shots of the sort of well-heeled yupsters who look rather less like gardeners than targets of demographic opportunity. Occasionally, too, the text lapses into the self-congratulatory second-person platitudes of the catalogue copywriter (“You view the world differently when you’re looking at it with a gardener’s eye.”)

These are minor annoyances in a valuable and potentially important book that manages to demystify and democratize the esthetics of garden design. “The Garden Design Book” brims with inventive solutions and inspiring case studies that, taken together, go a long way toward proposing a specifically American vision of the garden. But what is perhaps most striking about “The Garden Design Book” is that it exists at all—for who could have imagined just a few years ago that a genuinely sophisticated book about American garden design could even court the charge of trendiness?

Still more encouraging news about the state of American garden design will be found in Page Dickey’s BREAKING GROUND: Portraits of Ten Garden Designers (Artisan, $45). Lo and behold, six of the profilees are Americans, and their work—as photographed by Erica Lennard—suggests that ground is indeed being broken, particularly out West. Most of these designers have triumphantly declared their independence from the English perennial border, turning in many cases to local species, but local species deployed in striking ways. It’s often assumed that native plants imply a demurely naturalistic design, but the best of the designers in “Breaking Ground”—Nancy Goslee Power in California, Patrick Chasse in Maine and Nancy McCabe in Connecticut—have found ways of going native without sacrificing a strong sense of form or personal expression. McCabe does it with her distinctive stonework and timber fences, Chasse with his brilliant tapestries of ground cover and Power with her weird and boldly sculptural plants, which prove a fair match for even Frank Gehry’s raucous architecture.

The work here is playful, undaunted by the classical tradition and far more concerned with sensory experience than academic correctness. Though most of these projects look decidedly deep-pocket, the excellent text and pictures—both of them journalistic, and not the least bit gushy—manage to extract from these gardens valuable lessons for those of us who will never be able to afford a Nancy McCabe. I came away convinced of just how much more can be accomplished by planting less, and confirmed in the view that subtlety in the garden is highly overrated. But perhaps the happiest lesson to take away from “Breaking Ground” is that there is no good reason that sensitivity to the environment need check exuberance in our dealings with nature.

Why is it that the biggest and most lavish garden books always seem to get published in the spring—at precisely the season when reading is the last thing a gardener has time for, and legitimate gift-receiving occasions are so few? Whatever the reason, the more quirky or scholarly garden books that would be lost in the spring flood of garden porn—all those tempting volumes of sumptuous but not entirely real (and certainly unattainable) gardens—stand a much better chance of catching our eye this time of year. Here are seven that caught mine.

PARADISE TRANSFORMED: The Private Garden for the Twenty-first Century (Monacelli, $60) is fully as gorgeous as any work of garden porn I’ve ever thumbed, yet it’s a whole lot more provocative. Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor, partners in a London landscape design firm, have produced an eye-popping international survey of contemporary landscape architecture, from the coolly elegant modernist compositions of Dan Kiley to the occasionally wacky post-modern gardens of Martha Schwartz. The accent here is on design rather than horticulture—most of these gardens are decidedly post-plant. “Gardens should be freed from the boxwood of history,” declares one of these paradise transformers, and the work of the 30-odd designers featured here is nothing if not original, eloquently refuting the common view that nothing much has happened in landscape architecture since Roberto Burle Marx and Luis Barragan. Don’t miss Ms. Schwartz’s dadaist “bagel garden” in Boston, where a front lawn has been transformed into a tidy parterre of clipped box, purple aquarium gravel and, yes, a double row of lacquered plain bagels.

If “Paradise Transformed” makes a case for the vitality of contemporary landscape design, SO FINE A PROSPECT: Historic New England Gardens (University Press of New England, $45) brings proof that an earlier group of American paradise transformers—the makers of great private gardens in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries—accomplished a lot more than they’ve usually got credit for. Bringing together the insights of the social historian, the biographer and the gardener, Alan Emmet has added a significant new dimension to our understanding of American garden history, once treated as little more than a shallow tributary of English garden fashion. A wilder landscape and climate, combined with a powerful moral imperative inherited from the Puritans, gave New England gardens their own special character, even when their designers had one eye on changing European fashions (the hemline of horticultural fashion being a garden’s relative formality). Ms. Emmet skillfully demonstrates how gardens as diverse as Hollis Hunnewell’s Italianate extravaganza in Wellesley, Mass., and Celia Thaxter’s florid Impressionist gem on Appledore Island, Me., were both the distinct American reflections of an individual, a landscape and a time. “So Fine a Prospect” deserves a place on the short shelf of recent histories—alongside May Brawley Hill’s “Grandmother’s Garden” and Mac Griswold’s “Golden Age of American Gardens”—that have helped us recover a largely forgotten gardening heritage.

There’s often an inverse relationship between the beauty and the usefulness of a gardening book; not so in the case of Bunny Guinness’s CREATING A FAMILY GARDEN (Abbeville, $29.95), a book that somehow manages to marry romance and practicality—precisely the challenge facing every gardener with young children. How, in other words, does one make peace between the play equipment and the perennials? Ms. Guinness, a young British designer who won a gold medal for her “Wind in the Willows” garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1994, has demonstrated how a well-designed sandbox can actually add something to a garden; she does the same favor for the tree house, the swing set and the kiddie pool, all of which she manages to fold into winning grown-up gardens from which every last molecule of blue and yellow plastic has been exiled. Seductive photographs trade off with clever do-it-yourself plans and a text that evinces a real empathy for children; there’s even a list of plants that kids love, and a menu of desiderata that includes such essentials as “areas of long grass for stalking games.” (I guess Lyme disease hasn’t come to England yet.)

A book I can imagine having an equally dramatic effect on my garden next spring (not to mention my wallet) is the second volume of the Garden Club of America’s PLANTS THAT MERIT ATTENTION. Volume 2: Shrubs (Timber Press, $59.95). (Volume 1 was “Trees.”) Drawing on the expertise of hundreds of American horticulturists and gardeners, Janet Meakin Poor and Nancy Peterson Brewster have compiled a magisterial reference that should finally break the stranglehold of that small handful of hackneyed shrubs currently choking our yards and nurseries. Here are literally hundreds of gardenworthy alternatives to the usual yews, rhodos and forsythias, each given a good photograph and a brief but authoritative textlet setting forth its landscape uses and culture. The shrubs are presented alphabetically, but at the back of the book you’ll find a truly awesome set of appendixes breaking down the cultivars by hardiness zone, shade tolerance, pest and disease resistance, fragrance, floriferousness, soil preference, environmental stress resistance—everything but deer-withstanding ability. A model of just how good a plant reference can be, “Shrubs” also directs readers to the public gardens where each of the featured shrubs is on display, and then on to the nurseries that offer it for sale. This is the sort of book that could quietly revolutionize a garden, even a landscape.

A somewhat less sophisticated, but no less ambitious, new reference work is THE BOOK OF OUTDOOR GARDENING (Workman, cloth, $28.95; paper, $18.95), by the editors of Smith & Hawken, a book that aspires to become the pre-eminent one-volume primer for beginning American gardeners. Comprehensive, lively, accessible and even inspiring, this is precisely the sort of book to give someone who’s recently fallen headlong into the dirt. Some experienced gardeners will bridle at this book’s occasionally annoying blend of trendiness and environmental rectitude (if the Smith & Hawken catalogue sets your teeth on edge, this will too), but the scope, handsomeness and convenience of this primer should earn it many devoted readers.

Another impressive feat of editorial enterprise is on display in A PHOTOGRAPHIC GARDEN HISTORY (Random House, $55), by Roger Phillips and Nicky Foy, though this one is a good deal more eccentric. This inviting visual history of world gardening, consisting of several hundred photographs and long captions, simultaneously unfolds along two completely different conceptual paths, sort of like a CD-ROM between hard covers. The first path is chronological and cultural (the pageant of Western gardening from ancient Rome to the present, followed by sections on Chinese and Japanese gardening), while the second is thematic and cross-cultural. What this means for the reader, or viewer, is that our stately march from “Dutch Baroque” to “Romantic/Picturesque” will be suddenly interrupted by a two- or three-page visual digression on the theme of, say, “Borrowed Landscape,” in which we are invited to contrast the long prospects at Stourhead with those at Bi Shu Zhan Zhuang. Taken together, these often brilliant little photographic essays, which touch on everything from grottoes to water staircases, follies to parterres, are the best parts of this odd volume, underscoring the power of a few simple landscape ideas to endure across time and culture.

All the books mentioned thus far have more to offer the eye than the ear; every one of them is copiously illustrated and fat enough to commandeer a coffee table. Nothing wrong with that, except that it seems to me the winter bookshelf should also have at least one small and personal volume on it, a one-byline book propelled farther by its passion than its authority, and written in the sort of voice that is the literary equivalent of a chat over the back fence. As it happens, Margery Fish’s WE MADE A GARDEN (Sagapress/Timber Press, $19.95), one of my all-time favorite first-person gardening books, has just been published in this country for the first time, some 40 years after it appeared in England. Cause to cheer—and to wonder how American publishers could ever have let this one fall through the cracks for so long.

The “we” of the title is Margery Fish and her somewhat cranky late husband, Walter, a former editor of The Daily Mail; and the garden they made was in Somerset, where they bought a wreck of a house and two acres of limey clay in 1937, when “my husband decided there was a likelihood of war.” Margery Fish is the most congenial of garden writers, possessed of a modest and deceptively simple voice that manages to delicately layer memoir with horticultural how-to. The book was first published in 1956, and Margery Fish comes across as every inch the 50′s wife, patiently enduring Walter’s interminable lectures on the importance of structure in the garden—walls, lawns, paths—and the relative inconsequentiality of her own cherished flowers. But lurking just beneath the surface of Margery’s submissiveness is a subversive streak—imagine Gracie Allen wielding a pair of secateurs. Even the garden paths required negotiations: “I should have preferred to fill our cracks with a mixture of sand and fine soil so that tiny green plants would creep along all the stones but this was one thing Walter would not have at any price,” she confides. “Time has improved things and a lot of the Somerset cement has become loosened, some of it helped, I admit, by a crowbar, and now I have little plants creeping and crawling in and out of nearly every crevice. Between the lines of this captivating little book one can make out the story of a marriage (Walter dies before the garden is completed) and the distant war that spirits off one “garden boy” after another, leaving Margery to roll the gravel on Walter’s beloved paths alone. Much more than a period piece, “We Made a Garden” is a gentle reminder that plants are only a small part of what a garden is. The good ones are autobiographies written in green.

It was the bookstore’s long and unexpectedly lively shelf of garden writing that led me deep into the garden world. Here was a pastime that had inspired not only the obligatory volumes of illustrated step-by-step, but also the higher how-to of a Vita Sackville-West, applying her tart prose and Bloomsbury sensibility to issues of garden taste; the incontestable esthetic pronouncements of a Gertrude Jekyll, gardening’s own Ruskin; the socio-botanical commentaries of a Louise Beebe Wilder or a Celia Thaxter, bringing an almost Jamesian regard to the social swirl of a perennial border; the dryly comic reminiscences of a Margery Fish; and the bristly opining of a Katherine White or an Eleanor Perenyi, casting their critical gaze over the garden world like two horticultural Lieblings.

In the garden section I had stumbled on a spirited, often very funny conversation that had been going on for years, oblivious to literature’s main chance and in some ways better for it. It’s the same in the angling section or on the numismatic shelf, I’m sure: writers trading tips, getting it right, adding their two cents to age-old debates nobody else in the store even knows about, much less cares. History and geography collapse in these far-flung special-interest villages; a contemporary American like Mrs. Perenyi can argue with an Edwardian like Jekyll as if the fence of time and distance were only picket.

Is there really such a thing as a green thumb? Did roses once upon a time smell better than they do today? Will the loud and lowborn gladiolus ever win a place in perennial society? At the beginning, I felt like a child at the grown-ups’ table—half dazzled, half befuddled by all this shoptalk, so much perennial-biennial-herbacious insiderism handled with such knowing ease.

I read to garden, and I gardened to read. Mrs. Perenyi, my Virgil, not only taught me about compost and doubleness in flowers and how to make an asparagus bed; she clued me in, too, on the class consciousness operating just below the garden world’s surface: gladioluses are strictly for funerals, she let me know, and magenta flowers must be eschewed, for they are ill bred and all too common, the plant world’s proletariat.

The books, like good hostesses, introduce the newcomer to all the various characters in plant society, drawing us aside to apprise us of their every proclivity and tic. However beautiful, a flower will remain closed to us until we have grasped its true character, and a good garden writer will pin down the floral personality with the quick, sure strokes of a Balzac. Americans seem to be particularly good at this, perhaps because we’ve tended to approach the garden as moralists rather than as esthetes.

Unlike the English, the Americans lavish the personal pronoun on their plants. Where Gertrude Jekyll might speak of the peony strictly in terms of its color or texture, to Alice Morse Earle she “always looks like a well-dressed, well-shod, well-gloved girl of birth, breeding, and of equal good taste and good health; a girl who can swim, and skate, and ride, and play golf.”

In the hands of an Earle or a Thaxter or a Wilder (three splendid American garden writers from early in this century whose works have recently been reissued), the garden resembles a 19th-century novel populated by a vivid cast of floral characters—characters, by the way, whom we may have over to our place any time for the price of a seed or tuber, division, corm or slip. Alice Earle’s peony, or one a lot like her, now happens to live in my front yard.

At first these ladies—for with only a few exceptions the great garden writers have been ladies as well as women—served me well in the garden. I admired, and strove to attain, their ease in the company of nature and the fearsome surety of their judgments. “These blue hydrangeas are ever to me a color blot,” Earle declared in “Old Time Gardens.” “They accord with no other flower and no foliage. I am ever reminded of blue mould, of stale damp.” Earle is, if anything, even harder on the color magenta: the very word, when printed on the pages of a book, “makes the black and white look cheap.”

I did my best to heed the pronouncements of these writers, which always sounded incontrovertible—at least until another equally sure-footed writer came along and offered an incontrovertible defense of magenta, as Louise Beebe Wilder manages to do in “Color in My Garden.”

The fierceness of opinion surprised me at first; how could issues of color and floral character excite such passion and, in many of these writers, such vivid prose? Perhaps it comes from operating in a literary ghetto. Certainly in the past it was the case that a gifted woman who wanted to write about nature was likely to end up writing about flowers, the most convenient and socially acceptable of nature subjects. Yet the polite conventions and formal limitations of the genre can accommodate only a narrow range of feeling, with the result that it occasionally bubbles over—in an unexpectedly violent appraisal of a flower, or a particularly brilliant metaphor. And so the garden bookshelf brims with the sort of taut, quirky writing produced by a good mind working in a confined space.

Yet the deeper I got into gardening, the more problematic, and less charming, I found the limitations of the genre to be. For one thing, I began to realize I was getting a lot of British advice and it simply didn’t apply to my own patch of ground in northwestern Connecticut. The climate and geography and light of North America do not suit a traditional English perennial border, which requires cool summers and soft light to reach its perfection (not to mention mild winters if it is to survive). Yet most of the books on the garden shelf, even those written by Americans, continue to hold up the traditional border as gardening’s highest achievement—and so we Americans struggle vainly to duplicate it, even in the deserts of Southern California. Though there are encouraging signs things may be starting to change (“The Garden in Autumn” by Allen Lacy, who writes the Gardener’s World column in The New York Times, is an American book through and through), Anglophilia still weighs heavily on American garden writing.

But it isn’t only the advice that smells British; it’s often the voice and point of view and choice of subjects, too. I was perplexed at how few of the more literary garden books bothered to talk about so basic a gardening operation as digging, or even planting—there was little about the processes of gardening, and more connoisseurship than I, at least, had time for. Everybody seemed to jump right from wintertime sketches and plans to the glorious blooms of July. Either all these writers had armies of hired help, or they were unconsciously imitating English writers who did. The landscape they wrote about also seemed more British than American—more tamed and tractable than mine.

Indeed, there turned out to be a lot going on in my garden that the garden books never addressed. For example, I found I spent most of my time and energy in the garden facing down the oncoming forest, which, in New England at least, is always moving to regain the ground it long ago ceded to farms. Weeds and pests, far from free agents, are in fact the forest’s avant-garde. This was a much more intransigent and wilder landscape than I had been led to expect, and cultivating it proved a dirtier business than the genteel pastime conjured in the garden classics. Perhaps what I was running up against was the minorness of a minor literature. Because there were bigger and harder questions I wanted answered now, about just how I was supposed to fit into this landscape.

Was I within my rights to firebomb a woodchuck burrow? Did growing a few vegetables necessarily entail a pitched battle, or were there happier ways to rhyme my desires with nature’s ways? Should I take the vigor of the local weeds as evidence that they had a higher claim to this ground than my plants? Were they wilder, and therefore somehow more “natural”

I could not find answers to these questions in the garden books I read, and this seemed peculiar. For unless you have a large staff, or are incapable of reflection, gardening quickly thrusts you into a complicated, intimate relationship with nature, one in which the moral and philosophical questions are at least as pressing as the esthetic ones. And, too, there was sex in the garden (how could you write about flowers and miss it?), and politics (what is this obsession my neighbors have with the state of my front lawn?) and of course the issue of class.

But I guess that’s what a minor literary tradition is all about. Perhaps the Americans were too busy looking over their shoulders at their British betters, or maybe they were just too modest (this had long been strictly a ladies’ literature, after all) to bite off any big issues. Whatever, I decided now to consult what is generally agreed to be a more central tradition of writing about nature; maybe Thoreau and Emerson and their innumerable descendants would have some better answers to the kinds of questions the garden seemed to pose. America may not yet have a world-class garden literature, but our writing on nature is thought to be second to none.

The first thing that struck me, as I worked my way through a few of the excellent anthologies that have recently appeared (“The Norton Book of Nature Writing,” edited by Robert Finch and John Elder, and “This Incomperable Land: A Book of American Nature Writing,” edited by Thomas J. Lyon), was just how different the worlds of nature and garden writing are—although the ostensible subject matter of both literatures is the same: our engagement with the natural world.

For one thing, not a single garden writer is represented in any of the nature anthologies. The garden is evidently not considered a fit subject for a nature writer, never mind that it is in the garden—and not in the wilderness—where most Americans (some 90 million of us garden) gain their most direct and intimate experience of nature, of its satisfactions, fragility and power.

Second, to judge by the anthologies, nature writing would appear to be as thoroughly dominated by men as garden writing is by women; after Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard, it’s pretty much a men’s club. The bifurcation seems almost cartoonishly paleolithic, with the women at home tending their flowers while the men, like erstwhile hunter-gatherers, venture into the wilderness, tracking down large beasts and big thoughts.

This is our basic image of a nature writer, a man at large in the wilderness, but of course it does not have to be this way. There was nothing in the job description to prevent a nature writer from writing about man-made landscapes—about Central Park as well as Yosemite, about lawns as well as glaciers. And in fact there was a moment, back at Walden, when the two traditions, garden writing and nature writing, did briefly occupy the space of the same book. I am speaking, of course, of Thoreau’s bean field, which I think may be one of the critical junctures in American literature.

When Thoreau planted his bean field at Walden, he found that he had greatly complicated his relationship to nature. Where before he looked on all nature democratically, refusing to make anthropocentric distinctions between weeds and flowers or swamps and cultivated fields, his bean field immediately forced him to make “such invidious distinctions with [my] hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another.” As soon as he determined to make “the earth say beans instead of grass,” Thoreau found he had made enemies in nature: worms, cool days, woodchucks and weeds.

But Thoreau couldn’t bear to be in this position. He refused to accept that he might have a legitimate quarrel with nature. Badly tangled up in contradictions between his needs and what he judged to be nature’s inviolable prerogatives, he finally had to forsake the bean field, eventually declaring that he would rather live hard by the most dismal swamp than by the most beautiful garden.

With that declaration, the garden was essentially banished from American writing on nature. Ever since, when Americans have wanted to think about our relationship to nature, we have journeyed to the wilderness. Not only could I not find any gardens in American nature writing, but gardens are largely absent from American poetry and fiction as well. (Compare that to the English tradition: think of Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Jane Austen.) In American nature writing, raging oceans, howling forests and trackless deserts abound, and though there have been a couple of nice lawns in this century (think of Gatsby’s, or some of Cheever’s), the garden is a more neglected setting in American literature than the planet Mars.

Why should this be? I suspect the reason has something to do with our deeply ingrained habit of seeing nature and culture as irreconcilably opposed. Since the time of the Puritans, we have assumed that man and nature are engaged in a kind of zero-sum game, that the victory of one necessarily entails the loss of the other. Forced to choose, we usually opt for nature—in our books. In practice we usually come down on the side of man.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, American nature writers are at bottom religious writers, and untouched nature is their sacred text. If nature is holy (“We now use the word nature,” John Burroughs wrote, “very much as our fathers used the word God”), altering it in any way—even pulling weeds—becomes sacrilegious. As for cracking a joke now and then—well, forget it.

Aside from the obvious practical problems (how can I presume to even prune a sacred tree, much less chop it down to make a dwelling?), the religious approach to nature has literary drawbacks as well. On occasion it has produced inspired prose (think of John Muir’s raptures in Yosemite, or Annie Dillard’s at Tinker Creek), but the result too often is a humorless, wearing round of “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS,” as Joyce Carol Oates once catalogued nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses,” her upper case suggesting the stony bluntness, inertness and weird impersonality of so much of it.

Our nature writers are observers, by and large; they are not, as Thoreau briefly was by his bean field at Walden, “attached . . . to the earth”—just notice how seldom they tell you where they live. They are wanderers, restless, rootless almost to a man, voyaging to the ends of the earth in search of the last this, the only remaining that. The American nature writer is an alienated fellow; he’s apt to be, like Thoreau, something of a social misfit and, as Edward Hoagland has pointed out, deeply uncomfortable about sex—the very realm in which we humans make our nearest and perhaps riskiest approach to the wild.

The nature writer even seems alienated from his beloved landscape. He admires nature at a safe distance, always keeping between himself and it a certain cushion of awe. He can’t imagine an active role for himself in nature except as its despoiler. His implicit advice to the gardener is to give it up; keep your hands in your pockets and just look. (Nature writing is foremost a literature of the eye; by comparison, the garden writer is a sensualist.) The idea that we might by gardening or farming or designing actually improve a landscape—add to the diversity and sheer amount of life it supports—is to the nature writer an absurdity. For no sooner have we have touched a virgin landscape than everything is lost. All that is left is the writing of elegies, something that nature writers in America have been doing since 1674, according to Thomas J. Lyon, when John Josselyn first bemoaned the loss of wildlife in New England.

In our own time, with so little wilderness left to defend, the traditional nature writer’s stance is less than helpful, and not only to the gardener. Nature writing seems to have darkened of late, and threatens, I think, to take a nihilistic turn. When the tradition produces a book such as “The End of Nature” by Bill McKibben, it may well have arrived at a logical dead end. According to Mr. McKibben—and he is not alone among nature writers in holding this view—now that the corrupting hand of man (specifically our greenhouse gases) has reached into the last earthly corner of wilderness, nature is “over.” This is not only a scientifically meaningless idea but a dangerous one too, for as Mr. McKibben himself acknowledges, “If nature is already ended, what are we fighting for?”

The sense of alarm is surely justified, but not the despair. Nature is only over if you believe that untouched wilderness alone qualifies as nature. And that has never been anything more than a conceit. Indeed, the only thing that is in any danger of ending is an idea of nature (as culture’s pristine opposite) that we invented in the first place. Considering what we have done to the planet in the time this idea has held sway, its passing may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Maybe what our writing about nature could use right now is a new emphasis—for instance, the garden. The gardener understands that nature and culture need not be antagonists, that it is possible to heal and even improve a landscape, that changing nature is something this species has always done—and occasionally done well. Perhaps today we would do well to contemplate, in addition to Thoreau’s unsullied swamp, the surpassing beauty of a Bourbon rose, the way it blurs the borders of nature and human art, suggesting, perhaps, a third alternative. The writer who goes to the wilderness may well conclude the end is nigh. The writer who goes to the garden is bound to return with a few other, somewhat more hopeful possibilities.

By garden I do not mean only our patches of flowers and vegetables. By garden I mean any place where nature and culture have been wedded with some lasting success. I’m thinking of the unacknowledged “gardens” Rene Dubos wrote about (the agricultural landscape of the Ile de France, the tallgrass prairies the Indians made in the Middle West); Wendell Berry’s Kentucky farmlands; and even, rightly regarded, a place such as Yellowstone (which Alston Chase in “Playing God in Yellowstone” reminds us is in fact a kind of garden, the product of centuries of interaction between humans and nature). Were more nature writers to visit these kinds of places, and attend there to the human rather than the divine intervention, they just might return with some new forms of pastoral, ones that could help us put our relationship to nature on a saner footing.

Returning to some of my favorite garden writers after a long journey in the wilderness, I must say I was filled with fresh respect and admiration. The modesty of these writers, their attachments to small, unspecial places, their gentle humor in response to nature’s indignities—these things, which had seemed before so minor, now shone forth as the considerable virtues they are. So much of what I needed to learn about nature, I realized, they simply took for granted.

It’s too easy to condescend to these women. Garden writers are essentially comic writers, but we are always going to be more impressed by the heroic and the sublime. Yet in our dealings with nature at least, heroism and sublimity have probably run their course. To know when to laugh at nature, which will always be pulling the rug out from under us—will always, after all, have the last laugh—is part of wisdom.