This volume takes the reader beyond the author's garden and aims to offer encouragement to all gardenerws, especially novices, to ignore books and try whatever appeals to them. The book begins with the uninitiated, those setting out to garden for the first time; and it ends with those who find themselves with a legacy that becomes increasingly onerous. Mirabel Osler is the author of A Gentle Plea for Chaos, for which she won the 1988 Sinclair Consumer Press Garden Writer of the Year Award.