A Journal in Thyme

Grissell ( Thyme on My Hands ), an entomologist, takes us month by month through a year in his Maryland garden, beginning and ending with the autumn season. ``The role of the garden writer has always been to nag,'' he notes, ``while that of the gardening reader has always been to work.'' But he also uses his journal to nag himself and the result is an informative amusement: ``My planting scheme for tulips this year is rather milk-toasty,'' he whines. Elsewhere, observing the masses of civic bulbs planted in our nation's capital, he confides, ``These great plantings . . . seem like an awful waste of money.'' After ranting on in January about ``a world where we have control over scarcely anything,'' he sighs, ``Well, I must apologize for that last little outburst.'' Grissell is a good companion, unimpressed by fashion, laboring in his garden and also wondering about it, too; ready to specify what works out and what doesn't, but unwilling to swamp us with minutiae. He makes a sincere narrator, ``hydrological tendencies'' and all. (May)