Rebecca's Garden: Four Seasons to Grow on

Kolls, who hosts TV's popular Rebecca's Garden, offers her practical landscape gardening advice in print, a format that fails to capture the liveliness of her presence on the airwaves. After explaining such preliminary start-up principles as soil preparation, zone and micro-climate identification and tool selection, she launches into her seasonal guide to planting and tending trees, shrubs, flowers and grass. Unfortunately, there's too much overlap from section to section. Of greatest value are the many gardening tips planted in sidebars. Kolls admonishes readers to ""garden in the clouds"" because cloudy days are more benign to plants. One pointer for fall suggests coating the cut edges of a newly carved pumpkin with petroleum jelly to forestall the shriveling process. Winter gardening moves indoors with craft projects, mower and tool maintenance and some general tips on houseplant care. An appendix lists planting, growing, nutritional and historical information about 36 vegetables commonly grown in the Midwest. While it's refreshing to see a book that discusses gardening in northern climates, this volume is not comprehensive enough to be any gardener's single reference. (May)