The Cut-Flower Garden: How to Grow Your Own Flowers for Bouquets and Arrangements All Year Long

James and Haralambou ( Flowering Bulbs Indoors and Out ) offer a guide for those who are serious about using the garden year-round as a source of fresh and dried flowers and foliage in the house. But this is not the sort of book that tells readers to slip into the backyard, to pick a few daffodils and daisies and put them into a vase. Instead, James has a plan. First, he guides readers through a month-by-month training session with flowers, telling us what must be done in the garden to ensure flowers and foliage for months to come. Next, he clearly and carefully details how to cut and condition flowers, how to force them to bloom in early spring, and how to dry and arrange them. Then comes a library of flowers well-suited to a cutting garden--annuals, bulbs, perennials, and blooming and evergreen shrubs and trees--complete with a full biography of each. Appendices provide bloom sequence charts, a hardiness zone map and mail-order sources. Part of the joy of this exceptionally informative book is that James includes unusual, as well as common, species. So roses and daisies have their well-deserved space, but there is also room for coralbells and goatsbeards. James might have given a few sample garden plans to keep the reader from being overwhelmed as to what to plant--and with what else--but he has otherwise provided a wonderfully complete and delightful book. Photos not seen by PW. Alternate selection of the Organic Gardening Book Club, Craft Book Club, Cookbook Club , and Country Book Club. (Apr.)