This Dictionary Is the Last Word in Gardening

I love librarians. Librarians know things. And they love to share it all with you. It’s in their job description, sure, but it’s also in their souls. Fighter jocks may have The Right Stuff, but librarians have The Correct Stuff.

How many librarians do you see on “Jeopardy!”? Damn few, that’s how many. Why? Because they’d break the bank. Give a decent librarian a week on the show and producer Merv Griffin would be selling pencils on street corners by the following Monday.

I love ‘em all. They know nearly everything, and what they don’t know they can find before you can get the cap off your pen to take it down. They know, for instance, that there’s no Club Med on the islets of Langerhans, they can tell you the difference between convince and persuade, they know what a gerund is, that there’s nobody buried in Grant’s Tomb, that the saxophone is a woodwind, that Monticello is on the nickel. Ask a silly question, get a perfect answer.

Naturally, librarians live to possess the definitive work on any subject. If they can go to a single source--”Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lint,” for instance--and provide the answer to any question a thinking human could devise, the sun shines on their lives. They sleep soundly at night, believing that God is kind and the world is good.

There is a kind of happy contagion surrounding the possession of good, hard information. Knowledge, after all, is power. And if all this talk is starting to make you dream about world-class reference works, listen up. I’ve got a source for you that’ll make you weak in the knees.

It’s The New Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening.

OK, so the title isn’t exactly a bodice ripper. But can the gang at Harlequin give you all this?:

* Four volumes.

* About 3,200 pages.

* Nearly 50,000 plant entries.

* Illustrations totaling nearly 4,000.

* A total of 175 biographical entries of noted botanists, plant collectors and horticulturists.

* Essays, 180 of them, on gardening history, techniques, style and design, regional gardening practices, pest control and other subjects.

The volumes, published in the United States by Stockton Press (and in the rest of the world by Macmillan Publishers, Ltd., of London), describe more than 50,000 varieties of plants throughout the world. Simply put, the dictionary is being touted as the definitive work on the subject of gardening. If knowledge is power, there’s enough of it in these four books to power the QE II to Saturn.

The breakdown of a typical entry in the dictionary will give you an idea of just what sort of scholarly detail you can expect. The plants are listed, first of all, by genus--their botanical names. Within that description is listed the genus author, the popular name, the derivation of the name, the plant family and where it typically grows.

Next comes a complete description of proper cultivation, growing and care of the plant, followed by a listing and description of the different species of the plant and the climatic zones in which they grow (there are maps throughout the books for reference), and pertinent cross-references elsewhere in the dictionary.

Appendixes? Have they got appendixes. There’s a botanical glossary, an index of popular names, a glossary of pests, diseases and disorders, and a glossary of plant taxonomy, horticultural terms, common botanical epithets.

According to the publishers, the dictionary is a modern outgrowth of the Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, published by Macmillan in 1900, and the Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening, published by that same house in 1951. So why this new effort?

It’s because new things are growing all the time, and growing differently. In the last 40 years, say the editors, “the range of plants in cultivation has again changed enormously, with species more freely disseminated around the world than ever before.

“New selection and breeding are taking place on an unprecedented scale, and new methods of propagation have allowed the best new forms--as well as plants in need of urgent conservation in the wild--to be multiplied in quantity. Much, too, has changed in the practice of gardening. New techniques, materials and environmental attitudes have transformed all aspects of horticulture from pest control to plant nutrition.”

You’re salivating, right? If you’re an info-freak, you’re already reaching for the phone to call Stockton Press in New York and order a few dozen sets. Who cares if you’re a gardener? Just the thought of having all that data at your fingertips is making you dizzy with delight. You could be so animated by now that you’ve probably forgotten that ironclad law that applies when something looks too good to be true: There’s a catch.

Yep. The dictionary costs $795.

Of course, if you’re a complete bedrock gardening nut--or an information vacuum--that won’t matter. The rest of us, we lovers of truth and beauty (read: hard facts and pretty flowers), should call our local library and gently suggest that the librarians order a set. The price, for us, will be right, and the librarians, bless them, will be like kids with a new toy.

Go ahead, ask them the genus name for cabbage. Make their day.