BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : She Doesn’t Mind Digging Up the Dirt : PEOPLE WITH DIRTY HANDS: The Passion for Gardening by Robin Chotzinoff; Macmillan : $22, 205 pages

“What is it about gardening,” Robin Chotzinoff quotes one of her many relatives, “that works out something bad?” Think about it. There are very few activities that are just plain good, the perfect combination of love and work; they don’t need to be piled high with sentiment or artifice--unadorned observation will suffice.

Chotzinoff, age 36 when she travels around the country observing and remembering gardeners she admires to include in this book, grew up on Manhattan’s upper west side. “Down on the street,” she writes, “small valiant trees grew from holes in the sidewalk, supported by what looked like rubber dog collars.” Chotzinoff remembers being 16, watching her aunt, Cookie Grossman, in her garden on Long Island and thinking, “I am, for some reason I don’t understand at all, very interested in this.”

I can imagine how wild and particular and full of humor Chotzinoff’s Colorado garden must be, because this woman absolutely has a gift for making people, even readers, feel relaxed and at home. She writes about rustling roses (stealing them from graveyards--tip: Avoid rich people’s graveyards because they tend to be too manicured), about New Mexico chiles, about gardens of the Shinnecock Indians on Long Island, and healers in her home state of Colorado and in Louisiana. Those and a million other things.

From roses she learns that: “1. There is more than one way to be beautiful. 2. Survival is a noble goal. 3. Good climates are in the eye of the beholder. 4. If you are attacked by disease, abandonment, or a bad chain of events, do not necessarily despair. There is always the chance that you were bred to be tough. 5. Everyone should not smell the same.” From J.R. Perez, chile grower in Commerce City, Colo., she passes along this tip: “Get you a pork chop and mix a salsa with tomatoes and green chile and fry it all up together, and that’s the best thing you could ever have.”

From Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (“its pretentious name still makes me cringe”) she retains the saying: “The love of wisdom puts us on the spot all the time.” And from Aunt Cookie, she keeps three things to admire: “1. She and Uncle Herb had a good marriage. 2. Aunt Cookie did not fuss with her looks. 3. Aunt Cookie had a garden. It began to occur to me that gardening is the ultimate solitary pursuit. . . . You really have no control over a garden. You may think you do, but you don’t.” There is also Bill Palmer’s crucial tomato tip: “Manipulate nature by five degrees at night. If you can get the temperature in your tomato bed from 58 degrees up to 63, it’s like you moved your garden 700 miles south.”

Chotzinoff is stingy with her scorn, being a nonjudgmental type whose bountiful enthusiasm seems to attract only people, animals and gardens she likes, but she is pretty tough on big-business seed and plant companies like Burpee and Breck’s of Holland, or the “well-organized, color-coordinated world of Spring Hill Gardens.” “ ‘People keep knocking at my door,’ ” she quotes testimony from one of their catalogs on their peony selections, “ ‘wondering if they are plastic,’ writes dentist Kevin Osborn of Houston Heights. ‘Thank you for the beauty!’ ” People like Chotzinoff let fools embarrass themselves.

And lest you retain any fuzzy romantic notions about gardening and earth mothers, Chotzinoff describes her pregnancy and single motherhood. “If there is a nurturing bone in my body,” she writes, “I have yet to locate it. What kept me going was the possibility of a future adventure. And I was right--the adventure has barely stopped since my daughter, Coco, was born six years ago. Sometimes when I look at her, I think: all that, from a seed. An innocuous pellet, big as a BB or fine as dust. A seed is something to pay attention to in winter.”