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Photo Credit: David L. Morgan

This gardening encyclopedia is packed with essential information for gardeners of all skill levels.

Here’s a fantastic book you’ll find hard to put down – if you can pick it up: The American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants (2nd edition; DK Publishing) is a massive piece of work, both in content and bulk. This most recent version of the well-received 1997 first edition was assembled by two distinguished horticulturists: Dr. H. Marc Cathey, president emeritus of the American Horticultural Society (and Learn2Grow® Consultant) and Christopher Brickell, past director of the Royal Horticultural Society and the International Society for Horticultural Science.

At first blush, you might envision A-Z as a coffee-table book. (Or, considering its size, a coffee table itself.) Don’t be misled; look more closely. It’s truly a plant encyclopedia of the first order.

We often expect encyclopedias to tell us everything about, well, everything. And in my work as a horticultural editor/writer and teacher, my only recourse to learning more about a taxon would be from a flora, one of those obscure catalogs of information (often in Latin) found in selected libraries. (Even the hallowed Internet sometimes fails us here. I expect that you’d tire of searching online endlessly for answers you might otherwise find in a singular volume.)

Up until now, my standard reference had been the well-worthy Index of Garden Plants (Timber Press), a publication of merit by the Royal Horticultural Society. But my eyes grow weary of squinting at the book’s small type as I work into the evening. A-Z’s 6,000 or so color plates bring its letters to life. Plus, the typographers selected an old eye-friendly font and spaced the lines nicely. You’ll notice some attractive extras, too – like marginal alphabetical markers and symbols that guide your eye across the pages.