‘Cascadia’ Captures Best Of Northwest Gardens

“Cascadia” by Ann Lovejoy (Sasquatch, $16.95)

It is a hard heart indeed that does not thrill to spring’s incipient verdure. How can anyone resist straying outdoors to imbibe in the glories of the season? And if the preceding prose was a little too purple for you, just try reading Ann Lovejoy’s new book, “Cascadia.”

A Bainbridge Island resident, Lovejoy is the Northwest’s premier gardening writer. She has won legions of fans - novices and experienced greenthumbs alike - with books like “A Border in Bloom,” “Fragrance in Bloom,” and “Further Along the Garden Path.”

A consummate gardener herself, Lovejoy in the past has struck a nearly flawless balance between practical advice and rhapsodic inspiration, all delivered in a confiding, personable tone that sounds as if she’s speaking to you over the backyard fence.

Now “Cascadia” comes along. It is, most assuredly, a beautiful book. Bellevue photographer Sandra Lee Reha has captured the best throughout the coastal Northwest - from urban pockets of green to sprawling woodland gardens. Whatever the equivalent of “mouth-watering” is to a gardener, that’s what these photos are - lavish and gloriously green.

After touching on various gardening principles and styles, Lovejoy devotes the final third of the book to month-by-month gardening highlights. Her exultation that gardening in the Northwest is a year-round activity is tempered by those admission - “Here, a day in January can be as mild as one in June (a fact which says rather less for June that for January, but never mind).”

With so many strong points, what is there left to complain about? The problem with “Cascadia” is that Lovejoy’s usually skillful balancing act is thrown akilter here. Rapture is laid on thick at the expense of solid gardening advice. Even the photo captions are lamentably vague, and sometimes seem to correspond poorly with the illustrations that describe. Readers all too often are left in this book to puzzle over the identity if that shade-loving plant with the tiny pink flowers, or the shrub with the stunning foliage.

“Cascadia” is a fine book for the coffee table. But frankly, this hyperbolic paean to gardening in the Northwest is not a trusty companion like Lovejoy’s other works, certainly not the sort of book you’d tuck under your arm for moral support as you survey the new crop of dandelions sprouting up in your flower border. You’d be afraid to get it dirty. Now what kind of gardening book is that?