Four years ago I was a complete gardening ignoramus. I thought hostas were a sort of Latin American mobster (it’s a long story), lupines a terrible skin disease, and city people who grew their own lettuce just plain fools (hey, it’s only 79 cents a head at the store!). I’m still no nature girl – hike-hardy friends still laugh about the time I mistook a mound of moist pinecones for bear shit on a busy, domesticated trail on Vancouver’s North Shore – but the gardening bug has bit. It started innocently, with a sandbox converted into an herb garden so that we could have fresh basil whenever we craved pesto. It might’ve been the sexy Spanish tarragon, or it might have been the towering fennel with its licoricey, feathery fronds, but soon I found myself lured outside at inopportune moments just to stand there staring at my patch of Aix en Provence with a stupid smirk on my face.

Then we rented the little house with the big yard.

It’s early February as I write, and here on the West Coast the crocuses are out. The hostas, my new loves, already show signs of returning. Their tips are barely showing through humps of earth, tight fingers that will unfurl to reveal the creamy, variegated Hosta undulata, the elephant ear-like hybrid Blue Angel, and a host of others. This is perhaps the single most entrancing thing about gardening, the miraculous return of perennials that seemed to have completely disappeared after the end of the previous season. We watch them come back with the same awe generally reserved for those family pets that travel thousands of kilometres to find their owners.

Des Kennedy, twice nominated for the Leacock Medal for his ruminations on the gardening life, knows well the giddiness of the new season. “The subtleties of springtime emergences, although lost on casual passers-by, thrill a gardener because they verify the survival of what might have been lost in a killing winter, but also because it is through these tiny cracks and fissures we glimpse the golden days of summer still to come,” Kennedy writes in An Ecology of Enchantment: A Year in a Country Garden.

From his garden on B.C.’s Denman Island, Kennedy leads us through the seasons with a short essay for each week of the year, starting in the depths of winter. Rather than a how-to book, this is a how-come book. How come some people are “born to stone,” how come the “couch-potato approach” to native-plant gardening is for poseurs, how come some garden insects are more congenial than others, how come coastal gardeners, while envied, are not loved. While giving the obviously beautiful (hyacinths, delphiniums, roses, Japanese maples) their due, Kennedy also celebrates the homely underdog: skunk cabbage, thistles, kale, root vegetables, and garlic all get star turns.

I found Kennedy passionate, knowledgeable, and inspiring. What I didn’t find him was funny. (He’s promoted as “Canada’s own horticultural humourist.”) His is the kind of writing that strives for humorous effect through hyperbole, groaner puns, and purple prose. A typical Kennedy sentence (this one about a shed): “This, after all, is the heart and soul of one’s estate, at once a storehouse of fine implements and oddments, a place of sanctuary during domestic squalls, and an outpost in the noble work of making a better world.” And, surely, there oughta be a law against using “this mortal coil” more than once in a book. But Kennedy did make me want to get out there and garden. There is earth and much fecundity in An Ecology of Enchantment, as well as blood, sweat, and the back-breaking joy of gardening.

There’s no place for goofy word play in Lorraine Johnson’s Grow Wild! Native Plant Gardening in Canada and Northern United States. The Toronto-based president of the Canadian Wildflower Society is on a mission to help heal the Earth and Grow Wild! is as much about the politics of ecology as it is about beauty. That said, Andrew Leyerle’s gorgeous photographs made my heart palpitate and Grow Wild! is a smartly designed, reader-friendly book. The ratio of photographs to text is near perfect and there are numerous informative sidebars detailing plant lists, sources, tips, and various minutiae.

The book looks at three regions: the northwest (from coastal forests to dry grasslands); the prairies; and the northeast (from woodlands to meadows). Johnson visits several gardeners from each region who have, most starting from scratch, created incredible areas of beauty using only plants native to their area. These include a tiny, urban forest in Vancouver, a bog garden in Portland, Oregon, a native-grasses prairie garden in St. Andrews, Manitoba, a prairie flower garden in Western Springs, Illinois, and mossy woodland garden in New Hope, Pennsylvania. We also meet members of the Wild Ones, anti-lawn and native-plant gardening activists in the Midwest who promote biodiversity with passion and a sense of humour.

The ecological benefits of native-plant gardening appear myriad, as are other rewards – just look at the pictures in Grow Wild! (One downside: I realized that in order to grow my ideal native-plant garden I’d have to move to Western Springs, Illinois or Glendale, Wisconsin.)

I liked Grow Wild! enough to overlook Johnson’s use of the word “healing” six times in the final two pages. I can’t say the same for California photographer and garden designer Elizabeth Murray’s beautiful-looking but aggravating Cultivating Sacred Space: Gardening for the Soul. The flakey metaphors pile up fast and thick early on. (“Our soul must be like bamboo.”) By page 17, I wanted to claw out my heart and thrust it at Murray (a sort of Martha Stewart for the Esalen Institute crowd) and scream, “I am not worthy!”

There is little here, really, to do with gardening, although there are stunning gardens in it (including those at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur). This is nature with a capital “N” along with lots of annoying references to feng shui, energy, and fairies. The book is sad, as Murray recounts the premature death of her husband. It appears that Cultivating Sacred Space is predominantly an attempt at public healing and will appeal to those I call “questers,” people who have made books like The Celestine Prophecy and Simple Abundance bestsellers.

Thank God, then, for the no-nonsense sophistication of Toronto’s Marjorie Harris, possibly Canada’s most authoritative gardening writer. Her Pocket Gardening: A Guide to Gardening in Impossible Places is refreshingly practical and I enjoyed the flashes of prickly tone: “I have a reputation for being crabby about grass”; “Keeping out the dog (or child) from hell: Plant things with definite spikiness …” She also uses delightful words like “moxie.”

This is gardening in the real world, one filled with cranky, recalcitrant neighbours, eyesores like ugly garages, and little yards too shady for dream meadows of poppies, bachelor’s buttons, and sunflowers. Harris asks us to redefine the garden. The theory behind Pocket Gardening is that you can garden anywhere and she walks us through the possibilities: container gardening; found gardens (turning pools, parking lots, and back alleys into gardens); patio, balcony, roof, and window box gardening; gardening in scree, gravel, and crevices; water gardens; as well as small front yard and back yard gardens.

Harris provides clear directions that even neophytes like me can follow (although I’m too lazy to actually follow through). Her thoughts on maximizing privacy and creating illusions are particularly interesting and the examples she uses demonstrate that there is no shortage of urban gardeners out there with plenty of moxie. The only complaint I have is about the paucity, and awkward placement, of photographs.

And now it’s time to put down the books and reconnect “with the essential truth of the craft,” as Kennedy writes, “that it is the actual doing of it that’s important, the mucking about with soil and seeds, pushing boulders uphill, bending plants to our will, and bending ourselves to the willful ways of plants.”