It’s not quite a life list, of the sort that birders keep, but 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die feeds the same sort of drive to go out and look. Its immediate effect on me: I really, really want to go to Kyoto. Even at just shy of a thousand pages, 1001 Gardens does not aim to be encyclopedic; general editor Rae Spencer-Jones marshals garden profiles by dozens of garden experts (horticulturalists, designers and writers among them) into a collection organized geographically, a benefit for readers plotting a grand garden tour. As you might expect, that team approach gives some eclectic results: How else a could a garden gnome reserve in the UK end up on the same must see list as Versailles? I’d argue that’s part of the charm of 1001 Gardens, all the better for opening the book at a random page and following the path where it leads. Do note that the entries and appendices offer only the slimmest of details on the logistics of actually visiting the gardens so if you mean to travel beyond your armchair, consider the book an invitation to dig further, in a volume on a regional garden style, or in a travel guidebook. The same goes for the photos they’re only glimpses, but as alluring as a peek through a gap in a garden wall.

In my previous garden, I had been doing my best to colonize the grass for more ornamental plantings. I’ve been in gardens that had already evolved a long way in that direction I’m thinking in particular of one garden in North Carolina where what was once a sweep of suburban lawn had evolved into a labyrinth of berms and island beds. But most of us don’t want to do without a lawn entirely, and most gardeners have to share their turf (so to speak) with romping dogs, soccer-playing children or lawn sports fans (croquet or badminton, anyone?) Paul Tukey’s message in The Organic Lawn Care Manual is that a lawn doesn’t need to be chemically dependent any more than a flower or vegetable bed does. You might not expect to hear right plant, right place in a lawn care book, but there it is. The essentials for a healthy organic lawn, Tukey suggests: Choose the right grass, water wisely, mow well. Beyond that, the same concepts apply whether you’re cultivating tulips, tomatoes or turf, and we’d all do well to listen. Nurture the soil; it will nurture your plants, and they in turn will nurture you.

Where you garden matters enormously, of course, for what you can grow, and how well. The Pacific Northwest is a Shangri-la of sorts for gardeners, and although that’s where co-authors Susan Carter, Carrie Becker and Bob Lilly gained their vast collective garden expertise, I’m pleased to say that there’s no gloating to be found in Perennials: The Gardener’s Reference not even about being able to grow Meconopsis only the voices of hands-on gardeners who know and love their plants. Together, they have assembled an accessible, information-packed treasury of garden-worthy plants, more than 2,700 of them. An essay on general maintenance complements plant-specific recommendations in the A-to-Z directory, and accompanying lists offer other ways into the data. There are suggested collections of plants for specialty gardens (spring ephemerals, meadow plants, plants too tall for words ), and my favorite, a list which sorts the plants from the directory into their plant families. That list, I think, has the potential to be very useful, especially for gardeners looking to meet less familiar cousins of plants they already know and grow. I also love the user-friendly tables that accompany each entry, which chart hardiness zones and heights and spreads, details on flowers and foliage, and even notes on the quirks and particularities of individual species and cultivars exactly the sort of information you need to choose among them. The photography in Perennials is fabulous, too. This book is an appealing new acquaintance which appears quite likely to grow into a very best friend.

Big Ideas for Small Gardens has its roots on the West Coast, thousands of miles away from the Haywards’ New England, and, just as a plant might be, is adapted to a notably different niche in the gardening world. Authors Emily Young and Dave Egbert present a very visual take on translating large-scale garden schemes into smaller quarters. The heart of the book is an abundance of inspiring photos, all of which are helpfully and thoroughly captioned. But there’s plenty of garden smarts beyond the eye candy, and in fact, if you can manage not to be distracted by the gorgeous pictures, the section Big Concepts offers a lucid overview of essential landscape design principles that are relevant to any garden, of any size, anywhere.

Katherine Whiteside wants you to enjoy your garden. I’d imagine she’d be the perfect companion to have along while touring some breathtaking garden that sparks curiosity and envy in equal measure, one that makes you say I’d like to try that, but I couldn’t possibly . . . Whiteside’s reply, I’d guess: Yes, you can. The Way We Garden Now: 41 Pick-and-Choose Projects for Planting Your Paradise Large or Small is full of fine advice and comprehensible projects for beginners and for gardeners who are ready to branch out. While you certainly don’t have to march through the projects sequentially, they’re presented in a wise order (design appears early in the process, for example), and paced for the long haul. These aren’t instant makeovers; Whiteside is willing to budget months for opening new beds, and gives a two-year plan for installing paths, for example. And any garden how-to that ranks keeping a journal near the top of a list of important garden tasks is already well on its way to earning a gold star from me. What’s particularly now about this book, I think, is the way it does more than show and tell you what to do; it begins with why. Whiteside introduces each project by asking What’s the payoff? and her own experience shines through the answers, to inspire and motivate the aspiring gardener.

Virginia called me today, and she was crying, reveals professional organizer Vicki Norris in her commonsense handbook, Restoring Order to Your Home. Buried in junk, Norris’ client simply couldn’t cope. Maybe you’re not that desperate, Norris says, but maybe your relationships or family is suffering because of household disorganization. Alleviating that suffering, she claims, is not about having a picture-perfect home or buying plastic storage bins. Instead, she says, Ordering your life and your environment is about one thing: reclaiming your life. The foundation of Norris’ organizing plan is understanding and fashioning a customized approach: if you take the time to truly divine the cause and effect of your disorganization, the better able you are to find solutions you can live with to banish chaos forever.

Norris, like other organizational consultants, offers a room-by-room battle plan for home de-cluttering (one strategy being to zone a space), but bases her solutions on a person’s individual preferences, plus whether a room is a public, private or storage area. She identifies common causes and hot spots of clutter, offers family-oriented strategies for dealing with the messes that toddlers and teenagers can create, and warns about the financial and psychological drain of the offsite storage unit. Organizing, says the author, will not only liberate you from household chaos; it will give you a fresh start on life! Alison Hood plans to tackle her closets in San Rafael, California.

Organizational guru Peter Walsh, the star of TLC’s hit show, Clean Sweep, takes a hard line on clutter in It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. He has seen hundreds of chaotic home environments nationwide, and his book is liberally sprinkled with amusing (and occasionally appalling) client e-mails and case studies.

Like many professional clutter-busters, he advises that the first step toward getting rid of emotional and physical clutter is to decide you want to change, then imagine the life you really desire. The second step is to demystify the causes, costs and conflicts surrounding clutter, and to incorporate small acts of organization, or daily rituals, into your normal routine. Next, Walsh tackles your home, from basement to attic, offering organizational strategies based on individual lifestyle choices and each room’s function and purpose. He finishes up with a maintenance plan, a cleanup checkup, and suggested monthly rituals for proactive planning and year-long order. Get organized, says Walsh, and I promise that every aspect of your life will change in ways that you never imagined. Alison Hood plans to tackle her closets in San Rafael, California.

Do you lead your life, or does your life lead you, asks professional organizer (and InStyle and Real Simple contributor) Meryl Starr. Realizing that most of us are overwhelmed by our stuff and our to-do lists, Starr offers relief in The Personal Organizing Workbook: Solutions for a Simpler, Easier Life. This workbook jumpstarts a new, organized lifestyle by asking the deceptively simple question, What makes you happy? If you have no idea, or have lost sight of your goals, perhaps disorganization which steals the time necessary for such reflection is the culprit. It’s hard to look up over those piles of papers, past our crowded closets . . . but it’s crucial to realizing the fulfillment and serenity you can achieve in your everyday life, Starr says. Four easy-reference, tabbed chapters are enhanced with Thayer Allyson Gowdy’s (InStyle Home) enticing color photographs (of neatly arranged interiors, handbags, desks and closets), while feasible strategies offer guidance on how to manage your possessions, to-do list, relationships and any less-than-stellar habits. Self-evaluation tools, such as questionnaires, are included to promote self-awareness the crucial foundation for lifelong change. Alison Hood plans to tackle her closets in San Rafael, California.

The single man can just about keep his stuff anywhere he pleases, whether it’s his collection of vintage beer cans, his motorcycles, his baseball memorabilia or his pinball machines. Austin-based writer Sam Martin approaches ManSpace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory with the point of view that, eventually often after he gets married and has children a guy’s stuff has to vacate the living quarters and get farmed out to the garage, basement or attic, which tends to farm the guy himself out to the domestic outback. This entertaining and wonderfully illustrated volume details the efforts of approximately 50 males who set out to create their own unique, in-or-near-the-home manspaces to suit such passions as collecting, sports, electronics, music, painting, woodworking and arcane hobbies, or simply to create a new kind of private hangout.

When in-house space isn’t available, these ingenious fellows even take to the backyard, as the author himself did, designing and building a 165-square-foot, fully functional office, only steps from his home life but worlds away in his mind. Some guys, like film and TV writer Bill Kerby, married in middle age, knew from the get-go that he’d never yield space to his new bride. The solution? They purchased a house with a backyard cabin, which he transformed into an arty, yet wholly masculine living quarters where his stuff abounds, including a classic old barber chair that his wife banished from the main house. ManSpace is a spectacular idea book with marvelous visuals and witty text, and it might just get a lot of guys to thinking. Definitely a cool gift item for that creative male who loves his stuff.

The fresh smell of line-dried laundry practically leaps off the pages of Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook. In this massive guide dressed in an easy-to-clean plastic dust jacket Stewart combines the efficient techniques learned at her mother’s knee with up-to-date information gathered by her formidable lifestyle team for maintaining every room of the home. She starts with step-by-step explanations of basic cleaning tasks (there are ways and then there are better ways), followed by room-by-room and periodic home maintenance tasks and shortcuts (clean when dirt is fresh, straighten as you go), helpful for those who didn’t learn by family modeling. Practically everything else about the home is covered, too: buying a mattress, storing wine, organizing a tool shed, preserving digital photos, emergency preparedness and moving house. While the book often reeks of Stewart’s iron the sheets perfectionism and fetishistic obsessions (most people can select a light bulb and wash a blanket without a page of instruction), it still makes an excellent one-stop-shop for cleaning up a messy act.

David Bowers looks at the duties of fatherhood from a contemporary perspective in Dad’s Own Housekeeping Book: 137 Bright Ideas. This book is for the Mr. Moms of the world, or for those who just want to be more involved in tidying up the home front. As a single dad for 15 years before my remarriage, I wish I’d had a book like this. Bowers shows housekeeping neophytes the difference between a mop and a Swiffer; he also explains why there’s more to cleaning a toilet than wiping off the seat, and how cooking is really a defense mechanism against cranky youngsters. He describes the Felix Unger method for doing any household task, but at the same time provides a quick checklist for changing an imminent grandparent visit from a housekeeping disaster into an illusion of cleanliness. You can’t beat that kind of practical advice.