Whether you're a seasoned gardener who has tilled the soil for decades or a new gardener who can't quite get used to dirt under your fingernails, one thing's certain: spring marks a new beginning in everyone's garden. Some of this change is planned creating a new bed for mixed plantings or renovating a perennial border. But there are also unforeseen changes plants that don't like where they've been placed and require moving in order to improve their growth. Fortunately, several new books coming out this season can help you handle the changes spring has in store for your garden.

Taunton Press, which produces Fine Gardening magazine, has come out with a series of four Design Guides (each priced at $17.95) that offer hands-on advice and inspirational ideas from more than 50 of the country's top landscape architects, garden designers, horticulturists and master gardeners on the subjects they know best. Creating Beds and Borders offers innovative ideas for eye-catching island beds and borders. Beautiful color photos and easy-to-read text explain the steps involved for building a bed without the usual back-breaking work, selecting the best border plants to achieve continuous bloom from spring to fall, getting more blooms from your perennials, and using foliage plants to create more color and drama in your flower beds. In Landscaping Your Home, the experts show you how to evaluate your property and draw a personalized landscape plan, create a welcoming entry area, design a landscape that suits your home and lifestyle, plant for small spaces and create attractive garden rooms and spaces for family activities. As a resource for present and future projects, Taunton also offers Designing With Plants and Exploring Garden Style. These four guides will make an excellent addition to any gardener's library.

Rhododendrons and Azaleas by Geoff Bryant will insure immediate gratification in your newly designed flower beds. Along with a section on the most popular species and varieties, Bryant includes information on the uses of rhododendrons in the garden, their cultivation, soil, nutrition, pests, diseases, pruning and propagation. His 95 color photos will convince you that these are must-have plants that really do have it all. For help with other species, Firefly Books has published a new series of specialty titles focusing on specific plants, including Orchids and Hibiscus, all of which present information quickly and thoroughly.

Have you ever visited a flower show or nursery center wishing you'd brought a quick-reference plant guide to look up valuable culture information before you purchased plants? As a rule, plant guides are far too bulky to tuck under the arm and consult while meandering through flower beds, but now there's an excellent resource to serve this purpose the American Horticultural Society Great Plant Guide. This is the perfect compact, quick-reference book, containing more than 1,000 color photos and detailed descriptions of 3,000 shrubs, trees, climbers, bulbs, perennials, annuals and biennials for every garden situation. In addition, this handy little guide offers plant lists for problem sites, colorful foliage and fruit, small gardens, containers, hanging baskets, flowering bulbs, winter interest, hedges, groundcovers and scented foliage. There are also hardiness zone and heat zone maps. Before you leave for your next flower show, pack this guide to take along. You'll use it continually throughout the growing season.

Ortho's classic Home Gardener's Problem Solver is out in its newest edition, and you'll want this updated text for your bookshelves. This home gardener reference has been adapted from the huge professional edition usually seen in garden centers. Just as comprehensive as the professional edition, it features 400 pages of problem-solving techniques for lawns, bulbs, groundcovers, flowers, shrubs, vines, vegetables and fruits. There's even a section on houseplants and insect pest remedies to keep houseplants disease-free. If you're new to gardening and don't want to learn the art through painful experience, Ortho's Home Gardener's Problem Solver can reduce your learning curve and insure that your plants live longer and stay healthy.

Pat Regel is the author of The Houseplant Survival Guide.

Our urge to collect is as natural as other animals' urge to hoard. The big difference is that most of us, unlike squirrels, don't eat our collections. There are many beautifully wrought objets out there calling out for your disposable income, so here's a guide to some recent guides primarily to furniture, but also to jewelry, porcelain and glass.

A good place to start is John T. Kirk's American Furniture: Understanding Styles, Construction, and Quality. Because it's an Abrams book, you know it's going to be handsomely put together and stuffed with information. It is. Kirk, a cabinetmaker and a professor of art history at Boston University, has contagious enthusiasm for many interesting topics the subtleties of finishes and stains and what they say about the period of their popularity, the innate grace of certain styles versus the more labored effects of others. Many color and black-and-white photos of furniture join designers' drawings and early advertisements. Kirk explains everything from recent design revivals to the origins of designs that, like evolutionary dead-ends, no longer seem wise in our modern conception of useful art which, in the long run, is what fine furniture is all about.

Once you've learned the basics from Kirk, you should turn to Caring for Your Family Treasures: Heritage Preservation, with text by Jane S. Long and Richard W. Long. The authors provide useful advice on how to care for books, fabrics, ceramics, dolls, photographs and even such items as military mementos. They also explain insurance and other security measures tailored to your individual needs. The style is friendly and the illustrations lush. However, it's the commonsense but expert information that makes the book surprisingly appealing.

Those encyclopedic twin brothers from Antiques Roadshow, Leigh and Leslie Keno, have written (with Joan Barzilay Freund) a new book, Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture. The brothers tell countless anecdotes about the thrill of the chase and their delight in well-made objects. At the age of 12, they started a joint diary with the prophetic words, We are antique dealers. They have fulfilled their ambitions. Their stories demonstrate both their passion and their expertise. They have hung exhibitions of chairs from walls to force viewers to confront furniture as sensual forms, and they have organized auctions at Christie's that resulted in almost $600,000 paid for a single table. And along the way they have informed countless viewers of Antiques Roadshow. This book is fun even if you don't have the budget for serious collecting.

Since 1979, collectors have depended on the Miller's Antiques Checklist series of guides. Four of them are out in new editions—Furniture, with Richard Davidson as primary consultant; Jewellery(British spelling), with Stephen Giles; Porcelain, with Gordon Lang; and Glass, with Mark West. These volumes are well-made, pocket-size and illustrated with color photographs and even diagrams for comparison. They address variations on themes, recognizing fakes and determining true condition. They provide helpful background context about periods and styles, and extensive glossaries of terms both common and obscure. Checklists consist of questions to ask yourself about each item. From Wellington chests to Chippendale settees, from the glories of 18th-century Meissen porcelain to the difference between hardstone and shell cameos, from glassmakers' marks to jewelers' tools, these books cover an impressive amount of information in a very small space and do so painlessly. At least one of these should be in your pocket on your next trip to the antique mall.

Michael Sims' next book will be a natural and cultural history of the human body for Viking.