Ellen Sandbeck, an organic landscaper and worm farmer, raises consciousness while promoting simple, environmentally friendly and cheap solutions to every cleaning challenge in Organic Housekeeping: In Which the Nontoxic Avenger Shows You How to Improve Your Health and That of Your Family While You Save Time, Money and Perhaps Your Sanity, due out in May. Sandbeck, who lives with kids and pets yet never loses her dry sense of humor or passion for a healthfully clean house, has terrific ideas for housekeeping that minimizes the household’s negative impact on the environment. She proves a spirited and encyclopedic guide to the natural and nontoxic home, covering every element of the paper-not-plastic lifestyle, including domestic odor control and indoor air quality, de-cluttering, making laundry less odious (try rain- or snow-washing), and general cleaning and disinfecting (with a terrific and inexpensive nontoxic sanitizer made of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar). Sandbeck even discusses fire safety and caring for cars, the garden and pets with health and the environment in mind.

Readers who equate natural with still slightly dirty should know that Sandbeck a former housecleaner is fond of using a toothbrush to get at gunky nooks and crannies, and has perfected a system of damp cloths (washable, bleachable, landfill-friendly old cotton T-shirts) on a rubber mop head to sop up muddy footprints before they dry. This crunchy granola Martha Stewart also covers common green topics such as organic food, recycling, reducing consumption, and reusing everything from foil to plastic containers and old clothes. Her sensible, safe and more effective methods for clean, healthy living help both ordinary families and the world.

<b>Murphy’s Law strikes the garden</b> What gardener doesn’t indulge in <i>schadenfreude</i> from the smug perch of an armchair in early spring, before their own epic mistakes come to roost in their exotics? <b>The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden</b> is a delicious ride through one man’s seriocomic horticultural adventure: to create the most impressive garden ever to set off his historic, rundown old heap of a house in New York’s Hudson Valley. And that man, William Alexander husband, father and director of technology by day meets his emotional and intellectual match while cultivating a few acres of fruits, vegetables, roses and cottage flowers. Encountering the jolly act of weeding more than 20 beds and trying to figure out how the sod mealworms got up the hill to his corn, his transformation to gentleman farmer well-versed in Murphy’s Law is presented in chapters including One Man’s Weed Is Jean-Georges’s Salad, Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire), Statuary Rape, and Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden. As Alexander cans peaches, learns to garden with his wife ( like trying to grow mint and horseradish in the same bed ), fights Japanese beetles and works with a gardener who looks and acts suspiciously like the actor Christopher Walken, readers will relate to his basic philosophical dilemma: am I becoming my garden, or is my garden becoming me? Through follies and mistakes and temper tantrums and bad decisions that reveal more about personality and character than he’d like to admit (this committed environmentalist once soaked his vegetables in the pesticide diazinon in a fit over bugs), Alexander is eventually humbled and awed by Mother Nature’s final word, always delivered without anger or acrimony.

Apparently, Prince Charles was right: talking to plants isn’t barmy. As it turns out, however, it’s not the words of encouragement that keep the primroses blooming, but the huff of breath while talking to and watering houseplants that helps those routine-lovers adjust to changing wind conditions around the house and garden. This and many other rich tidbits in The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual will convince hapless home gardeners that they can have the many benefits of indoor landscapes without committing horticultural homicide. Here’s something the guilt-ridden might like to know, thanks to author Barbara Pleasant: some houseplants are only meant to survive a year or two (whew), many can’t cope with dry indoor air without daily help, and even within varieties, plants are like children, each having their own personalities and needing a slightly different approach. That said, this attractive illustrated directory boosts beginners’ confidence with a directory of hardy houseplants from cacti and succulents to orchids, bulbs and blooming plants. Pleasant discusses each variety’s characteristics and needs including water/humidity, food and light (she has a fantastic method for determining indoor lighting strengths and best plant positions). A handy symbol a cute flowerpot also marks the most hardy, abuse-proof houseplants (think Devil’s Ivy) to ensure that even novices can have immediate success.

The Victory Garden is the longest-running gardening program on American television, popular for its folksy style and Yankee practicality. Despite new generations of hosts and changes in garden styles, that unpretentious tone has remained refreshingly consistent, especially in books inspired by the show including the latest, The Victory Garden Companion. Released April 1 to coincide with the program’s 30th anniversary season on public television, the book covers every basic principle of domestic gardening in a readable, conversational style, from views and vantage points and braving the elements including sun, wind and rain, to entrances and exits, backyard fixtures and features, an excellent section on lawn (or the lack of necessity for it), flowers, the urban garden and the edible garden, which inspired the series’ name. Add step-by-step weekend projects, Inspired Gardens features on horticultural highlights from around the world, the Best Bets columns such as the top five tools for vegetable gardeners, Digging Deeper sections on current gardening trends including heirloom seeds and solar power, lush color illustrations and the reasonable price, and this book becomes black gold for any gardener looking for that perfect combination of how-to and why in one handy volume.

Mother Nature doesn’t need a paint chip to combine colors. Even her most garish combinations, like a field of riotous wild flowers in spring, have a grace and beauty about them that amateur gardeners often find difficult to duplicate. So America’s favorite gardener turns timid paint-by-number gardeners into bold and creative artists in P. Allen Smith’s Colors for the Garden: Creating Compelling Color Themes. Painting on a canvas as large as a backyard can be daunting, so Smith provides his usual reassuring and clear advice, linking home and garden colors to create a harmonious palette using the garden home concepts introduced in his previous books such as enclosure, activity, whimsy and abundance. Smith helps gardeners discover their color preferences and incorporate cool, warm and neutral plant hues against the backdrop of walkways, arbors, fences and other hardscape elements. The book also explores how texture, shape and light affect colors, and how to use natural elements as frames for outdoor compositions. Excellent photographs underline Smith’s points, and his plant directory features vigorous, easy-care and dependable varieties from shrubs and trees to annuals, along with seasonal combinations in each color temperature, that can be used as a paint box to create original, living art.

If the formal lines of Versailles, Sissinghurst Castle or the gardens of Kyoto fertilize your horticultural aspirations, then the imaginative gardens in The New Garden Paradise: Great Private Gardens of the World will raise the bar for your backyard. Edited by the incomparable Dominique Browning, essayist and editor-in-chief of House &andamp; Garden magazine, the book declares that the last decade has produced exceptionally talented and progressive landscape architects and designers and supports that premise with detailed, breathless text and phenomenal photos of 35 personal paradises full of tangible innovation that blooms and sways in the breeze. While pretentious design descriptors like lush and sensual, ruthlessly discriminating and tour de force are somewhat distracting, the gardens themselves remain as mysterious and elusive as a good novel or poem. Caught in various moods and seasons and organized into categories including New Classicism, Personal Visions and the Cottage Garden Reinvented, these gardens ultimately surpass words to stir the pure feeling, according to Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, that people long for.