Whether you’re looking to overhaul your home’s outdated colors and tired furniture, or you simply enjoy living vicariously through the good taste of others, the latest batch of design books offers plenty of ideas for making personal spaces more appealing.

The decorating book expected to make the biggest splash this spring is Trading Spaces: Behind the Scenes, a treasury of insider information from the phenomenally popular home improvement show, “Trading Spaces.” For the two or three people in America who have somehow missed the TV show, here’s the rundown: Homeowners sign up to redecorate (and, in some cases, ruin) a room in a neighbor’s home with the help of designers and a $1,000 budget. At the end of two days, the rooms are revealed to the owners. The result might be a tastefully appointed French Country bedroom . . . or a living room with hay glued on the walls.

Edited by Brian Kramer, Trading Spaces: Behind the Scenes offers candid biographies of the show’s main players. Perky host Paige Davis admits that her upbeat personality evokes a love/hate reaction people either love her or find her, in her own words, “loud, obnoxious, dramatic, overbearing and annoying.” Designer Frank Bielec, known for his country kitsch designs, admits that he used to work as an aerobics instructor. Hildi Santo-Tomas, the designer with an aloof demeanor and a penchant for high-glamour rooms, reveals her goofy passion for Pluto, a Labrador Retriever she calls her “life source and soul.” Beyond the bios, Trading Spaces: Behind the Scenes includes revealing photos and hilarious features, such as a table to help readers determine which of the show’s cast is their design soul mate. The book ends with a roundup of every “Trading Spaces” episode. Aside from the gratuitous poster-size portraits of cast members, which would appeal only to a true fanatic, this book is an extremely satisfying peek inside a little show that became a monster hit. While the book is heavy on fun facts, it’s light on decorating tips. For that, open up Think Color: Rooms to Live In (Chronicle, $40, 172 pages, ISBN 0811836703) by Tricia Guild. This hefty volume of decorating inspiration is an antidote for those who balk at the thought of citrus-colored walls or pink bedding. Think Color proves that bright, bold colors can look tasteful and, yes, even soothing.

Guild is the creative director and cofounder of Designers Guild, a company that specializes in sleek designs with liberal use of fresh flowers and vibrant fabrics. The colorful photos in the book convey this rich sensibility, and accompanying text offers advice on everything from creative ways of serving food to successfully using wallpaper.

Novice decorators will appreciate Guild’s concise explanations of her choices in each room. A bold room where flowery red, yellow and blue curtains are paired with a rainbow-striped chair somehow looks restful. How? As Guild explains, this is because a barely noticed white rug ties together and “stabilizes” the room. Don’t worry if reading this gorgeous book doesn’t result in a major transformation in your own home. Just flipping through these glossy pages is satisfying enough.

If just adding a few throw pillows won’t do the trick, turn to The Distinctive Home: A Vision of Timeless Design (Taunton, $40, 240 pages, ISBN 1561585289) by Boston architect Jeremiah Eck. The author aims to explain the essence of a distinctive home, and he succeeds with this ode to good architectural design. You don’t need a degree in architecture to understand his simple, thoughtful meditations on houses. Eck considers every element of the home, from landscaping to roofline, and explains the importance of both the smallest details (the chimney) and the bigger picture (how the house appears from a distance).

In Eck’s view, a home is more than just a storage unit for TVs, appliances and Jacuzzis. “To me,” he says, “one of the goals of a house should be not just to provide pleasure but to achieve a higher level of all-encompassing satisfaction. Well-proportioned spaces, good light and small but thoughtful details can help push a home beyond mere pleasure.” The book is filled with beautiful color photos that give detailed ideas on how to make your own home distinctive. Amy Scribner’s latest home improvement project was painting the bathroom of her Washington D.C. home in periwinkle blue.

Here it is the armchair gardening book of the season: Gardening in Eden: The Joys of Planning and Tending a Garden by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II. This is as delightful a book about gardening as I’ve read. There are clues that Arthur Vanderbilt is not throwing some impatiens in the ground and calling it a garden. He is a lawyer and nonfiction author by trade, but he has been working on his New Jersey garden for 20 years. He confesses that it has good bones, stone walls, steps and paths to different vistas. He has boxwood-bordered beds. There’s a pond. He’s a goner, clearly, and his passion for his garden comes through in his careful observation, his knowledge of plants, and above all, his love of the never-ending seasons.

A gardening book without pictures is a special pleasure. I’m guessing that Arthur Vanderbilt has some spectacular vistas at his home, but what this book does so well is let us see them in process, through his eyes, in all their incomplete and imperfect glory.

Right now I’m missing my garden. At the moment it is a bare scene, the color sucked out of it, the dry reeds of last year’s fennel rattling in the wind. I came across a photograph I took last April, when I first planted up my little space. The greenness of it all so many sprouts, such happy little boxwoods. It was like finding a baby picture when your child is a teenager when was this ever real? As winter grinds to its end, the solace of seed and plant catalogs is great. But when I see a catalog photo of an impossibly bloomy shrub rose, I wonder a) did they glue extra blossoms on there? and b) how could I ever get such a thing to grow like that in my own garden? This is why I prefer books as my preseason warm-up: at least these folks aren’t trying to sell me something. Seen in a book, that same bloomy shrub rose becomes not a tarty come-on but a noble goal, a specimen that any patient and well-intentioned gardener can nurture to its rightful destiny.

A number of exciting new books are full of noble goals for the patient gardener. And there’s a good one for the impatient gardener, too.

Inspiration If you don’t know who P. Allen Smith is, you haven’t been watching enough TV. This soft-voiced Southern gardener is a gentle antidote to Martha Stewart, and his syndicated show and frequent spots on the Weather Channel and CBS reveal a guy who seems, above all, unpretentious and friendly. Probably grows tomatoes at home, you think when you see him. But when you see his new book, you realize it’s like someone saying he likes eggs, and you glance up to see a dozen FabergŽs on the mantelpiece. Smith is downhome, but he is thinking big, too.

It is a treat to read P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home: Creating a Garden for Everyday Living (Clarkson Potter, $29.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0609609327). Read this book for the author’s overarching principle: to think of the space outside your home as an extension of the home, not as a swath of lawn to mow. Use that space to create areas that blur the distinction between inside and out, and create outdoor spaces for the things you love to do: cook, relax, play with children, entertain. This notion of garden “rooms” is quite English and quite ancient, so Smith provides photographs of long-established gardens both English and American that make his case in a lovely way. His own gardens provide the core of the illustrations, and they are amazing. There is much here for those of us without giant landscaping budgets or huge yards: practical advice on choosing plants, a wealth of ideas for adding privacy and an overall message that we should think about our yards in a new way. All is delivered in a sophisticated, elegant book design.

Another new book to get you thinking fresh is Garden Color (Better Homes and Gardens, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 0696215349). Just about every gardener has a place, by a front door or a porch, where the main goal is vibrant color. This book takes you through the color wheel, exploring color theory in the garden and showing in dozens of photographs plant combinations that will make color explode in your garden. In that sturdy Better Homes and Gardens way, the focus is on plants that are widely available and easy to grow. Every plant ever grown Well, not quite. But something very special for gardeners is going on in American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants ∧ Flowers, Christopher Brickell and Trevor Cole, editors-in-chief (DK, $60, 720 pages, ISBN 0789489937). There are a number of comprehensive plant encyclopedias out there (Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening has been my favorite), but they tend to be arranged alphabetically. The AHS Encyclopedia arranges plants by color, size and type. This Plant Selector system is a godsend for the gardener trying to fill a gap in a garden (“I need a small yellow perennial blooming early spring”) or someone who forgot the name of the plant she saw at the garden center (“It was a white climber”). But that’s not all. In addition to the full-color Plant Selector, the Plant Dictionary covers 8,000 plants, which is a help when you return from the garden center chanting “lamium, lamium” and can’t remember what it is.

There is a reason some books cost $60. (The proofreading bill alone on this thing had to be wicked.) But the results are worth it: a rich resource for the gardener who is ready to move beyond flats of pansies and start thinking about the enormous world of plants. I will be using this book often this spring.

Practicality And then there’s the real world, where those flats of pansies sit for a while on the back porch, reproachful every time I pass them. Not a noble sight at all. It is impossible to do everything I’d like to do in my garden, but I would be miserable without it. Joanna Smith understands this dilemma, and she is full of ideas in The One-Hour Garden: How You Can Have a No-Fuss, No-Work Garden (Reader’s Digest, $26.95, 160 pages, ISBN 0762104252). The title, of course, is a tease the only no-work garden is a paved garden. What’s helpful about this book is the notion of time management. Smith spends most of the book evaluating the time and trouble required for various garden elements and plants, which is not how many gardeners approach their garden planning. She’s anti-lawn, anti-weeding and pro-gravel, and she encourages careful thought about soil conditions, light and moisture. This book will take more than an hour to read, which will put you a week behind on your garden. But Smith shoehorns a ton of information into this colorful volume, with lots of quick lists, short how-tos and hints. This book will save time for every gardener, even the ones who like a high-fuss, tons-of-work garden. Small pleasures Finally, there is good news for anyone who doesn’t have access to a yard. Rosemary McCreary is a prolific garden book author, and her newest volume brings the idea of landscaping inside. Tabletop Gardens is not your average houseplant book. A single plant placed with care becomes a sculpture. A glass globe becomes a child’s fairy-tale garden. Flowering bulbs and forsythia branches turn into a centerpiece garden. McCreary isn’t one to plop a ficus in a corner and be done; the lovely color photographs prove that a tabletop garden can be a fascinating indoor environment. Cactus, grasses, climbing vines and bromeliads are all on her list of unusual ways to decorate with living plants, and her plant lists and care information make it all seem quite simple. Even if you do have an acre of perennials and a topiary garden, Tabletop Gardens is an inspiration. Sometimes, thinking small can be the most noble goal of all. Ann Shayne is a former editor of BookPage.

Right now I’m missing my garden. At the moment it is a bare scene, the color sucked out of it, the dry reeds of last year’s fennel rattling in the wind. I came across a photograph I took last April, when I first planted up my little space. The greenness of it all so many sprouts, such happy little boxwoods. It was like finding a baby picture when your child is a teenager when was this ever real? As winter grinds to its end, the solace of seed and plant catalogs is great. But when I see a catalog photo of an impossibly bloomy shrub rose, I wonder a) did they glue extra blossoms on there? and b) how could I ever get such a thing to grow like that in my own garden? This is why I prefer books as my preseason warm-up: at least these folks aren’t trying to sell me something. Seen in a book, that same bloomy shrub rose becomes not a tarty come-on but a noble goal, a specimen that any patient and well-intentioned gardener can nurture to its rightful destiny.

A number of exciting new books are full of noble goals for the patient gardener. And there’s a good one for the impatient gardener, too.

Inspiration If you don’t know who P. Allen Smith is, you haven’t been watching enough TV. This soft-voiced Southern gardener is a gentle antidote to Martha Stewart, and his syndicated show and frequent spots on the Weather Channel and CBS reveal a guy who seems, above all, unpretentious and friendly. Probably grows tomatoes at home, you think when you see him. But when you see his new book, you realize it’s like someone saying he likes eggs, and you glance up to see a dozen FabergŽs on the mantelpiece. Smith is downhome, but he is thinking big, too.

It is a treat to read P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home: Creating a Garden for Everyday Living (Clarkson Potter, $29.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0609609327). Read this book for the author’s overarching principle: to think of the space outside your home as an extension of the home, not as a swath of lawn to mow. Use that space to create areas that blur the distinction between inside and out, and create outdoor spaces for the things you love to do: cook, relax, play with children, entertain. This notion of garden “rooms” is quite English and quite ancient, so Smith provides photographs of long-established gardens both English and American that make his case in a lovely way. His own gardens provide the core of the illustrations, and they are amazing. There is much here for those of us without giant landscaping budgets or huge yards: practical advice on choosing plants, a wealth of ideas for adding privacy and an overall message that we should think about our yards in a new way. All is delivered in a sophisticated, elegant book design.

Another new book to get you thinking fresh is Garden Color (Better Homes and Gardens, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 0696215349). Just about every gardener has a place, by a front door or a porch, where the main goal is vibrant color. This book takes you through the color wheel, exploring color theory in the garden and showing in dozens of photographs plant combinations that will make color explode in your garden. In that sturdy Better Homes and Gardens way, the focus is on plants that are widely available and easy to grow. Every plant ever grown Well, not quite. But something very special for gardeners is going on in American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants ∧ Flowers, Christopher Brickell and Trevor Cole, editors-in-chief (DK, $60, 720 pages, ISBN 0789489937). There are a number of comprehensive plant encyclopedias out there (Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening has been my favorite), but they tend to be arranged alphabetically. The AHS Encyclopedia arranges plants by color, size and type. This Plant Selector system is a godsend for the gardener trying to fill a gap in a garden (“I need a small yellow perennial blooming early spring”) or someone who forgot the name of the plant she saw at the garden center (“It was a white climber”). But that’s not all. In addition to the full-color Plant Selector, the Plant Dictionary covers 8,000 plants, which is a help when you return from the garden center chanting “lamium, lamium” and can’t remember what it is.

There is a reason some books cost $60. (The proofreading bill alone on this thing had to be wicked.) But the results are worth it: a rich resource for the gardener who is ready to move beyond flats of pansies and start thinking about the enormous world of plants. I will be using this book often this spring.

Practicality And then there’s the real world, where those flats of pansies sit for a while on the back porch, reproachful every time I pass them. Not a noble sight at all. It is impossible to do everything I’d like to do in my garden, but I would be miserable without it. Joanna Smith understands this dilemma, and she is full of ideas in The One-Hour Garden: How You Can Have a No-Fuss, No-Work Garden. The title, of course, is a tease the only no-work garden is a paved garden. What’s helpful about this book is the notion of time management. Smith spends most of the book evaluating the time and trouble required for various garden elements and plants, which is not how many gardeners approach their garden planning. She’s anti-lawn, anti-weeding and pro-gravel, and she encourages careful thought about soil conditions, light and moisture. This book will take more than an hour to read, which will put you a week behind on your garden. But Smith shoehorns a ton of information into this colorful volume, with lots of quick lists, short how-tos and hints. This book will save time for every gardener, even the ones who like a high-fuss, tons-of-work garden. Small pleasures Finally, there is good news for anyone who doesn’t have access to a yard. Rosemary McCreary is a prolific garden book author, and her newest volume brings the idea of landscaping inside. Tabletop Gardens (Storey, $27.50, 160 pages, ISBN 1580174663) is not your average houseplant book. A single plant placed with care becomes a sculpture. A glass globe becomes a child’s fairy-tale garden. Flowering bulbs and forsythia branches turn into a centerpiece garden. McCreary isn’t one to plop a ficus in a corner and be done; the lovely color photographs prove that a tabletop garden can be a fascinating indoor environment. Cactus, grasses, climbing vines and bromeliads are all on her list of unusual ways to decorate with living plants, and her plant lists and care information make it all seem quite simple. Even if you do have an acre of perennials and a topiary garden, Tabletop Gardens is an inspiration. Sometimes, thinking small can be the most noble goal of all. Ann Shayne is a former editor of BookPage.

Right now I’m missing my garden. At the moment it is a bare scene, the color sucked out of it, the dry reeds of last year’s fennel rattling in the wind. I came across a photograph I took last April, when I first planted up my little space. The greenness of it all so many sprouts, such happy little boxwoods. It was like finding a baby picture when your child is a teenager when was this ever real? As winter grinds to its end, the solace of seed and plant catalogs is great. But when I see a catalog photo of an impossibly bloomy shrub rose, I wonder a) did they glue extra blossoms on there? and b) how could I ever get such a thing to grow like that in my own garden? This is why I prefer books as my preseason warm-up: at least these folks aren’t trying to sell me something. Seen in a book, that same bloomy shrub rose becomes not a tarty come-on but a noble goal, a specimen that any patient and well-intentioned gardener can nurture to its rightful destiny.

A number of exciting new books are full of noble goals for the patient gardener. And there’s a good one for the impatient gardener, too.

Inspiration If you don’t know who P. Allen Smith is, you haven’t been watching enough TV. This soft-voiced Southern gardener is a gentle antidote to Martha Stewart, and his syndicated show and frequent spots on the Weather Channel and CBS reveal a guy who seems, above all, unpretentious and friendly. Probably grows tomatoes at home, you think when you see him. But when you see his new book, you realize it’s like someone saying he likes eggs, and you glance up to see a dozen FabergŽs on the mantelpiece. Smith is downhome, but he is thinking big, too.

It is a treat to read P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home: Creating a Garden for Everyday Living (Clarkson Potter, $29.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0609609327). Read this book for the author’s overarching principle: to think of the space outside your home as an extension of the home, not as a swath of lawn to mow. Use that space to create areas that blur the distinction between inside and out, and create outdoor spaces for the things you love to do: cook, relax, play with children, entertain. This notion of garden “rooms” is quite English and quite ancient, so Smith provides photographs of long-established gardens both English and American that make his case in a lovely way. His own gardens provide the core of the illustrations, and they are amazing. There is much here for those of us without giant landscaping budgets or huge yards: practical advice on choosing plants, a wealth of ideas for adding privacy and an overall message that we should think about our yards in a new way. All is delivered in a sophisticated, elegant book design.

Another new book to get you thinking fresh is Garden Color (Better Homes and Gardens, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 0696215349). Just about every gardener has a place, by a front door or a porch, where the main goal is vibrant color. This book takes you through the color wheel, exploring color theory in the garden and showing in dozens of photographs plant combinations that will make color explode in your garden. In that sturdy Better Homes and Gardens way, the focus is on plants that are widely available and easy to grow. Every plant ever grown Well, not quite. But something very special for gardeners is going on in American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants ∧ Flowers, Christopher Brickell and Trevor Cole, editors-in-chief. There are a number of comprehensive plant encyclopedias out there (Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening has been my favorite), but they tend to be arranged alphabetically. The AHS Encyclopedia arranges plants by color, size and type. This Plant Selector system is a godsend for the gardener trying to fill a gap in a garden (“I need a small yellow perennial blooming early spring”) or someone who forgot the name of the plant she saw at the garden center (“It was a white climber”). But that’s not all. In addition to the full-color Plant Selector, the Plant Dictionary covers 8,000 plants, which is a help when you return from the garden center chanting “lamium, lamium” and can’t remember what it is.

There is a reason some books cost $60. (The proofreading bill alone on this thing had to be wicked.) But the results are worth it: a rich resource for the gardener who is ready to move beyond flats of pansies and start thinking about the enormous world of plants. I will be using this book often this spring.

Practicality And then there’s the real world, where those flats of pansies sit for a while on the back porch, reproachful every time I pass them. Not a noble sight at all. It is impossible to do everything I’d like to do in my garden, but I would be miserable without it. Joanna Smith understands this dilemma, and she is full of ideas in The One-Hour Garden: How You Can Have a No-Fuss, No-Work Garden (Reader’s Digest, $26.95, 160 pages, ISBN 0762104252). The title, of course, is a tease the only no-work garden is a paved garden. What’s helpful about this book is the notion of time management. Smith spends most of the book evaluating the time and trouble required for various garden elements and plants, which is not how many gardeners approach their garden planning. She’s anti-lawn, anti-weeding and pro-gravel, and she encourages careful thought about soil conditions, light and moisture. This book will take more than an hour to read, which will put you a week behind on your garden. But Smith shoehorns a ton of information into this colorful volume, with lots of quick lists, short how-tos and hints. This book will save time for every gardener, even the ones who like a high-fuss, tons-of-work garden. Small pleasures Finally, there is good news for anyone who doesn’t have access to a yard. Rosemary McCreary is a prolific garden book author, and her newest volume brings the idea of landscaping inside. Tabletop Gardens (Storey, $27.50, 160 pages, ISBN 1580174663) is not your average houseplant book. A single plant placed with care becomes a sculpture. A glass globe becomes a child’s fairy-tale garden. Flowering bulbs and forsythia branches turn into a centerpiece garden. McCreary isn’t one to plop a ficus in a corner and be done; the lovely color photographs prove that a tabletop garden can be a fascinating indoor environment. Cactus, grasses, climbing vines and bromeliads are all on her list of unusual ways to decorate with living plants, and her plant lists and care information make it all seem quite simple. Even if you do have an acre of perennials and a topiary garden, Tabletop Gardens is an inspiration. Sometimes, thinking small can be the most noble goal of all. Ann Shayne is a former editor of BookPage.

Right now I’m missing my garden. At the moment it is a bare scene, the color sucked out of it, the dry reeds of last year’s fennel rattling in the wind. I came across a photograph I took last April, when I first planted up my little space. The greenness of it all so many sprouts, such happy little boxwoods. It was like finding a baby picture when your child is a teenager when was this ever real? As winter grinds to its end, the solace of seed and plant catalogs is great. But when I see a catalog photo of an impossibly bloomy shrub rose, I wonder a) did they glue extra blossoms on there? and b) how could I ever get such a thing to grow like that in my own garden? This is why I prefer books as my preseason warm-up: at least these folks aren’t trying to sell me something. Seen in a book, that same bloomy shrub rose becomes not a tarty come-on but a noble goal, a specimen that any patient and well-intentioned gardener can nurture to its rightful destiny.

A number of exciting new books are full of noble goals for the patient gardener. And there’s a good one for the impatient gardener, too.

Inspiration If you don’t know who P. Allen Smith is, you haven’t been watching enough TV. This soft-voiced Southern gardener is a gentle antidote to Martha Stewart, and his syndicated show and frequent spots on the Weather Channel and CBS reveal a guy who seems, above all, unpretentious and friendly. Probably grows tomatoes at home, you think when you see him. But when you see his new book, you realize it’s like someone saying he likes eggs, and you glance up to see a dozen FabergŽs on the mantelpiece. Smith is downhome, but he is thinking big, too.

It is a treat to read P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home: Creating a Garden for Everyday Living (Clarkson Potter, $29.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0609609327). Read this book for the author’s overarching principle: to think of the space outside your home as an extension of the home, not as a swath of lawn to mow. Use that space to create areas that blur the distinction between inside and out, and create outdoor spaces for the things you love to do: cook, relax, play with children, entertain. This notion of garden “rooms” is quite English and quite ancient, so Smith provides photographs of long-established gardens both English and American that make his case in a lovely way. His own gardens provide the core of the illustrations, and they are amazing. There is much here for those of us without giant landscaping budgets or huge yards: practical advice on choosing plants, a wealth of ideas for adding privacy and an overall message that we should think about our yards in a new way. All is delivered in a sophisticated, elegant book design.

Another new book to get you thinking fresh is Garden Color. Just about every gardener has a place, by a front door or a porch, where the main goal is vibrant color. This book takes you through the color wheel, exploring color theory in the garden and showing in dozens of photographs plant combinations that will make color explode in your garden. In that sturdy Better Homes and Gardens way, the focus is on plants that are widely available and easy to grow. Every plant ever grown Well, not quite. But something very special for gardeners is going on in American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants ∧ Flowers, Christopher Brickell and Trevor Cole, editors-in-chief (DK, $60, 720 pages, ISBN 0789489937). There are a number of comprehensive plant encyclopedias out there (Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening has been my favorite), but they tend to be arranged alphabetically. The AHS Encyclopedia arranges plants by color, size and type. This Plant Selector system is a godsend for the gardener trying to fill a gap in a garden (“I need a small yellow perennial blooming early spring”) or someone who forgot the name of the plant she saw at the garden center (“It was a white climber”). But that’s not all. In addition to the full-color Plant Selector, the Plant Dictionary covers 8,000 plants, which is a help when you return from the garden center chanting “lamium, lamium” and can’t remember what it is.

There is a reason some books cost $60. (The proofreading bill alone on this thing had to be wicked.) But the results are worth it: a rich resource for the gardener who is ready to move beyond flats of pansies and start thinking about the enormous world of plants. I will be using this book often this spring.

Practicality And then there’s the real world, where those flats of pansies sit for a while on the back porch, reproachful every time I pass them. Not a noble sight at all. It is impossible to do everything I’d like to do in my garden, but I would be miserable without it. Joanna Smith understands this dilemma, and she is full of ideas in The One-Hour Garden: How You Can Have a No-Fuss, No-Work Garden (Reader’s Digest, $26.95, 160 pages, ISBN 0762104252). The title, of course, is a tease the only no-work garden is a paved garden. What’s helpful about this book is the notion of time management. Smith spends most of the book evaluating the time and trouble required for various garden elements and plants, which is not how many gardeners approach their garden planning. She’s anti-lawn, anti-weeding and pro-gravel, and she encourages careful thought about soil conditions, light and moisture. This book will take more than an hour to read, which will put you a week behind on your garden. But Smith shoehorns a ton of information into this colorful volume, with lots of quick lists, short how-tos and hints. This book will save time for every gardener, even the ones who like a high-fuss, tons-of-work garden. Small pleasures Finally, there is good news for anyone who doesn’t have access to a yard. Rosemary McCreary is a prolific garden book author, and her newest volume brings the idea of landscaping inside. Tabletop Gardens (Storey, $27.50, 160 pages, ISBN 1580174663) is not your average houseplant book. A single plant placed with care becomes a sculpture. A glass globe becomes a child’s fairy-tale garden. Flowering bulbs and forsythia branches turn into a centerpiece garden. McCreary isn’t one to plop a ficus in a corner and be done; the lovely color photographs prove that a tabletop garden can be a fascinating indoor environment. Cactus, grasses, climbing vines and bromeliads are all on her list of unusual ways to decorate with living plants, and her plant lists and care information make it all seem quite simple. Even if you do have an acre of perennials and a topiary garden, Tabletop Gardens is an inspiration. Sometimes, thinking small can be the most noble goal of all. Ann Shayne is a former editor of BookPage.

Right now I’m missing my garden. At the moment it is a bare scene, the color sucked out of it, the dry reeds of last year’s fennel rattling in the wind. I came across a photograph I took last April, when I first planted up my little space. The greenness of it all so many sprouts, such happy little boxwoods. It was like finding a baby picture when your child is a teenager when was this ever real? As winter grinds to its end, the solace of seed and plant catalogs is great. But when I see a catalog photo of an impossibly bloomy shrub rose, I wonder a) did they glue extra blossoms on there? and b) how could I ever get such a thing to grow like that in my own garden? This is why I prefer books as my preseason warm-up: at least these folks aren’t trying to sell me something. Seen in a book, that same bloomy shrub rose becomes not a tarty come-on but a noble goal, a specimen that any patient and well-intentioned gardener can nurture to its rightful destiny.

A number of exciting new books are full of noble goals for the patient gardener. And there’s a good one for the impatient gardener, too.

Inspiration If you don’t know who P. Allen Smith is, you haven’t been watching enough TV. This soft-voiced Southern gardener is a gentle antidote to Martha Stewart, and his syndicated show and frequent spots on the Weather Channel and CBS reveal a guy who seems, above all, unpretentious and friendly. Probably grows tomatoes at home, you think when you see him. But when you see his new book, you realize it’s like someone saying he likes eggs, and you glance up to see a dozen FabergŽs on the mantelpiece. Smith is downhome, but he is thinking big, too.

It is a treat to read P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home: Creating a Garden for Everyday Living. Read this book for the author’s overarching principle: to think of the space outside your home as an extension of the home, not as a swath of lawn to mow. Use that space to create areas that blur the distinction between inside and out, and create outdoor spaces for the things you love to do: cook, relax, play with children, entertain. This notion of garden “rooms” is quite English and quite ancient, so Smith provides photographs of long-established gardens both English and American that make his case in a lovely way. His own gardens provide the core of the illustrations, and they are amazing. There is much here for those of us without giant landscaping budgets or huge yards: practical advice on choosing plants, a wealth of ideas for adding privacy and an overall message that we should think about our yards in a new way. All is delivered in a sophisticated, elegant book design.

Another new book to get you thinking fresh is Garden Color (Better Homes and Gardens, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 0696215349). Just about every gardener has a place, by a front door or a porch, where the main goal is vibrant color. This book takes you through the color wheel, exploring color theory in the garden and showing in dozens of photographs plant combinations that will make color explode in your garden. In that sturdy Better Homes and Gardens way, the focus is on plants that are widely available and easy to grow. Every plant ever grown Well, not quite. But something very special for gardeners is going on in American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants &and Flowers, Christopher Brickell and Trevor Cole, editors-in-chief (DK, $60, 720 pages, ISBN 0789489937). There are a number of comprehensive plant encyclopedias out there (Taylor’s Master Guide to Gardening has been my favorite), but they tend to be arranged alphabetically. The AHS Encyclopedia arranges plants by color, size and type. This Plant Selector system is a godsend for the gardener trying to fill a gap in a garden (“I need a small yellow perennial blooming early spring”) or someone who forgot the name of the plant she saw at the garden center (“It was a white climber”). But that’s not all. In addition to the full-color Plant Selector, the Plant Dictionary covers 8,000 plants, which is a help when you return from the garden center chanting “lamium, lamium” and can’t remember what it is.

There is a reason some books cost $60. (The proofreading bill alone on this thing had to be wicked.) But the results are worth it: a rich resource for the gardener who is ready to move beyond flats of pansies and start thinking about the enormous world of plants. I will be using this book often this spring.

Practicality And then there’s the real world, where those flats of pansies sit for a while on the back porch, reproachful every time I pass them. Not a noble sight at all. It is impossible to do everything I’d like to do in my garden, but I would be miserable without it. Joanna Smith understands this dilemma, and she is full of ideas in The One-Hour Garden: How You Can Have a No-Fuss, No-Work Garden (Reader’s Digest, $26.95, 160 pages, ISBN 0762104252). The title, of course, is a tease the only no-work garden is a paved garden. What’s helpful about this book is the notion of time management. Smith spends most of the book evaluating the time and trouble required for various garden elements and plants, which is not how many gardeners approach their garden planning. She’s anti-lawn, anti-weeding and pro-gravel, and she encourages careful thought about soil conditions, light and moisture. This book will take more than an hour to read, which will put you a week behind on your garden. But Smith shoehorns a ton of information into this colorful volume, with lots of quick lists, short how-tos and hints. This book will save time for every gardener, even the ones who like a high-fuss, tons-of-work garden. Small pleasures Finally, there is good news for anyone who doesn’t have access to a yard. Rosemary McCreary is a prolific garden book author, and her newest volume brings the idea of landscaping inside. Tabletop Gardens (Storey, $27.50, 160 pages, ISBN 1580174663) is not your average houseplant book. A single plant placed with care becomes a sculpture. A glass globe becomes a child’s fairy-tale garden. Flowering bulbs and forsythia branches turn into a centerpiece garden. McCreary isn’t one to plop a ficus in a corner and be done; the lovely color photographs prove that a tabletop garden can be a fascinating indoor environment. Cactus, grasses, climbing vines and bromeliads are all on her list of unusual ways to decorate with living plants, and her plant lists and care information make it all seem quite simple. Even if you do have an acre of perennials and a topiary garden, Tabletop Gardens is an inspiration. Sometimes, thinking small can be the most noble goal of all. Ann Shayne is a former editor of BookPage.

Are you suffering from CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome)? Has your kitchen table disappeared under a mountain of clutter? Did you spend most of the morning searching for an overdue phone bill that simply must be paid today? If so, you’re certainly not alone. As Marla Cilley has discovered, there are tens of thousands possibly millions of us who simply can’t keep our houses neat and tidy. Cilley decided to come to the rescue by stepping into a phone booth and emerging as The FlyLady, a superwoman of household organization who rescues the messiest from their dusty, dirty, clutter-laden homes.

Cilley is the chief housekeeper-in-residence at a popular Web site, www.flylady.net, and earlier this year she self-published a book for the overwhelmed, overextended and overdrawn: Sink Reflections: FlyLady’s BabyStep Guide to Overcoming CHAOS. The first printing of the book sold out so quickly that it was snapped up by Bantam Books, which is publishing a trade paperback edition this month ($14.95, 223 pages, ISBN 0553382179).

Cilley’s approach is light-hearted, supportive and sometimes even fun, as the 130,000 subscribers to her Web site have learned. Her commandments range from the 27-Fling Boogie (in which you run through your house at a dizzying pace and grab 27 items to throw away) to the Hot Spot Fire Drill (a twice-a-day cleanup of an area that attracts clutter). After reforming her own disorganized ways a few years ago ( my home was full of clutter, my sink was overrun with dirty dishes and I looked like a truck had just run over me ) Cilley set up a small e-mail group to counsel others. The group evolved into her popular Web site, which she runs with a crew of five from her home in the North Carolina mountains. BookPage recently asked the FlyLady for some help in crawling out from under our own mountain of stuff.

BookPage: Help! My house/life is in total CHAOS. How do I take that daunting first step toward fixing it? Marla Cilley: Go shine your kitchen sink! Quit looking at the big picture and just take the first babystep and shine that sink! You write that the FlyLady program really isn’t about cleaning. What is the heart of your message to the messy? If you take care of yourself first and I mean FLY(Finally Loving Yourself), your home and life will fall right into place. BabySteps, BabySteps, BabySteps. Establish the foundations of small routines and before you know it, you will find the peace you are looking for.

Who are the typical subscribers to your Web site? They are from all walks of life: FLY Guys, homeschooling parents, retired people. You name it and we have them in our cyber-family. FLYing works for anyone who has a home and is tired of living in CHAOS! Does your own house ever lapse into CHAOS? NO! Occasionally I have a hot spot get out of control, but it only takes five minutes to put out that fire! My routines allow us the freedom to open our door to guests at a moment’s notice.

What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever parted with in a 27-Fling Boogie? Flinging becomes fun after a little while. I have never parted with anything that made me smile. If it doesn’t, it is out of here. It is so easy if you can ask yourself a simple question. Do I love you? Do I use you? Do I have a place for you? If you can honestly answer these questions, then the item is worth keeping. If not, look out the flinging has begun! What’s the household chore you dread the most, and how do you convince yourself to do it anyway? I don’t dread any of them, because none of them take more than 15 minutes to do and I can do anything for 15 minutes! When my timer goes off, I get to stop! The holidays are approaching, and I can’t find my dining room table under all the clutter. How can I uncover it in time for Thanksgiving? Find your garbage can first and use it! The trashcan is my favorite filing system! Toss it out!

As a real estate agent, I’ve seen homes in many price ranges. But whether a house has a market value of $50,000 or $500,000, it’s not the price tag but the personal touches that turn four sheetrock walls into a warm, welcoming room. If your kitchen needs some kick, or you want to make your boudoir more bewitching, we’ve found three excellent books to help you define and design your own distinctive spaces.

Decorating dilemmas For the economically minded or anyone else who wants a creative challenge, Trade Secrets from Use What You Have Decorating by Lauri Ward (Putnam, $27.95, 256 pages, ISBN 0399148094) is a delightful foray into inexpensive ideas and treatments that yield dramatic, room-changing results. Ward, who has her own decorating Web site (www.decorate.com) and appears regularly in the national media as a design expert, shares her extensive knowledge in this unintimidating, “brass tacks” book. Having worked with hundreds of homeowners, she offers their real-life decorating dilemmas as examples of transformations that can be readily accomplished without great investments of time or money. And she offers tons of tips, like using unconventional curtain rods a hockey stick or a golf club in a sport fan’s room, or a bamboo pole or dried tree branch in nature-oriented settings. But Ward’s Trade Secrets is more than a list of decorating tips and tricks; there are solid chapters on basic fundamentals such as “Home Offices,” “The Bottom Line on Flooring” and “Decorating with Paint and Paper.” The illustrations are not lavish; they are simple black and white drawings, but they fit the thrifty tone and complement the simple, “you can do this too” approach for which Ward is known.

A sense of adventure If you need more visual appeal before you can be inspired to create, Tracy Porter’s Home Style: Creative and Livable Decorating Ideas for Everyone by Tracy Porter (Hyperion, $24.95, 144 pages, ISBN 0786868112) contains enough sensuous, eye-catching photographs to stimulate even the most neutral-toned imagination. Still, plenty of space is left (whole pages) for Porter’s ample lists of tips on topics like “Display Ideas,” “Decorating Your Mantels” or (another of my favorites surprise, surprise) “Decorating with Books.” Like Ward, Porter encourages you to take interesting pieces you may already have and use them in new and adventuresome ways. For example, she proposes hanging an heirloom chandelier in an unconventional spot in a nursery or over a bathtub or using a vintage screen door as an interior door, where an airy, inviting and unusual feature would say “Welcome!” An added bonus to this book is the final section that gives how-to instructions on many of the exquisite little treasures found in the earlier pages, like her “Make and Create” drawerpulls, lampshades or switch plates, most of which can be accomplished with your own household “finds” and a hot-glue gun.

Achieving real style Straight Talk on Decorating by Lynette Jennings is angled toward a more “mature” budget, but Jennings, host of Discovery Channel’s Lynette Jennings Design, brings her warm, witty, conversational tone to the pages of this practical, unpretentious “production.” Her own homes in Toronto and Atlanta are featured in sumptuous photos, as she explains why each room works to satisfy both the elements of pleasing design and the living requirements of real people. “Real style,” she admonishes, “means being sure of who you are, how you want to live, and what you want for your loved ones.” One of the most provocative portions of this book is Jennings’ treatment of color. In debunking decorating myths, she encourages homeowners to go against traditional real estate wisdom and boldly paint those safe, white “easy sell” walls. She argues that a beautiful home, “a home full of colorful personality. . . will be the most memorable, intriguing, and valuable to a prospective buyer.” And, I have to admit the photographs in this book make a mighty good case for her “go ahead and give it some color” arguments. In fact, real estate agents take note any of these books would make great house-warming gifts to pass to your clients at closing, along with the keys to their new homes!

As a real estate agent, I’ve seen homes in many price ranges. But whether a house has a market value of $50,000 or $500,000, it’s not the price tag but the personal touches that turn four sheetrock walls into a warm, welcoming room. If your kitchen needs some kick, or you want to make your boudoir more bewitching, we’ve found three excellent books to help you define and design your own distinctive spaces.

Decorating dilemmas For the economically minded or anyone else who wants a creative challenge, Trade Secrets from Use What You Have Decorating by Lauri Ward (Putnam, $27.95, 256 pages, ISBN 0399148094) is a delightful foray into inexpensive ideas and treatments that yield dramatic, room-changing results. Ward, who has her own decorating Web site (www.decorate.com) and appears regularly in the national media as a design expert, shares her extensive knowledge in this unintimidating, “brass tacks” book. Having worked with hundreds of homeowners, she offers their real-life decorating dilemmas as examples of transformations that can be readily accomplished without great investments of time or money. And she offers tons of tips, like using unconventional curtain rods a hockey stick or a golf club in a sport fan’s room, or a bamboo pole or dried tree branch in nature-oriented settings. But Ward’s Trade Secrets is more than a list of decorating tips and tricks; there are solid chapters on basic fundamentals such as “Home Offices,” “The Bottom Line on Flooring” and “Decorating with Paint and Paper.” The illustrations are not lavish; they are simple black and white drawings, but they fit the thrifty tone and complement the simple, “you can do this too” approach for which Ward is known.

A sense of adventure If you need more visual appeal before you can be inspired to create, Tracy Porter’s Home Style: Creative and Livable Decorating Ideas for Everyone by Tracy Porter contains enough sensuous, eye-catching photographs to stimulate even the most neutral-toned imagination. Still, plenty of space is left (whole pages) for Porter’s ample lists of tips on topics like “Display Ideas,” “Decorating Your Mantels” or (another of my favorites surprise, surprise) “Decorating with Books.” Like Ward, Porter encourages you to take interesting pieces you may already have and use them in new and adventuresome ways. For example, she proposes hanging an heirloom chandelier in an unconventional spot in a nursery or over a bathtub or using a vintage screen door as an interior door, where an airy, inviting and unusual feature would say “Welcome!” An added bonus to this book is the final section that gives how-to instructions on many of the exquisite little treasures found in the earlier pages, like her “Make and Create” drawerpulls, lampshades or switch plates, most of which can be accomplished with your own household “finds” and a hot-glue gun.

Achieving real style Straight Talk on Decorating by Lynette Jennings (Meredith, $34.95, 240 pages, ISBN 0696211084) is angled toward a more “mature” budget, but Jennings, host of Discovery Channel’s Lynette Jennings Design, brings her warm, witty, conversational tone to the pages of this practical, unpretentious “production.” Her own homes in Toronto and Atlanta are featured in sumptuous photos, as she explains why each room works to satisfy both the elements of pleasing design and the living requirements of real people. “Real style,” she admonishes, “means being sure of who you are, how you want to live, and what you want for your loved ones.” One of the most provocative portions of this book is Jennings’ treatment of color. In debunking decorating myths, she encourages homeowners to go against traditional real estate wisdom and boldly paint those safe, white “easy sell” walls. She argues that a beautiful home, “a home full of colorful personality. . . will be the most memorable, intriguing, and valuable to a prospective buyer.” And, I have to admit the photographs in this book make a mighty good case for her “go ahead and give it some color” arguments. In fact, real estate agents take note any of these books would make great house-warming gifts to pass to your clients at closing, along with the keys to their new homes!

As a real estate agent, I’ve seen homes in many price ranges. But whether a house has a market value of $50,000 or $500,000, it’s not the price tag but the personal touches that turn four sheetrock walls into a warm, welcoming room. If your kitchen needs some kick, or you want to make your boudoir more bewitching, we’ve found three excellent books to help you define and design your own distinctive spaces.

Decorating dilemmas For the economically minded or anyone else who wants a creative challenge, Trade Secrets from Use What You Have Decorating by Lauri Ward is a delightful foray into inexpensive ideas and treatments that yield dramatic, room-changing results. Ward, who has her own decorating Web site (www.decorate.com) and appears regularly in the national media as a design expert, shares her extensive knowledge in this unintimidating, “brass tacks” book. Having worked with hundreds of homeowners, she offers their real-life decorating dilemmas as examples of transformations that can be readily accomplished without great investments of time or money. And she offers tons of tips, like using unconventional curtain rods a hockey stick or a golf club in a sport fan’s room, or a bamboo pole or dried tree branch in nature-oriented settings. But Ward’s Trade Secrets is more than a list of decorating tips and tricks; there are solid chapters on basic fundamentals such as “Home Offices,” “The Bottom Line on Flooring” and “Decorating with Paint and Paper.” The illustrations are not lavish; they are simple black and white drawings, but they fit the thrifty tone and complement the simple, “you can do this too” approach for which Ward is known.

A sense of adventure If you need more visual appeal before you can be inspired to create, Tracy Porter’s Home Style: Creative and Livable Decorating Ideas for Everyone by Tracy Porter (Hyperion, $24.95, 144 pages, ISBN 0786868112) contains enough sensuous, eye-catching photographs to stimulate even the most neutral-toned imagination. Still, plenty of space is left (whole pages) for Porter’s ample lists of tips on topics like “Display Ideas,” “Decorating Your Mantels” or (another of my favorites surprise, surprise) “Decorating with Books.” Like Ward, Porter encourages you to take interesting pieces you may already have and use them in new and adventuresome ways. For example, she proposes hanging an heirloom chandelier in an unconventional spot in a nursery or over a bathtub or using a vintage screen door as an interior door, where an airy, inviting and unusual feature would say “Welcome!” An added bonus to this book is the final section that gives how-to instructions on many of the exquisite little treasures found in the earlier pages, like her “Make and Create” drawerpulls, lampshades or switch plates, most of which can be accomplished with your own household “finds” and a hot-glue gun.

Achieving real style Straight Talk on Decorating by Lynette Jennings (Meredith, $34.95, 240 pages, ISBN 0696211084) is angled toward a more “mature” budget, but Jennings, host of Discovery Channel’s Lynette Jennings Design, brings her warm, witty, conversational tone to the pages of this practical, unpretentious “production.” Her own homes in Toronto and Atlanta are featured in sumptuous photos, as she explains why each room works to satisfy both the elements of pleasing design and the living requirements of real people. “Real style,” she admonishes, “means being sure of who you are, how you want to live, and what you want for your loved ones.” One of the most provocative portions of this book is Jennings’ treatment of color. In debunking decorating myths, she encourages homeowners to go against traditional real estate wisdom and boldly paint those safe, white “easy sell” walls. She argues that a beautiful home, “a home full of colorful personality. . . will be the most memorable, intriguing, and valuable to a prospective buyer.” And, I have to admit the photographs in this book make a mighty good case for her “go ahead and give it some color” arguments. In fact, real estate agents take note any of these books would make great house-warming gifts to pass to your clients at closing, along with the keys to their new homes!