IT'S LIKE GREETING a dear friend to turn the page of a novel and find a character who stops to water a wilting flower or marvels over a camellia bud. The fact that Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout's famously fat detective) devotedly cares for his orchids between 9 and 11 every morning almost makes up for his arrogance. Even though Miss Marple collects clues to the latest village murder as she clips her roses, gardens aren't integral to Agatha Christie's plots. But that doesn't matter, because any reference to my favorite occupation makes a book more absorbing.

Gardens play many roles in fiction. They serve as setting or metaphor, provide motivation, excuse or pastime. Many a tiresome spouse has been done in by poisons from plants or an unmarked tin tucked away in the garden shed. The main character in Carol Shields' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Stone Diaries" is a garden columnist who, when deposed by a sneaky editor, never quite recovers her zest for life.

Odd as it seems to link gardens, those sanctuaries of peace, with any crime beyond that of slug slaughter, such situations show up frequently in murder mysteries. Ellis Peters' medieval series stars Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk-sleuth-herbalist in an era when plants were the main source of both medicine and poison. If you prefer your mysteries to be of a more current century, there's the series by Susan Albert Wittig featuring herb shop owner China Bayles, a feisty ex-attorney intent on living a peaceful small-town life in Pecan Springs, Texas, only to have her idyll frequently interrupted by dastardly crimes she can't help investigating. Perhaps it is because of her handsome cop boyfriend. And then there is the lively horticulturist Celia Grant, in the series by John Sherwood, who seems to turn up a dead body behind every potted plant or stashed away in freshly dug garden plots.

I'm currently enjoying a couple of garden-mystery authors new to me. Ann Ripley's detective is Louise Eldridge, an organic gardener and television garden-show host. Wild rather than cultivated plants are central to the themes of Rebecca Rothenberg's books featuring Claire Sharples, a botanist specializing in blight, wilt and rot. This could also describe poor Claire's love life, but she rises above personal problems to solve murder mysteries with an ecological twist. Then there is the most unusual detective of the lot, Rei Shimura, a Japanese-American antiques dealer living in Tokyo. In "The Flower Master," author Sujata Massey explores the art of Japanese flower arranging, while her hip young sleuth traverses Tokyo to solve the murder of her Ikebana teacher.
 

Now In Bloom Witch hazels burst into bloom as the days begin to perceptibly lengthen. The coppery-orange confetti flowers of Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena,' larger than most witch-hazel blossoms, warm up winter with their richly intense color and distinctive, fresh fragrance. The flowers coat bare branches, to be followed by leaves that turn orange and red in autumn. 'Jelena' grows slowly into a 12-by-12-foot, vase-shaped shrub, prefers sun but will tolerate light shade, and is a Great Plant Pick for Northwest gardens.

But all is not blood and guts in the literary garden world. Two recent books offer up love, longing and fine writing. Poet Helen Humphreys explores love lost and nearly regained in her period piece of a novel, "The Lost Garden." Lonely and lacking confidence, Gwen Davis flees the London Blitz for rural Devon, leaving her job at the Royal Horticultural Society, where she studied vegetable cankers. Her narrow, theoretical approach to gardening is challenged in her new role as leader of a group of young women restoring an old estate garden. And her shell of self-protectiveness is forever shattered by the sensitivity of a young Canadian soldier, her devotion to Ellen Wilmott's tome "The Genus Rosa," and her first real friendship. Humphreys' self-admitted ignorance about gardening shows in the implausibility of the mysterious secret garden that Davis discovers, but her truths about affection and loss more than make up for it. "Night Gardening" is children's book author E.L. Swann's first novel for adults, and it has all the simplicity and enchantment of the best books for children. It is the story of blossoming and decline, death and restoration, in both humans and gardens.