JONATHAN BUCKLEY/"SUCCESSION PLANTING FOR YEAR-ROUND PLEASURE"

The early summer outburst of magenta Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus stops you in your tracks. It’s growing here among dwarf bamboo Pleioblastus viridistriatus with leaves striped yellow and green.

I REMEMBER a gardening friend's story about madly weeding in the semi-dusk of an early April evening and hearing her husband admonish the kids, "You know your mother doesn't cook this time of year . . . go make a tuna fish sandwich." That sums up springtime for a gardener, but luckily it still gets dark early enough to allow a few minutes for reading before falling into exhausted sleep.

Here's a selection of new books and catalogs to keep you awake a little longer:

Whether our gardens consist of lavish borders or a few pots, all of us strategize on how to keep the show going as long as possible. In "Succession Planting for Year-Round Pleasure" (Timber Press, $29.95), octogenarian Christopher Lloyd offers wisdom born of decades planting and tending one of England's great gardens. From bedding out to self-seeders, Lloyd knows all the tricks of exclamation-point plantings. "The idea of plants sharing the same space is that they do this without getting in each other's way . . . We constantly plan so that when a plant has its off-season another takes over," he writes.

Now when spring plant frenzy is at its most acute, regional nursery catalogs are often the reading of choice. I use the Nichols Garden Nursery catalog as a reference for edibles, because Rose Marie Nichols McGee seems to know everything about growing food in the Northwest. Learn how to cook chard, choose the ripest melon and toss a perfect salad while browsing pages of color photos and precise descriptions for hundreds of herbs, vegetables, fruit and flowers. The catalog is free and can be ordered at www.nicholsgardennursery.com; 1-800-422-3985, 1190 Old Salem Road N.E. Albany, Ore. 97321-4580.

The Joy Creek Nursery catalog offers an equally useful reference for ornamentals. Owner Maurice Horn is an expert on drought-tolerant plantings and gravel gardening, and packs his catalog with information specific to our climate. When to cut perennials back, which hydrangeas repeat bloom, and the attributes of dozens of clematis and when to prune each — Horn gives the essential details clearly and concisely. ($3, www.joycreek.com; 503-543-7474), 20300 N.W. Watson Road, Scappoose, Ore. 97056.

Check out the new full-color Heronswood Nursery catalog for a portrait gallery of all the newest, coolest plants that haven't yet made it into any of the books (360-297-4172; info@heronswood.com).

Beginning gardeners will find "Sunset Northwest Top 10 Garden Guide" (Sunset, $19.95) basic but not dull, and carefully keyed to our climate. Packed not only with foolproof plants and explanations of seasonal tasks, but also with all the glorious color photos Sunset is known for, this guide is simple but not condescending. It includes plenty of rewarding plants such as grasses, vines and natives, as well as sturdy roses and hardy geraniums.

All of us who love plants tend to buy one of this and that, often ending up with a hodgepodge of favorites rather than a well-designed garden. Roger Turner takes on plant addiction with "Design in the Plant Collector's Garden: From Chaos to Beauty" (Timber Press, $34.95). Turner, trained as an architect, gently encourages selectivity and good planning, with explanations of the various roles plants play in good design. Which plants have the most presence, are good blenders, carpeters, companion plantings? Emphasizing compatibility and successful relationships, Turner aims to let gardeners have both their ferns and euphorbia (and alpines, bulbs, viburnums, too) — maybe just not quite so many of each.

ROBIN BACHTLER CUSHMAN/"SUNSET NORTHWEST TOP 10 GARDEN GUIDE" A bread seed poppy, P. somniferum.
			Help celebrate our top trees Would you like to see your favorite noteworthy tree make it into a book? Seattle tree expert Arthur Lee Jacobson is working on the long-awaited second edition of his book, "Trees of Seattle," first published in 1990 by Sasquatch Books. It included examples and descriptions of more than 750 of Seattle's most exciting and unusual trees and where you can go to admire them. Jacobson would like to hear about especially large trees or fine specimens, rare trees that didn't make it into the first edition, or the history of specific unusual trees. He hopes his new book will include more than 1,000 kinds of trees. To contact Jacobson with outstanding tree nominations, call 206-328-8733 or e-mail him via his Web page at www.arthurleej.com.

My philosophy of ignoring disease and pests and growing only plants that stay healthy and trouble-free breaks down when it comes to slugs. There's no way to overlook these voracious predators. If you've had a fresh, plump hosta torn to tatters or the heart of a lily bulb eaten out overnight, you know the rage and sense of futility that comes with spotting a slimy trail leading away from scenes of devastation. We are lucky enough to garden in an admirably temperate climate, with cool, damp springs that encourage flowers to linger for weeks. Instead of a snake in this garden of Eden, we have hungry slugs to spoil our paradise. The problem: These pests flourish in the same conditions that make our springs so long and lovely.

You can mess about with saucers of beer or copper tape, but who wants to look at the sticky glob left by a drowned slug? And I can't even imagine the time involved in circling every plant with copper. There are plenty of poisonous slug baits, and even some advertised as safe, but if you read the cautions on the label, none convince me that it's a good idea to spread them where children walk barefoot, cats play or dogs snuffle about. Which is just about everywhere in many of our gardens.

As the weather warms up a bit, hungry slugs stir from dormancy. The eggs they laid last fall begin to hatch an onslaught of gooey babies that continues through June. Despite how tiny they are, there's nothing sluggish about a young slug's ravenous appetite, and when grown it'll eat 40 times its weight each day — from your dahlias, hostas, primroses and all the rest.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle free-lance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.