Gardening is a serious business. Just how serious and all-consuming it becomes is something that we never dream of when we make our first ham-fisted inroads into the soil. I remember pudgily stuffing zinnia seeds into the cold, damp Irish earth when I was eight or nine. The seeds never sprouted: they were too old, and of course, I had provided completely the wrong conditions. The package of gaudy zinnia had been given to me in school in Massachusetts where we had lived for a year (the same year The Lights All Went Out, incidentally) and the little seeds were intended for long hot New England summers, not cool overcast Irish ones.
I had much better luck with that trusty duo, radish and scallion, when faint tracks of green appeared where I had inscribed the soil with lines of their seed. It was my first taste of the God-like power which comes from successful germination - or any other horticultural feat for that matter.
It's an intoxicating taste that gardeners become addicted to sooner or later and want to sample more and more of. But in order to get that power, feel that thrill, experience that pleasure - call it what you will - we need to build up knowledge of what we're doing with our soil, our plants, our tools, our climate. We acquire it in dribs and drabs, through observation, conversation and experience - and through reading and collecting more and more books (most gardeners are librarians at heart).
And there comes a time in every serious gardener's life when they yearn for some crazily expensive bible of gardening that will finally (well, for a bit anyway) sate their desire for written knowledge. For instance, since its publication in 1992, I've hankered after The New RHS Dictionary of Gardening, the four-volume, 3,336-page gospel of gardening.
The closely-packed text carries precise, scientific descriptions of more than 50,000 species with details of their origins and cultivation, as well as biographies of 400 important horticultural figures. There are also informative essays, on complex matters such as genetic engineering, plant reproduction and stress in plants, and on everyday subjects like pruning, lawns and kitchen and coastal gardening.
The history of gardening in the UK and the US is discussed, and there are separate entries on many different countries that have contributed interesting flora or garden styles to the world of horticulture (although inexplicably there is no entry on New Zealand, or anywhere in South America: two regions of great interest to most plantspeople).
This is a serious dictionary with no photographs, a feature which is initially shocking to those of us reared on glossy plant portraiture - but there are pages of delicate linedrawings instead. There are no concessions to frippery and no purple passages of prose. It is researched and written by 250 leading botanists and garden experts who are given no leeway to grind axes, push fads or hone reputations. It is information in its purest form. And at £550 sterling for the set, it requires a small family legacy to place it onto the domestic bookshelf.
But a paperback version was launched at this year's Chelsea Flower Show, and I'm relieved to report that it comes at the far more accessible price of £149 sterling (a special birthday or Christmas gift?). I've had it at my side for the past month or so and have found it a good and wise friend, with the answers to the most diverse questions. For example, "When was topiary invented?" I wondered recently, after seeing yet another garden centre filled with balls and cones. The dictionary answered that at the end of the first century BC Pliny the Elder noted trees carved into scenes of hunting and ships, while the correspondence of his nephew, Pliny the Younger, tells of trees being clipped into the shapes of letters.
"And where does the word `Rhododendron' come from?" I queried idly. From the Greek rhodos for rose and dendron for tree, it answered. "And tell me a bit about weeds," I suggested, but the answer, stretching across six, double-columned, crammed pages is not to be truncated here in a few words. For this book, with its entries on everything from Abelia to Zinnia (and on to Zygostates - an orchid, in case you were curious) is the kind that provides lasting sustenance over a lifetime of gardening, not just a quick nibble.
As pithy old philosopher Francis Bacon said about 400 years ago: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." The New RHS Dictionary of Gardening is the latter kind. Mr Bacon is the same chap who coined the phrase: "Knowledge is power". And equipped with my new four-volume armoury, I'm feeling pretty mighty.
The New RHS Dictionary of Gardening in paperback (£149 in the UK) or hardback (£550 in the UK) is available from Macmillan Reference, 25 Eccleston Place, London SW1W 9NF, England. Tel: 0044-1718818027; fax: 0044-171-8818022; email: macref@macmillan.co.uk