A love of gardening makes Father’s Day gift-giving easy. Just include a gardening tool or book on the shopping list. A trip to a garden center and bookstore will offer endless ideas for any price range.

A free gift from a child is a handmade booklet of gift certificates for father to redeem when needed. Certificates may include picking up sticks after a storm, deadheading the flowers for a week, cutting the grass, sweeping the driveway and sidewalk and washing the digging tools and garden wagon.

New garden gloves are appreciated - a lightweight, washable pair for general gardening chores or leather gloves for pruning roses and other thorny shrubs.

Small garden tools to replace worn or rusted tools, such as a weed picker, hand trowel, rake, spade, sprayer or sprinkler, will make gardening easier. Accompany the gift with an offer to help in the garden.

Additions to the home garden library are gifts that continue to give year after year. Having a handy resource may quickly solve a perplexing gardening question.

Did you know there is a hollyhock weevil that eats the hollyhock leaves, or that many insects attack only one plant? Whitney Cranshaw’s “Garden Insects of North America” ($29.95) is the ultimate guide to backyard bugs.

Formatted for quick reference are 11 chapters on garden problems, including management principles of some garden pests, leaf chewers and stem and twig borers. Throughout the book, photographs of insects make identification easier. Habits, food preferences, damage and treatments are addressed. Among other topics discussed are galls, scale, stem-borers, bulb feeders and trunk and branch borers.

The first impression of the home is the lawn. Ortho’s “All About Lawns” ($11.95) is a handy guide featuring easy solutions to lawn-care problems, complete guide to repairing and rebuilding a lawn and steps to growing an environmentally friendly lawn. Content includes information on diseases, insects, brown patch and other common problems.

American Horticultural Society’s “Plants for Places” ($18) helps solve the dilemma of what to plant in specific locations. Subjects covered are clay and acidic soils, water gardens. www.courierpress.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at 3:29 am and is filed under Garden Decor, Architecture Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.