Reviewed by Charles Hardman

The Gardener's Guide to Growing Lilies is one of those must-have books if you are a lily buff. Written by two men who have the authority which can only come from lifetimes of experience with their subject, this book provides answers this reader didn't even know there were questions for.

If you're not exactly a lily buff you may want to try on this book for size anyway. You'll certainly pick up a lot of fascinating information.

I was delighted to learn, for instance, that there is an epiphytic lily, L. arboricola which "grows in the debris collected in the nooks of tree branches in the forests of parts of northern Burma" (currently Myanmar).

It was fun, too, to learn that some species, among them L. concolor and L. pumilum , have bulbs which are only slightly larger than marbles while the bulbs of other lily species can be as large as an artichoke.

Who could have imagined that lily bulbs would come in five different styles or that the roots, stems and leaves of lilies could be so diverse? There are even two different forms of seed germination in the genus Lilium: epigeal, in which the first leaf is a cotyledon or seed leaf and hypogeal, in which the first leaf is a true leaf, the cotyledon leaf stage having been dispensed with altogether.

Do words like "epigeal" and "hypogeal" annoy you when they're first encountered? Don't worry, you're in comforting hands with Jefferson-Brown and Howland. They explain these and other words and in fact, whole concepts which might be new to the reader, with enough pictures and line drawings to render every subject covered within the grasp of the average reader. (This could have been a difficult book; the genus Lilium is not a simple one.)

Growing lilies in the garden rates an entire chapter along with companion plants which enhance and blend well with lilies.

Lily cultivation has a chapter devoted to this aspect of the Lilium and the fascinating subject of propagation rates a chapter all its own.

Then come the lily species, hybrid lilies, breeding your own lilies, a species checklist, false lilies and an appendix.

This is a grand book with a lot of information, color pictures, drawings and just down-to-earth gardening enjoyment worked into its 160 pages. I recommend it -- and not just to fans of the lily, either. Anyone who loves bulbs can learn and apply much from this book.