LADYBUG SAYS... NEW GARDEN BOOKS OFTEN COLORFUL AND INFORMATIVE

New garden books are more colorful, more informative, more usable and more alluring. It seems every year the newest ones on the market are so appealing that even the most amateur gardener cannot resist buying them.

A gardening friend says January and February are her two favorite months. Isn't this an unusual statement for a gardener to make? The most dreary months of the year, when there is no outside gardening and very little to do to those inside because most of them are in a dormant stage.

These were her favorite months, she said, because she had time to read and plan, because there were always new gardening supplies, products, and plants and when it was busy time in the garden she never had the time to really read. "There are so many wonderful books, and I love having the time to read them."

So today, we're going to review, briefly, four of the many beautiful and informative books that recently have come on the market. These are available locally in book stores and in places where garden products are sold. They also may be ordered direct.

Gardening Basics is a thick, profusely illustrated book in the Ortho series. It is written especially for beginning gardeners, but also will satisfy the most experienced old garden pro with its vast array of material.

There are 17 chapters crammed with gardening information, and this is topped off with an Encyclopedia of Plants that provides a vast array of information.

The book takes the gardener step-by-step through the garden preparation process from understanding plants and the garden environment through soil care, planting, watering, feeding, insect control, harvesting and many other categories and hints to help. Vegetables, flowers, ground covers, lawn shrubs and trees are among the topics. With this book, even the rankest amateur can garden.

Another book in the extensive Ortho series of more than 100 is Hummingbirds & Butterflies. The Ortho Library, it should be mentioned, includes not only books on gardening, but others on how to build various things, remodeling, cooking, wood working and household maintenance.

How to Attract Hummingbirds & Butterflies gives the reader tips and techniques for attracting these two beautiful specimens, gives facts on their behavior, instructions for designing a hummingbird and butterfly garden and gives descriptions of the many species.

With a broad trend throughout the country to find ways to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, especially the latter, to the garden, this book will be a valuable tool in any garden library. It, too, is heavily illustrated with pictures of these two colorful creatures. Through these and by words, the reader learns the colors and foods they seek out. It tells what to plant in the garden to bring them in and describes hummingbird feeders favorable to enthusiasts.

Like salads? The Salad Lovers Garden, by Sam Bittman, published by Doubleday, will give you a vicarious trip to the salad bowl. Its cover describes the book this way: "The gardener's guide to a season of gorgeous greens, healthy herbs and sensational salad vegetables complete with ravishing recipes for your harvest." Does that whet your appetite?

This book contains not only the traditional salad fixings, but many exotic plants that seldom find their way to the salad bowl. Among these are Endive, Escarole, Arugula, Celtuce, Mache and the list goes on. The book tells how to grow the vegetable produce that goes into salads, how to care for them, how to harvest, varieties and then sums each up with an at-a-glance wrap-up. Color photographs and line drawings show each plant.

We've mentioned the color photographs in the foregoing books, but that's not the end of it. How about a book entitled The Complete Guide to Using Color in Your Garden? This book by David Squire, published by Rodale Press, is a painter's palette of colors to be used in the garden. It tells how to select plants to different colors and combine them into a beautiful landscape. More than 500 plants are covered -- flowers, groundcovers, vines, trees and shrubs -- each with a photograph and complete growing instructions.

Plants are grouped in various ranges of color, including reds, pinks, blues, purples, golds and yellows, greens and variegated, and whites, silver and grays. It's a brilliant 320-page tightly written compendium of plants and how to use them in startling patterns.

These books will hook the gardener, amateur or expert.