This handsome volume offers garden tours of 28 private gardens of plant collectors across North America, from Harold Epstein's home in Westchester, New York, where the passionate horticulturist grew a 150-foot dawn redwood (believed extinct until it was discovered in a remote corner of western China in 1941) to sculptor Marcia Donahue's garden-gallery in Berkeley, California.

Ken Druse's profiles of these gardening extremists are arranged by classifying the collectors as plant hunters, horiticultural missionaries, specialists, or aesthetes.

Druse's own garden -- a 20-foot-by-50-foot plot in Brooklyn, New York -- is, by his own description, "a collector's garden. It is contained by buildings, concrete, and asphalt -- the perfect place for well-behaved exotic plants and indigenous ones, as well."

Like most garden tours, the ones in this book will inspire gardeners increase their own plantings and expand their own collections. Druse includes lists of plant sources, societies and organizations in the back of the book along with a short "Collector's Guide" of advice on propogation, taxonomy and plant sourcing.