Christmas Critics.

As serious gardens are not gardens but Eden, so are serious gardening books not books about gardening, but about being. Yes, a gardener needs to know how and when to trim the Perovskia atriplicifolia (to the base, in late winter); but one no more consults Jekyll or Bush-Brown merely to know this than one reads Psalms to find out exactly from which compass point one's help doth come.

Jekyll is, of course, the venerable Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who wrote more than a dozen serious gardening books in sumptuous Victorian prose (Robert Louis Stevenson, a friend of Jekyll's brother, borrowed the family surname for the title of his famous thriller), and who first imagined--among other innovations--herbaceous borders that weren't about blooms but color. And Bush-Brown is the team of the late Louise and James, whose America's Garden Book, first published in 1939, features writing so elegant and adult that one shudders to see it shouldered up in the bookstore with Gardening for Dummies and You Grow Girl.

Unlike such passing fads, the works of Jekyll and Bush-Brown are canonical, lodged permanently in the tradition. Here are three other books that may someday join them.

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (Norton, $23.95, 144 pp.) adds to the long list of books by former U.S. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, who turned 100 in July. The Wild Braid features Kunitz in a threefold capacity, as photo subject, poet, and horticultural ruminator. It includes twenty-five photographs, mostly of Kunitz at work gardening, and a dozen poems. But it's the garden reflections (edited primarily from conversations with his fellow poet Genine Lentine) that make this book a contender. For Kunitz cannot think of gardens without also thinking of eros, art, and mortality--and that's just for starters. The result is a sage's long, cool, kitchen-table tutorial on the world as a place infinitely engaging, infinitely beautiful, and necessarily evanescent. The book's title is drawn from his poem, "The Snakes of September," in which he touches two snakes "entwined in a brazen love knot" in his garden, and "the wild braid of creation trembles." Alien and enchanting as these snakes may be, they swell not with evil, but with the profound mystery that Kunitz feels all about him.

Kunitz's book forms the rare exception to the general rule that writers who cultivate their souls while cultivating their roses are to be avoided. The words "passion," "delight," or "love" in a gardening title should be treated like yellow crime-scene tape. This may be why Katherine White, by profession an editor (read: ruthless), produced the best garden writing ever published in the New Yorker: fourteen essays collected posthumously by her husband, writer E. B. White, and titled Onward and Upward in the Garden (Beacon Press, $16, 400 pp.).

Onward and Upward is that rare gardening book every page of which can be read with pleasure by folks who wouldn't know a tulip from a tulip tree. For one thing, the prose is at once taut and comfortable, like brilliant conversation. For another, White's eye lands in the right odd places: seed catalogue illustrations as a genre; the state of competitive flower arranging (a hilarious matter, in her hands); and the fact that blue lobelia carries the "unpleasant Latin adjective" Lobelia siphilitica because in the eighteenth century one Sir William Johnson paid American Indians for their secret cure for syphilis, and was handed this bog weed in return. Beyond such beguiling trivia, White touches on the principal gardening themes--folly, greed, beauty, death, and resurrection--with a serene acceptance that makes a gardener feel less guilty about the mess in the iris bed and a human being less miserable about the mess in the world.

Finally, a tome first published thirty years ago and now in its fifth edition, Michael A. Dirr's Manual of Woody Landscape Plants (Stipes, $52.80, 1,250 pp.), is a levitical entry in the canon sweepstakes, it's large-format pages treating more than sixteen hundred North American species of tree, shrub, and vine, from abelia x grandiflora to ziziphus jujuba. Covering taxonomy, morphology, aesthetics, cultivation, and maintenance, the book known to countless enthusiasts simply as "Dirr's" offers the usual lush encyclopedic virtues: stirring range, fresh words ("fascicle," "cuspidate," "tomentulose"), news you can use, and news you probably can't (the characteristics of forty-three known cultivars of European beech).

It also features what's rarest in books of this kind--the distinctive voice of a writer and redactor. Dirr, who teaches at Georgia State University, provides "Additional Notes" on each species, in which he offers memoir, reading recommendations, and a kind of street-corner critique of plant types that is rare in gardening treatises, where every cultivar, like every kindergarten graduate, routinely gets a star for something or other. For instance, Dirr describes the American plane tree as "truly at its 'best' when anthracnose [keeps] it devoid of leaves," while the original Camperdowni cultivar of Scotch Elm, in Dundee, turns out to be "rather pathetic and snaggle-toothed." About a University of Illinois program to remove weak-limbed honey locusts from its quad, he observes that "the threat of liability will do wonders for campus beautification." Such pithy wit helps make Dirr's manual not only an exhaustive resource, but great company on a winter evening, when snow lies on the woody landscape plants and the twenty-three cultivars of European beech seem a matter worth close consideration.

I cannot conclude without mentioning a volume that has no shot at canonization: Mordkhe Schaechter's Plant Names in Yiddish (YIVO Institute, $30). Here is a book which, had it been published in 1935, might have had 10 million readers, but which today will have but a handful in universities, where Yiddish--the juicy lingua franca of Europe's Jews from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth--is taught alongside Latin, Ugaritic, and other languages for which there are no more gardeners than there are in Atlantis. The book's 488 pages--104 of them in English--tender etymology, bibliography, history, and, just in case anyone ever needs them, the eleven Yiddish words for mushroom. Eden is about memory, loss, and hope, and if there is a more radical expression of those matters in the garden book genre, I don't know what it could be.

Ben Birnbaum is the editor of Boston College Magazine. He gardens and writes essays in Brookline, Massachusetts.