Here is a fresh crop of Charles Elliott's pungent, funny, and thoroughly unpredictable essays from that heartland of horticultural fanaticism, Great Britain. Ranging from deeply felt reflections on stinging nettles and giant hogweed to an examination of the English gardener's obsession with privacy, these essays demonstrate once again why Elliott's columns have so delighted readers of Horticulture magazine - along with many others without a trowel to their name. Like his first collection, The Transplanted Gardener - called "delectable" by Allen Lacy in The New York Times - The Gap in the Hedge explores British gardening past and present, as well as some of the odder byways into which a love of plants and gardens has led us. There are accounts of such great plant-hunters as Reginald Farrer and Joseph Rock, master gardeners like Ellen Willmott and Canon Ellacombe, and the undeservedly obscure scientist Jagadis Chunder Bose, whose improbable specialty was research into the emotions of plants. Here too are essays on the difference between gardening and groundskeeping, topiary, mistletoe, orchids, waterlilies, the history of hoses, and much more. Altogether, The Gap in the Hedge is a rich and vastly amusing assembly destined to please anyone interested in Britain, in gardening, or simply in human nature at its least commonplace. (6 1/4 X 9 1/4, 228 pages)