The Gin and Tonic Gardener is designed for those of us who would rather enjoy our gardens than find ourselves enslaved by them. Weeds? Janice Wells exhorts us to have another gin and tonic: a stiff drink can actually help obscure, or at the very least, help you forget, those usurpers of the garden.
Janice Wells, a well-known writer and journalist, uses her own garden as a laboratory for the gardening column she writes for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Though filled with humour, The Gin and Tonic Gardener does provide practical tips, including hints for the northern gardener whose prime growing season is limited to a few months of summer. Wells also reveals inventive ways to transform a mundane concrete pathway into one that looks like paving stones, how to disguise an ugly fence by encouraging vines to cover it and how to scour rummage sales for inexpensive and attractive outdoor furniture. Plus, she offers a listing of easy-to-grow plants that have delighted her with many colourful rewards despite her willful neglect, poor growing conditions, and being occasionally doused with the remnants of a strong gin and tonic.
Spirited, funny and filled to the brim with amusing gardening anecdotes and wisdom, this book is designed especially for the reluctant gardener who is looking for a way out of the tyranny espoused in gardening magazines, home and garden television shows and those fussy neighbours who cast disgusted glances at the green spaces outside our homes.

JANICE WELLS wrote weekly columns for the Halifax Chronicle Herald. Her popular columns, The Gin and Tonic Gardener and Definitely Not Martha offer irreverent observations and advice on coping with modern domestic realities. Her most recent book, Frank Moores, is a political biography of the colourful former premier of Newfoundland who played a pivotal role in the scandal involving former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. She is the author of Definitely Not Martha Stewart, which is a compendium of observations and advice from gardening to the domestic and romantic realities of a "re-single" woman in her fifties. She lives in St. Johns, Newfoundland.

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