Timber Press is proud to return to print a classic in garden literature by the late Beverley Nichols. With a new foreword by Ann Lovejoy and a new index updating all plant names, this edition of Merry Hall should delight a new generation of readers.<BR>If Nichols's horticultural undertaking is serious, his writing is hardly solemn. The narrative is high-spirited, riotously funny, and, at times, deliciously malicious. The local characters who alternately delight and frustrate him are as important as the plants: the ancient gardener Oldfield, who refuses to plant "boolbs," the scheming Miss Emily, and Gaskin, Nichols's omniscient and beatific factotum.<BR>But what lures readers to return to Merry Hall again and again are the rapturous discursions on plants and gardening.