Right from its jacket image, which cribs shamelessly from the famous album-sleeve cover shot for Bruce Springsteen"s virile classic Born in the U.S.A., A Man"s Garden wants to let you know without question that it"s aimed at REAL GUYS. It"s evident in nearly every line of copy profiling 14 men around the country who keep king-size, unconventional, or otherwise extraordinary gardens, from this opener: "When you come upon the four massive Corinthian columns ... you know this is a man"s garden" (why?) to ridiculous flourishes of rhetoric such as, "Ask a man why he gardens, why he feels compelled to push the earth around and wrestle crops from it." This overcompensation is all the funnier in light of double-entendres like the one directed (winkingly or not) at Manhattan-art-gallery-manager-turned-Connecticut-gardener Tim Mayhew, who, according to author Warren Schultz, "has given plenty of thought to men in the garden." Maybe this hypermasculinization of gardening was just a new angle to market a very pleasurable coffee-table book filled with lovely color photographs of 14 completely enchanting gardens--because that"s exactly what this book is, and frankly, it doesn"t matter whether they were cultivated by men, women, or hermaphrodites. There"s nothing inherently manly or womanly about Pearl Fryar"s fabulously surreal and almost erotically suggestive topiary in Bishopville, South Carolina, or the way the above-mentioned Mayhew drags no end of crumbling old statuary and curiosities into his lush verdure to create a kind of uniquely American ruins. Nor is there anything gender-specific about lawyer-cum-weekend-farmer Robert Kaufman"s robust vegetable garden, which runneth over with 200 colorful and semirare varieties, or the Willie Wonka junkyard garden Felder Rushing has built up around his Jackson, Mississippi, home, complete with walkways embedded with Mardi Gras beads, whole "trees" of cobalt-blue pop bottles, and giant jack-o"-lanterns cut out of old tires painted bright orange. There"s nothing particularly "American Joe" about the exquisite meditation garden Jeffrey Bale has nurtured on a tiny lot in a rundown part of Portland, Oregon, with its lush rhododendrons, potted bamboos, and Far East statuary, nor about David Alford"s Blue Lake Ranch in Durango, Colorado, surrounded by a homegrown prairie exploding with the infinite color of irises, peonies, petunias, echinacea, rudbeckia, and calendula. A Man"s Garden isn"t even a hardcore how-to so much as a handsome invitation to botanical reverie and inspiration (though utilitarians can suss out plenty of practical gardening wisdom along the way). So much for the "real-guy" angle. But then again, we all know books like this are meant to be bought by women as presents for their fathers, sons, or husbands--and that any man actually buying this book is probably buying it for his husband, too. --Timothy Murphy