Weekend Gardening Update: Know your veg

THE formula of Pan Garden Plants, a superb series of books, has never changed - it does not need to. Its two contributors, Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix, have been working together since 1977, and their latest collaborative venture is Vegetables ( pounds 17.50). The photographs (by Phillips) are clear and informative and provide the best available guide to distinguishing one variety of, say, beetroot from another; the text (by Rix) contains many more cultivation notes than previous books in the series, and some extraordinary historical information. For example: Mendel used peas for his studies in genetics, though he had intended only to improve the quality of the ones that grew in his monastery garden at Brno.