FARTHER AFIELD: A GARDNER'S EXCURSIONS by Allen Lacy. Hardcover, 6" x 9", 286 pages, 1986, First Edition, Farrar Straus Giroux, ISBN: 374-15355-8, list price $17.95, BRAND NEW!

In his first book, Home Ground (1984), Allen Lacy recalled the origins of his passion for gardening during his boyhood in Texas, and shared with readers the earthly pleasures he found in the plants growing in his suburban garden in New Jersey. Now, with Farther Afield, he offers additional forays into his own back yard, combined with accounts of his explorations of the larger world of horticulture. He takes us to a flower- seed farm in Costa Rica, to the British headquarters of a major international seed company, to the little-known but breathtakingly beautiful public parks of Barcelona, and to a vineyard in New Jersey that has survived in the midst of suburbia. He considers a number of other topics not usually treated in books on gardening, such as petty plant larceny and garden snobbery.

Farther Afield celebrates common plants like hostas and dahlias, and also puts in a word for uncommon ones, such as the gaura and the clove currant. Lacy's essays are touched with wit, not to mention common sense, but they also sound a deeper note, when he considers such matters as the rapidly escalating destruction of the world's equatorial forests or the threat to the genetic diversity of important food crops.

Those who are new to Allen Lacy can look forward to the unique voice readers of his first book discovered.