Suzy Bales -- gardener, lecturer and author of the new, gorgeously illustrated book "The Garden in Winter" (Rodale $34.95) -- has a bone to pick with T.S. Eliot.

January, she says, with its frozen or sodden ground, bare branches and icy winds, is the cruelest month in the garden -- not April.

Or at least it used to be, before Ms. Bales decided to take action.

"I would clean up my beds until there was nothing in them, and they looked so desolate," said Ms. Bales of Oyster Bay, N.Y. "Then, when I planted a small winter garden, all of a sudden I started seeing other places where I could put things, and it took off from there."

As the temperatures drop and Pittsburgh's gardens finish their long slow collapse after an unusually lengthy autumn, it's time to start thinking about the garden as a four-season pleasure, Ms. Bales says.

Author of 13 books on gardening and columnist on the subject for Family Circle, The New York Times and Better Homes and Gardens, Ms. Bales has gardened for more than 30 years on Long Island's North Shore.

Hers is a six-acre waterfront property that was the focus of her last work, "The Down To Earth Gardener," another eye-popper of a book, with photos that she mostly took herself. There's a lilac and peony walk, a woodland garden, a kitchen garden, and, everywhere, roses in profusion, climbing, rambling or properly upright in a formal arrangement.

"The Garden in Winter" picks up where her previous book left off, exploring a wintry space that is home to gold and silver conifers, trees with interesting bark and sculptural branches, variegated shrubs, unusual ground covers and grasses that fade from silver to blonde or caramel.

"If I ruled the world," she writes, "I'd decree that every homeowner take out a 3-foot-diameter plug of grass and plant a winter-flowering shrub. "

One of her favorites is yellow-blooming witch hazel Arnold's Promise, but she also gives props to its cousin, winter hazel Winterthur, with its showy flowers and fragrance. There's also a detailed inquiry into the sex life of a holly, another winter stalwart that comes in many different varieties but whose female bushes need a male nearby to produce fruit. Ms. Bales likes Satyr Hill, an American holly with lipstick-red berries. Not only is it both compact and fast-growing, it provides far better cuttings for holiday decorations than store-bought, chemically treated English holly.

Ms. Bales is a gifted garden writer and photographer who asks the reader to draw up close and really look at a plant, in evocative yet accessible prose -- "The clusters of viburnum berries act like catcher's mitts," she writes in one photo caption. "They easily hold the snow."

Come to think of it, she's absolutely right.

Asked if some space-starved gardeners might begrudge any ground given over to a winter conifer or shrub that might provide room for another summer-blooming rose, Ms. Bales laughed.

"I was that way, too, in the beginning. I planted flowers and vegetables, because I loved them and that's what all the books tell you to do."

But as time went on, and her tastes matured, she realized she was ready for something different -- a personal evolution that many impatiens-and-begonia-sated gardeners will recognize. In her book, she aptly quotes noted garden writer and editor Elvin McDonald: "Haven't gardeners started with annuals and ended up planting trees?"

In contrast to summer's gaudy show, the winter garden's palette can be subtle, she notes, "a chiaroscuro of white, black and gray -- a glorious pen and ink drawing."

This is also the time when the garden's "bones" -- its internal structure -- becomes most apparent. In the first chapter of "The Garden in Winter," Ms. Bales describes how fences, arbors, paths, raised beds, trees, shrubs -- all contribute to the overall form and pattern of a particular space.

The next five chapters range over the huge variety of trees, bark, conifers, evergreens, perennials, grasses and bulbs that can light up winter's bleak landscape, capped with a chapter on indoor holiday decorating with greenery from the back yard.

There are some surprising revelations: While Ms. Bales rakes her garden free of diseased leaves and other material in preparation for winter, she leaves most of her plants -- "except for peonies, which look terrible" -- alone until spring. Instead of mulching, she has laid down ground covers and planted bulbs underneath -- narcissus, hardy cyclamen, winter aconite.

It's just pure common sense, she says.

"I don't believe in leaving bare soil anyplace, because it's not what Mother Nature intended."

A self-taught garden designer, Ms. Bales began by taking classes at the New York Botanical Garden and worked in the greenhouses there, and went on to an apprenticeship that many professionals might envy. As an assistant to Alice Recknagel Ireys, a distinguished landscape architect and author, she learned her craft in the best possible way, from the ground up.

"I would drive her to places and when she needed someone to arrange the plants in the garden, I'd lug the material around and we'd argue back and forth where things would go," she said.

She was fortunate in other ways, too. When her husband, Carter Bales, became the principal investor of W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in 1987, "I went on the board there and started going to their research farm in California and in South America. I had about five years of private lessons, essentially, from the experts."

Today, no longer affiliated with Burpee, Ms. Bales travels around the country lecturing, writing columns and, mostly, trying to spread the message that gardening -- in summer or winter, in the back yard or in the front -- is not only about pleasing oneself, it's a neighborly act.

"We've been taught that it's unfriendly to put a hedge in front of your house, which is ridiculous," she said. "If someone is brave enough to put in a golden conifer or interesting winter shrubs with berries -- a simple step like that -- you will find people turning their heads and maybe start a movement on the block. Other people will do it too, after seeing how wonderful it is."

"Seeing the miracles that happen in your own yard, planting flowers that make people smile, can really calm you down. And if you can plant something that grabs your neighbors' attention in winter, all the better. Gardening is not work, it is a pleasure. It is not any different than for people who love to cook. You're creating something and giving back."