There are bigger names in gardening than hers, people perhaps more skilled at self-promotion on HGTV or Barnes & Noble or those specialty magazines sold at Home Depot.

But for my money, no one writes -- or photographs -- a better garden book than Suzy Bales.

Exhibit A: "Garden Bouquets and Beyond" (Rodale $35), her latest, in which the prolific Ms. Bales (she's authored 14 books) shares her deep knowledge about plants to make a very simple point about flower arranging:

You don't need a cutting garden. You don't need to go to a florist. You just need to go outside, all year long -- not just into your backyard, but in woods or on roadsides -- anywhere that's legal, in fact -- to make a bouquet.

The trick, she says, "is to stop categorizing everything as a flower, vine, tree, seed head or shrub and to look anew to see if it has an interesting shape or color."

For spring, that doesn't just mean daffodils -- it means winter hazel and hellebores stuck into florist foam, a key Bales staple. Buy it in big green bricks and cut it to fit your container, which can range from an ice bucket to a twig basket lined with plastic to a special cup on a candlestick. 'Sensation' purple-and-white lilacs with purple azaleas and orange tulips are tucked into an old green earthenware pot. Solomon's seal is mixed with viburnum and hyacinths.

"Flowers and foliage from one's own garden are different from those at the market," she writes. "They are not as perfect, it's true, but they are real and honest creatures, with no pretense."

Ms. Bales, a newspaper and magazine columnist, lecturer and master gardener, began writing extensively about gardening in the 1990s for Burpee Seed Co.'s American Gardening series under the nom de plume Suzanne Frutig Bales.

A former schoolteacher, she was that rare thing: a down-in-the-dirt plantswoman who also knew how to lift her prose from how-to to something more. In the Burpee series, and later in her own books, her style was warm, comforting, direct, her knowledge encyclopedic and the photographs her own, taken at her 6-acre property on Long Island.

In this book, however, most pictures are by Steven Randazzo, although every flower is from her own garden.

To be sure, Ms. Bales isn't your average housewife. Her husband, financier Carter Bales, owned Burpee for a while and she has help in maintaining her property. But she does plenty on her own.

I know this because, after I wrote about some of her other books for the Post-Gazette a few years ago ("The Down to Earth Gardener" and "The Garden in Winter"), Ms. Bales invited me to visit her home on Long Island Sound.

And so I did, one hot July day, after a bit of phone tag because frequently she was out in the garden working.

As she led me around, past the lilac and peony walk I'd admired in "The Down to Earth Gardener," past the formal perennial borders, the woodland garden, the kitchen garden, I was impressed with how intimately she knew every inch of ground, every plant's habit.

We ended up on her cool, capacious back porch, with its comfortable rattan and wicker chairs (site of one of the most stunning pictures in her book, of a mock topiary of roses wired to a large branch and stuck in a pot). A big believer in climbing plants -- vines, roses, anything -- she'd trained ivy up inside the stucco porch pillars and onto the ceiling above us, creating a green bower.

Ms. Bales is not obsessive compulsive -- she will yank a weed when she sees one, but her gardens have a relaxed, romantic, blowsy quality about them that is irresistible.

So, too, are the flower arrangements in her book. She'll pair flame-colored maple leaves and purple monkshood for a stunning fall bouquet, or tuck Hakonechloa (Japanese forest grass) and blue lupine in a wooden swan container.

She's practical, too, usefully debunking lots of myths: Don't hammer woody lilac stems, which crushes the plant cells and blocks water from moving up into the plant. Instead, slit them vertically at the bottom an inch or so. Recutting stems underwater isn't really as effective as simply cutting a stem on a diagonal, to create more surface for water to penetrate. And yes, those little packets that come with the flowers from the florist do prolong their life.

Mostly, though, use your imagination, and don't be concerned with flower trends when making a bouquet. With the exception, perhaps, of gladioli, "I admire common flowers," she says, "the more common the better. Such plants give uncommonly of themselves and deserve to be sainted, not shunned."

Of children, Dr. Spock told parents, "You know more than you think you do."

Of our gardens, Ms. Bales is similarly comforting: "You have more to pick than you think."

It's spring. Time to get out there and find out for yourself.