NONFICTION - June 16, 1991

ECCENTRIC GARDENS by Jane Owen, photographs by Eric Crichton (Villard Books: $24.95; 160 pp.). If the English are known to be eccentric, then English gardeners are prone to being more eccentric still. “Perhaps the solitary nature of the work,” posits author Jane Owen, “drives gardeners to mellow madness.” And madness is certainly a good word for a garden whose tree limbs are bursting with plastic parrots. Another boasts a modernistic Stonehenge, a third a torso (above) serenely floating in a pool. If there wasn’t already an England, it would probably be necessary to invent one.