Devotees will tell you that eating these wonderful beasts is not only healthy but also very sexy. They insist there has to be some truth to the many myths that expound their aphrodisiac qualities and more than one reason why so many of them have been immortalized in numerous stories, poems and songs. Our primordial ancestors must have instinctively known that shellfish were not only good for the soul but also life sustaining. Having crawled from the ocean, one theory has it, our forebears remained seaside, feeding their brains on a diet of marine creatures for the roughly 10,000 years that it took them to learn to stand erect and head downtown.

Marjorie Harris is one of CanadaÕs best-known garden writers. Since her first garden book, The Canadian Gardener, was published in 1990, she has written 15 garden books, including the highly regarded Botanica North America.After Marjorie moved from full-time journalism to full-time garden writing, she co-founded Toronto Life Gardens in 1996. This magazine was then folded into Gardening Life, with Harris as editor-in-chief, and continued to publish under that name until 2008. Since her magazine years, Marjorie has written a regular garden column for and made garden videos with The Globe and Mail newspaper. Her garden design business, Marjorie Harris Gardens (marjorieharris.com), features a blog and an extensive archive of articles on a wide variety of gardening topics. Marjorie lives in her own garden, which she started in 1967, with her husband, writer Jack Batten.

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Peter Taylor has written nine books, including Three Bricks Shy of a Load: A Collection of Stories about Ordinary People Doing Really Dumb Stuff and the novel, Watcha Gonna Do Boy . . . Watcha Gonna Be?, which was produced as a CBC television movie and a radio drama.

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