By PHYLLIS MERAS

Longtime Aquinnah seasonal resident Frances Tenenbaum was lauded last week in the Boston Globe’s Gardening Column as “one of the 20th-century’s outstanding American garden book editors.” Columnist Carol Stocker described the former Houghton Mifflin garden book editor as one “who helped elevate garden writing by American authors instead of following the book industry’s long trend of simply reprinting British garden books.”

The Globe’s praise of Mrs. Tenenbaum, a winter resident of Cambridge, was occasioned by her being honored by the Boston Public Library on the 10th anniversary of its annual Secret Gardens of Cambridge fund-raising tour. Mrs. Tenenbaum was one of the tour’s founders.

In 2004, Mrs. Tenenbaum was the recipient of the Garden Writers Association’s top honor when she was inducted into its Hall of Fame in recognition of her lifetime dedication to advancing gardening communications and promoting gardening to the public. In 2000 she won a gold medal from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Among works of note she has edited are Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Garden Plants, books by plant conservationist William Cullina, by the late Washington Post columnist Henry Mitchell and by Vermont artist Tasha Tudor. She also rediscovered Celia Thaxter’s An Island Garden and had it reprinted. Set on New Hampshire’s Isles of Shoals, and with illustrations by Childe Hassam, the original version was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1894.

Mrs. Tenenbaum is the author, herself, of Gardening with Wild Flowers, Taylor’s Dictionary for Gardeners, and Gardening at the Shore, a 2006 book that included the Vineyard gardens of Susan and Wally Epstein near Prospect Hill in Chilmark, Trudy Taylor’s garden overlooking Stonewall Pond in Chilmark, Sam and the late Gretchen Feldman’s garden above Chilmark Pond and a garden above Squibnocket Pond designed by Phyllis McMorrow. The book also contained photographs of Roger Sametz’s Aquinnah garden and Jean and Malcolm Campbell’s garden above Vineyard Haven harbor, designed by John T. Hoff.

Her most recent books are The Secret Gardens of Cambridge and Cambridge Voices, A Literary Celebration of Libraries and the Joy of Reading, designed by her daughter Jane Tenenbaum and published by the Friends of the Cambridge Library.

Mrs. Tenenbaum’s career in writing began at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She went on to jobs with the New York Herald Tribune and the Better Homes and Gardens Book Club. Her introduction to the Vineyard came through the late Jerome and Leah Wiesner. Mrs. Wiesner had been her roommate at the University of Michigan.