Books make a great gift for the gardener in your life, so here’s a round-up of some of this year’s best.
It’s strange to think that the modern world owes so much to the creation in 1829 of a simple portable glazed box – a sort of glasshouse in miniature – that become known as the Wardian case.
Designed by a surgeon and amateur botanist by the name of Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, it allowed live plants to be safely transported very long distances from far-away lands, a technological innovation with complex and dramatically far-reaching consequences as beautifully told in The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World, by Luke Keogh, winner of this year's prestigious Garden Media Guild Garden Book of the Year award (Kew Publishing, £25).
Almost two centuries later, and with topics such as climate change, habitat loss and dwindling biodiversity rarely out of the headlines, we find ourselves grappling with the far-reaching environmental consequences of that newly born global economy and the challenges it presents. Examples include journalist and garden writer Sally Nex's book, RHS How to Garden the Low-Carbon Way: The Steps You Can take to Help Combat Climate Change (DK, £12.99), a timely publication offering many useful pointers for the growing band of gardeners determined to take a "deep green" approach to cultivating their plots.
The same is true of David Goulson's Gardening for Bumblebees (Square Peg/ Penguin, £16.99), a treasure trove of practical advice and information on how to create a haven for these precious pollinating insects.
New Wild Garden: Natural Style Planting and Practicalities, by Ian Hodgson (revised edition, Frances Lincoln), is another excellent guide packed full of tips on how to create a sustainable, naturalistic garden supportive of wildlife and nature.
Meanwhile, Beth Chatto's Green Tapestry Revisited: A Guide to a Sustainably Planted Garden, is an updated and revised text of a gardening classic that tackled the issue of sustainability long before it became mainstream, with contributions from David Ward and Asa Gregers-Warg who both work at Chatto's groundbreaking garden and nursery in Essex (Berry & Co, London, £30).
The twin issues of sustainability and seasonality are also at the heart of several excellent new books on nature-led flower arranging and floral design.
One is Cut & Dry: the Modern Guide to Dried Flowers from Growing to Styling (Hachette, £17.99), by garden writer, designer and botanical stylist Carolyn Dunster, which won Garden Media Guild Practical Book of the Year 2021. A handsome publication packed full of hands-on tips, it highlights the special beauty of dried flowers and shows how to use them in ways that feel fresh and contemporary.
She is well known to her followers on Instagram as @lucytheflowerhunter and British garden designer and floral artist Lucy Hunter's book. The Flower Hunter: Seasonal Flowers Inspired by Nature and Gathered from the Garden (Ryland Peters and Small £20.99) is a sumptuously illustrated step-by-step guide to creating dreamily beautiful, seasonal floral arrangements from the garden.
Grow & Gather: A Gardener's Guide to a Year of Cut Flowers by Grace Alexander (Quadrille, £20) takes a similar approach. Charmingly charting the sowing, growing and harvesting of cut flowers in the author's rural Welsh garden over the course of a year, it's packed full of dirt-under-the-fingernails gardening tips and generously illustrated with atmospheric photography.
A familiar name to many, British gardener, botanist and cut-flower expert Sarah Raven's new book, A Year Full of Flowers: Gardening for all Seasons (Bloomsbury, £25), is a hugely informative, lushly illustrated seasonal guide to filling your garden with flowers throughout the year. Raven shares her considerable knowledge and expertise with each month-themed chapter including a hands-on, practical guide to a range of essential gardening skills while the excellent plant profiles of different key species – winter-flowering irises, violas, narcissus, tulips, roses, salvias, sweet pea, dahlias, chrysanthemums, pelargoniums, amaryllis – includes a series of hugely useful shortlists with recommendations for the most garden-worthy varieties. A modern classic, this is a book to return to again and again.
Roses and peonies are two garden flowers that have never gone out of fashion. In The Kew Gardener's Guide to Growing Roses (Frances Lincoln with Kew Publishing £12.99), a must-have for rose lovers, British rosarian Tony Hall shortlists 78 outstanding varieties and shares his expert advice on how to use them to the very best effect in a wide variety of settings and growing conditions.
In her book Peonies (White Hopton Publications, £25), the British gardener and nurserywoman Claire Austin (daughter of the late, great rosarian David Austin) shares a lifetime's knowledge of this famously beautiful genus with her expert profiles of more than 350 different peonies. From advice on matters such as propagation, planting, and cultivation to selecting the very best types for scent, cutting, container growing and using in combination with other plants, this is the definitive monograph of a flower that has captivated generations of gardeners.
The Jungle Garden, by Philip Oostenbrink (Filbert Press £25), shines a light on the exotic beauty of hardy, tropical-style foliage plants and the ways that they can be used to create a garden rich in atmosphere and year-round interest. Known for his creative, innovative plot-to-plate approach to food growing, gardener cook and author Mark Diacono's latest book, Herb: A Cook's Companion (Quadrille, £26), is an elegantly written, handsomely illustrated, inspiring guide to growing and cooking with herbs.
A mouthwatering read, Something in the Basket: Vegetable Recipes from the Garden at Lavistown by Kilkenny gardener and cook Olivia Goodwillie, is inspired by the seasonal produce from her organically managed kitchen garden (gardenfable.com, €19.99 including p&p).
In Head Gardeners, the revised and expanded edition (Pimpernel Press £20), Ambra Edwards shines a bright light on the challenges of a profession that's too often underrated and misunderstood.
The art, craft and science of garden making is also illuminated by the writings of a handful of great garden designers such as the late John Brookes, whose revolutionary book on the subject, How to Design a Garden, was republished this year in an expanded and updated form edited by Gwendolyn van Paasschen (Pimpernel Press).
The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking about Gardens, Nature and Ourselves (Filbert Press, £40) is the work of another brilliant garden maker, the American garden designer James Golden, whose rural garden in New Jersey has been hailed by many as one of the best in the world. A deeply thoughtful, lyrical meditation on the challenges of creating a garden in harmony with the natural world and the lessons that it teaches us, Golden's love for the land and the joy that it brings him sings out from its pages.
