Gardening - Books of the Year

In these dark evenings, edging up to the shortest day, gardeners switch over to gardening in the mind and on the page. Some pretty good assists have appeared this year.

In Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City (Conran Octopus, £28), garden designer Dan Pearson takes a similarly intimate approach to showing us how he gardens at home to that adopted by Monty Don in The Ivington Diaries, which was closely modelled on Nigel Slater's brilliant Kitchen Diaries ... It's a pleasing genre, especially when so handsomely published.

Pearson and his partner moved into a house with a long, overgrown back garden in Peckham in 1997 and, after a year of clearance and observation, began to make it his own, experimenting continuously since. An overgrown existing willow tree lasted two years before being removed; then a little grove of a special birch (Betula albosinensis var. septentrionalis) lasted only a year, before being moved on and replaced by a group of coyote willows (Salix exigua), which died after a few years, to be replaced by three dark-leaved Indian bean trees (Catalpa x erubescens Purpurea), which were removed after four years when they became infected with wilt, to be replaced ultimately with a semi-mature hornbeam (Carpinus) salvaged from a Chelsea Flower Show garden...

So this is not your average idle home gardener content with nurturing what he has. Pearson likes to strip the garden beds right back to the ground in February in order to enjoy "the shock of the new" each year as spring arrives, a rigour that will appal anybody less seriously committed. Yet this is also a book full of unexpected ideas and practical advice, with the entries helpfully presented as separate essays on particular subjects (hellebores and snowdrops, mulch and weeding). Moreover, it is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Howard Sooley, Derek Jarman's collaborator. This year's best buy for city gardeners.

Anybody with any interest in bulbs would appreciate Crocuses: A Complete Guide to the Genus, the year's best monograph, by Janis Ruksans (Timber Press, £30), a Latvian expert who both observes the plants in the wild and grows and propagates them as a nurseryman and who writes about his experiences in an unaffected first person, anecdotal style which almost disguises his tremendous erudition. The ravishing photographs of crocuses growing to perfection will help keep those of us who more often see them rain-battered and frost-damaged
hoping for the best for another year.

The Bad Tempered Gardener by Anne Wareham with photographs by Charles Hawes (Frances Lincoln, £16.99) is a kind of grumpy, argumentative antidote to all other gardening books. Wareham, who created the Veddw House Garden in Monmouthshire, denounces the dishonest "upbeat jolliness" prevailing among garden writers, who pontificate about places they have never visited and praise everything regardless.

She's a lot more discriminating, or you might say captious. Many roses and rose gardens are ugly, she reckons, while the growing of daffodils "leads to a lot of remarkably unpleasant sights". Scent is "a snare and delusion in the garden". Gardening itself, she says in one outburst, is "talked-up housework that you have to do outside". And so forth. Yet interspersing these tirades are little commendations of her favourite plants - alchemilla mollis, erigeron karvinskianus "Profusion", persicaria campanulata - all the more convincing for being in such a scoffing context.

There have been many books about allotment gardening lately, some of them practical guides, others humorous. But Cleve West's Our Plot (Frances Lincoln, £20) is the most personable and best-designed yet. The 2011 Best in Show winner at Chelsea shows a different side to his gardening - funny and informal - mixing stories, advice, recipes and realistic acknowledgement of problems, including vandalism and theft.

The most desirable picture books this year include The Best Gardens in Italy: A Traveller's Guide by Kirsty McLeod, photographs by Primrose Bell (Frances Lincoln, £30), which covers the whole country and is obviously the product of years of work. All the famous showpieces are informatively described - Bomarzo, Villa I Tatti, the Vatican, Ninfa - but there are also plenty of less well-known gardens to discover, such as La Porrona, near Montisi in Tuscany, a rural dream, full of roses and lavender, mulberry and pomegranate trees and casually grouped cypresses, melting into the landscape.

Equally prompting reverie, though pulling you back into the past instead of over the Alps, is Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden: From the Archives of Country Life by Judith B Tankard (Aurum, £30): wonderful pictures, even in black and white (although there are new colour pictures too, where the gardens survive). Some of these scenes - like the fairytale garden of Oliver Hill's Valewood Farm in Surrey - you just want to step into. Thanks to this book, in a way you can.