Gardeners are spoiled for choice when it comes to buying books to pore over, learn from and just admire for their beauty
THERE ARE SOME books that demand a warm fire on a cold evening. An evening with nothing special to do in the hours ahead, except, perhaps, to put another log on the grate, and refill a glass, or pour another cup. The Morville Hoursis one such volume, where Katherine Swift weaves the story of her Shropshire garden with the history of the house, its inhabitants and the surrounding area. Her beautiful, unashamedly sumptuous prose - which digresses delightfully wherever she pleases - is deeply and comfortably satisfying.
There is more fine garden writing in Hortus Revisited: A Twenty-first Birthday Anthology, edited by David Wheeler . The book includes more than 40 pieces from gardening greats, including Penelope Hobhouse, Richard Mabey and Noel Kingsbury. John Akeroyd considers the garden at Ilnacullin in west Cork, while Peter Dale includes a tribute to Annes Grove in the east of the same county.
One of Ireland's most famous gardening names is celebrated in the book William Robinson: The Wild Gardenerby Richard Bisgrove . Fans of the irascible, ambitious, opinionated father of naturalistic gardening will be well pleased with this account of his life and times, which portrays admirably - among other things - the heated battle then raging between Robinson and those who promoted rigid Victorian formality. Carpet bedding, geometric parterres and busy little rockeries sent him into paroxysms of tetchiness, and produced some of his more cantankerous quotes. On summer bedding, for instance: "Stupidity itself could hardly delight in anything uglier than the daubs of colour that, every summer, flare in the neighbourhood of most country houses . . ."
The Victorian era, of course, was also the heyday of the kitchen garden, and saw the breeding of thousands of varieties of produce. Some of these, as well as earlier and later cultivars, are covered in the pages of Christopher Stocks's Forgotten Fruits: A Guide to Britain's Traditional Fruit and Vegetables. A good number of these venerable edibles, such as the Ailsa Craig onion (1887) and the French Breakfast radish (c 1865) are still rightly popular today. Others, such as the disease-prone potato of the famine, the Lumper, are rarely grown or eaten, but are of enormous historical interest. Not a book for the beginner gardener, but one that would certainly be welcomed by those who know their onions, as it were.
For beginner and experienced vegetable growers alike, Joy Larkcom's several books are the business. A revised edition of her Creative Vegetable Gardeningappeared this year. As with all her books, it is a treasure, the product of years of research and practical experience. An enthusiastic newcomer to vegetables is Carol Klein. Her BBC series Grow Your Own Veghas now spawned a Grow Your Own Veg Journal, a month-by-month guide, complete with recipes, and blank pages to record your notes, triumphs, and brutal lessons.
Also at the practical end of the bookshelf, the Royal Horticultural Society has produced a New Encyclopedia of Gardening Techniques. As with almost all their publications, it is first class. If you want to know how to garden, you'll find it in here.
If you're someone who is heading down the organic road, then Bob Flowerdew, one of the first of the chemical-free gardeners, offers his Organic Garden Basics. It's a slim volume, but a valuable condensation of a lot of environmentally friendly know-how.
All green gardeners cherish their wildlife, especially birds - those hardworking devourers of aphids, caterpillars and snails. Ireland's Garden Birds: How To Identify, Attract and Garden for Birdsby Oran O'Sullivan and Jim Wilson is a helpful guide which does as it says in the title.
Fifty-six of our garden's most frequent feathered visitors are described. A nice feature is that each of the species' rankings in Ireland is given, as well as the percentage of gardens in which it has appeared - a useful aid for identification.
Plantspeople can never have enough books on single genera or plant groups, which makes the boxed RHS Wisley Handbook collection such a gem. Purchased individually the 12 96-page paperbacks cost £7.99 each, so the saving is enormous, even if all the books don't suit every reader. Subjects include euphorbias, hostas, hardy geraniums, ferns, primroses and auriculas, cottage garden flowers, garden succulents, grapes, bonsai, irises, hellebores, and lilies. The authors are experts in their fields; for example, Diana Grenfell writes on hostas, Martin Rickard on ferns, and Graham Rice on hellebores.
Another planty book, but with a different emphasis, is The Complete Planting Design Courseby Hilary Thomas and Steven Wooster. This guide looks at the aesthetic and practical qualities of plants, and the best way to use them in a garden. This is the kind of book that, if given to beginner designers, would promote harmony between hard landscape and planted material - something sadly lacking in so many of today's schemes.
An Irish Florilegium: Wild and Garden Plants of Ireland, with beautifully sensitive drawings by botanical artist Wendy Walsh and with text by Charles Nelson, was originally published in 1983. Copies of that first edition are almost impossible to find now (and cost a fortune), so this year's re-issue, in a slightly smaller format, is very welcome.
And finally, another book that I've enjoyed this year, because of its crazy, meticulous creativity is The Vertical Gardenby Patrick Blanc. There are rather too many pictures of the author-designer-scientist climbing waterfalls and grasping banyan roots while looking winsomely into the lens: but never mind that. This is one egotist I'm happy to pardon, simply because of the breathtaking beauty of his work. His vocation is clothing the exterior of urban buildings with vegetation, using a system of felt attached to plastic boards, and irrigated from above. His plants are merged together in carefully selected communities. The result is startlingly moving and fantastical, as if the jungle is reclaiming the city.
Fantasy, of course, is the thing that gets many gardeners through the dark winter days, and a book or two is just the tool to crank up the dream machine.