Does anyone else end up suffused with guilt when they read about how they should be growing their plants? I know I certainly do. Agapanthus: "plenty of water plus a weekly liquid feed coming up to flowering time". (Did I do this? No.) Hellebores: a twice-yearly mulch and a liquid feed after flowering. (Not a chance.) Strawberries: prepare the ground "a month in advance". (A day, if they're lucky.)
In this case, the advice comes from Helen Rock's Irish Gardening, a new book by The Sunday Tribune's highly readable gardening columnist. The 200-plus-page paperback volume, compiled from the writer's weekly columns, is divided into four sections: Design and Tactics, Plant Profiles, Great Irish Gardens and The Gardener's Calendar.
In the first part, Rock comments on ways of approaching various - mostly urban - garden situations such as the rectangular front garden (keep it simple) or the building-locked back yard (make it a jungle). She also discusses a mixed bag of subjects including chemical-free gardening, drawing your garden on paper and what to wear in the garden (bloomers! "i.e. knickers with legs to keep your thighs warm").
Her plant-profiles portray the expected hellebores, hardy geraniums, pelargoniums, clematis and other sterling plants, and her personal pets: violas, raspberries, figs, lemons and borage. This last is not only an excellent cure for hangovers, but is also "a great healer if taken regularly after a bang on the head".
Her Great Irish Gardens refreshingly include some which should be better known: Primrose Hill in Lucan and its collection of snowdrops; Ardgillan Castle near Balbriggan, with its rolling 200 acres of parkland and gardens; Ardcarraig in Co Galway, the creation of Herculean garden-maker and plantswoman, Lorna MacMahon. A tribute to Beech Park in Clonsilla celebrates this historic place under the reign of the Shackletons, who sold up in 1995. But an update on the garden would have been helpful: it is now owned by Neil and Mary McDermott and has been heroically manned by head gardener Seamus O'Brien for more than two years.
Finally, Rock's The Gardener's Calendar is an amusing and far-rambling treatise on minding your garden month-by-month. It has instilled in me a burning desire to amend my sloppy ways in my own patch.
But perhaps this isn't the best approach. Ruth Isabel Ross, gardening and cookery writer, vows at the very start of her new book: "There will be no New Year resolutions made for this garden today. Not a single one." Her A Year in an Irish Garden is filled with the hard-won wisdom of an octogenarian gardener.
The little hardback gem takes the form of a diary, with each month ending in a seasonal recipe for garden produce. Whimsical, highly observant line-drawings by architect Jeremy Williams complement the gentle, humorous text.
The Rosses's garden, Knockmore in Enniskerry, which is gardened by Ruth Isabel, her husband John and a number of other people (all introduced in the book's preamble) was once the property of Charlotte and Stella May. The two sisters came in 1898 and lived here for 50 years, making a classic Edwardian garden in the sheltered valley: a double herbaceous border, lily ponds, old roses, dry-wall terraces, wildflower glade and - of course - a very productive kitchen garden.
The elder of the sisters, Charlotte, was so attached to the garden that she said she would haunt the future guardians of her beloved plot if they didn't look after it. Thus far she has not put in an afterlife appearance at Knockmore, but her presence haunts Ross's book and sets the tone for this elegant, endearingly old-fashioned journal. In a genteel and ladylike fashion, the writer coasts from subject to subject, releasing wafts of history, horticultural expertise and quietly-humorous opinion on the way.
I like her musings on garden fashion: white seats - she has read in the chic magazine, Gardens Illustrated - are "vile except in the tropics . . . seats should be grey, green or slate blue. I immediately had a Pauline conversion and hated our dazzling white seats. How right this dogmatic young author was! He must be young to be so very sure."
Life in the Ross household is ruled by the garden, with the passage of seasons outdoors mirrored by activity indoors: poring over seed catalogues in January, chitting potatoes in February, corresponding with potential garden visitors in March. September means pots of jam steaming up the kitchen, while October brings the usual bombardment of unwieldy, grown-up courgettes: "We shall go insane if the marrows last another week."
There is something deeply comforting about this demurely rhythmic book. It bids you to stretch out - for a while - in front of the fire, your feet on the dog and peace in your heart, with the author's words floating softly across your mind: "This year we shall be flexible, so will not feel guilty about broken resolutions."
Helen Rock's Irish Gardening is published by Lilliput in paperback (£8.99). Website: http://indigo.ie/lilliput
A Year in an Irish Garden, by Ruth Isabel Ross, will be published by A. & A. Farmar (hardback) on October 31st (£9.99). Website: www.farmarbooks.com