Jane Powers selects her favourite gardening reads of the year
Either you like weeding or you don't. I do - although you'd hardly know it to look at my garden - and so does Christopher Lloyd, the delightfully opinionated gardener and writer. He and I also agree that to be effective you must get down on your knees, unlike the "professional gardeners" who weed from "a standing stooping position . . . Their standards of weeding are mediocre, but they remain men, standing proudly . . . whereas you and I become animals, even reptiles." These thoughts come from his 1970 volume, The Well-Tempered Garden. The piece, which mulls over the essentials and pleasures of weeding by hand, is included in The Royal Horticultural Society Treasury of Garden Writing, selected by Charles Elliot (Frances Lincoln, £12.99). Fifty-seven writers, from all ages, are represented. Pliny boasts shamelessly about his "advantageously situated" garden in the first century, Alexander Pope pokes fun at topiary in 1713 and Beth Chatto, Anna Pavord and Michael Pollan speak up from recent times.
A History of Kitchen Gardening, by Susan Campbell (Frances Lincoln, £14.99), is a revision of her Charleston Kedding: A History of Kitchen Gardening, published nine years ago. The book ambles knowledgeably through the many parts of a traditional kitchen garden: fruit and bee walls, vegetable beds, hotbeds, frameyard, compost yard, pinery, vinery, glasshouses and potting shed. She trips back and forth in time, stopping to tell us about ancient Roman vine cultivation and mediaeval herb gardens, as well as growing pineapples and mushrooms in the 18th century - and how, in 1930s Britain, a whiff of the lethal Cheshunt Compound was just the thing for curing a hangover. Her drawings of horticultural paraphernalia are delightfully detailed and engrossing.
Other people's gardens are always absorbing, especially when they are closed to the public. Dominique Browning's The New Garden Paradise: Great Private Gardens of the World (Norton, £30) is a lavish volume that pokes its nose into 35 gardens designed "for the rich and famous by the talented and creative". Brad Pitt's pond and Tim Curry's dragon tree are here, as well as gorgeous gardens designed by the likes of Piet Oudolf and Fernando Caruncho.
Garden voyeurs will also love Gardens in Perspective by the veteran British garden photographer Jerry Harpur (Mitchell Beazley, £25). This energetic book on contemporary garden design hops all over the world, gathering gardens into chapters on formality, minimalism, the new naturalism and so on. Harpur's succinct commentary reveals some of the ideas behind the creations, helping the reader to understand and enjoy the sights on offer.
Garden design doesn't get much more formal than in Italy, as can be seen from Ann Laras's Gardens of Italy (Frances Lincoln, £30). Those Renaissance Italians knew a thing or two about design: how to enclose space and when to open it into a vista; the power of light and shade; the cool afforded by green foliage and still water; and how to bring animation to a scene with fountains and splashes. They knew all about proportion and drama, too, with their avenues of attenuated cypresses leading to beautifully scaled monuments peopled by pompous statuary. All of these are to be found in Laras's book, as well as romantic creations such as Ninfa and plant paradises such as Lady Susana Walton's La Mortella.
No garden is complete without plants, of course, but how to choose? Nicola Ferguson's Right Plant Right Place (Cassell Illustrated, £26.99) might just help, with its selection of more than 1,400 plant varieties. A revision of the popular book first published 20 years ago, this is a compendium of lists of plants for every situation: heavy clay soil, dry shade, groundcover, hedging and many others. It includes new varieties and, reflecting current trends, lists of black plants and perennial plants with long flowering seasons. Some of the photographs are poorly reproduced, but the information is good and solid, which is the main thing.
More and more people are buying second houses abroad and, therefore, having to wrestle with part-time gardens in strange climates. For those who have chosen Spain, Clodagh and Dick Handscombe's Your Garden in Spain (Santana, €29.90, from www.santanabooks.com) is a godsend, containing just about everything you need to know about constructing and maintaining a little corner of the Iberian peninsula, whether it's a woodland site, a windy balcony or the space outside a mobile home. Climate and conditions, suitable species, planting schedules, Spanish tools and gardening vocabulary . . . You name it, they've covered it.
Yet even gardening on familiar ground can be hard enough, especially if you're a beginner and don't know where to turn. The Royal Horticultural Society's manuals are always trustworthy, offering clear and up-to-date advice. Gardening through the Year, by Ian Spence (Dorling Kindersley, £19.99), is a rather nice month-by-month guide to the garden: what to expect, what to do and how to do it. As with all of Dorling Kindersley's garden books, it has heaps of colour photographs.
Also new this year is the RHS Illustrated Dictionary of Gardening (Dorling Kindersley, £30), an 864-page volume dealing with every aspect of gardening: plants, techniques, terminology, design, botany, pests and diseases. Every serious gardener needs a reference book like this, whether it's for help on pruning bonsai roots or settling an argument about how many divisions there are in the daffodil family (13, incidentally).
Arguments - good-natured, of course - are a feature of the BBC's long-running radio show Gardeners' Question Time. Among its current panellists are Matthew Biggs, Bob Flowerdew, Anne Swithinbank and "our own" John Cushnie, from Co Down. These four horticultural oracles have put together Gardeners' Question Time Techniques & Tips for Gardeners (Kyle Cathie, £25), which gives their ideas on planning, hard landscaping, weed control, soil, plants, propagation, pruning and just about everything else you're likely to meet in the garden.
Finally, I mentioned the following books earlier in the year, but I'd like to commend them to you once more: Beth Chatto's Damp Garden (Cassell Illustrated, £25), Gardening with Tulips by Michael King (Frances Lincoln, £25), The Potato Book by Alan Romans (Frances Lincoln, £16.99) and Amy Stewart's wonderful treatise on the earthworm, The Earth Moved (Frances Lincoln, £14.99).