The top 10 gardening books to gift this Christmas 2024
Helen Griffin has scoured the shelves for this year’s best new books so that you don’t have to
There has been a bumper crop of new gardening books in 2024, with a range of titles to satisfy both beginner and the more experienced gardeners.
From creating colourful containers year-round and the nitty gritty of
10 of the best gardening books
Explore these 10 hand-selected gardening books for the festive season, complete with brief overviews and where to buy them. Plus, we finish with a quick guide to the best RHS books to make your Christmas gift shopping even easier.
1) A Year Full of Pots: Container Flowers for All Seasons
By Sarah Raven
Published by Bloomsbury, 2024, 416pp, RRP £27
‘More is more’ is the first rule for containers, and three decades’ experience with 300-plus pots makes Sarah Raven a maestro. A Year Full of Pots: Container Flowers for All Seasons takes the reader on a journey to acquire, group and scheme with containers to create a glorious symphony of colour.
Month-by-month, advice illustrated by Jonathan Buckley’s photographs reveal how to build the orchestra: flower types from low-maintenance to high drama fulfil the roles of ‘Fillers, Thrillers, Pillars and Spillers’. Favourites such as dahlias, tulips, narcissus, hyacinths, pelargoniums, salvias, violas and cosmos vie for solo performances. The queen of containers exceeds all expectations in this ultimate container bible.
2) Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World
By Phaidon editors, introduced by Tony Kirkham
Published by Phaidon, 2024, 352pp, RRP £44.95
What is a tree? In this new coffee-table book, Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World, you’ll find 300 photographic responses to that question from the iconic to the ingenious, contributed by more than a dozen tree experts. Each entry features a prized tree from the visual arts, with a short erudite description that explodes preconceptions. From Darwin to Dali, Renoir to Redouté, this curated ‘exhibition within a book’ depicts 3,500 years of global appreciation for the very organisms that let us draw breath. Totally immersive and with hours of interest, this book’s a keeper.
3) A Flower Garden for Pollinators
By Rachel de Thame
Published by Quercus, 2024, 208pp, RRP £25
The shocking decline in pollinating bee and butterfly species poses a threat to some of our crops’ survival. Rachel de Thame’s timely book, A Flower Garden for Pollinators, places these small but vital invertebrates at the top of our gardening agenda. This is her call for action to plant flowers that will provide abundant nectar and pollen-rich forage as well as larval food.
With exquisite insect illustrations by her daughter and photos by Jonathan Buckley, Rachel urges us to let go of neatness, abandon chemicals and rethink goals and ‘ownership’. Instead, we should equip our gardens with a diversity of flowers to feed pollinator friends. This book champions her preferred flowers and the insects they’ll nourish, season by season.
4) The Garden Against Time: In Search Of A Common Paradise
By Olivia Laing
Published by Picador, 2024, 336pp, RRP £20
Olivia Laing’s soulful memoir, The Garden Against Time: In Search Of A Common Paradise, about restoring a notable Suffolk garden during the pandemic has universally delighted readers. Like the enduring children’s book The Secret Garden, her story seduces and salves as she tames the wildness and scours the archives bringing this abandoned paradise back to life. Intertwined throughout is her exploration of how others have loved and lost their paradise gardens which makes this book so educational.
5) The Gardens of Ulf Nordfjell
By Ulf Nordfjell
Published by Merrell, 2024, 240pp, RRP £40
Fans of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show will know the name Ulf Nordfjell and the success of this three-time RHS Gold-medal-winning Swedish designer. His new book, The Gardens of Ulf Nordfjell, immerses us in 10 stunning public and private landscapes shaped from 2010 to 2020, from the Arctic Circle to the French Riviera. Detailed plans document his intentions, while captioned photos over many seasons explain his evolving planting and well-honed talent for merging nature with architecture. He shares his thoughts on the effects of climate change and the sustainable approach he has intentionally adopted.
6) Your Outdoor Room: How to Design a Garden You Can Live In
By Manoj Malde
Published by Frances Lincoln, 2024, 208pp, RRP £20
RHS Chelsea Flower Show designer Manoj Malde shows you how to design and plant a garden haven in which to relax, grow, entertain and thrive. He tackles a wide range of plots in size and potential with real-life examples. Then his no-nonsense design course unpacks every stage of the process from first questions and principles to final flourishes.
Your Outdoor Room: How to Design a Garden You Can Live In answers the near-universal challenge: ‘How can I make my garden feel bigger?' and shows ways to develop personal style, introduce zones, use pathways and screens, add water features, as well as choose colours and materials. Employing sustainable practice and simple language Manoj leads those new on their design journey to understand this complex practice and make fundamental shifts in their minds and on the ground.
7) Hortobiography
By Carol Klein
Published by Witness Books, 2024, 336pp, RRP £22
Autumn is a good time to the settle down with this gritty, tell-all memoir, Hortobiography, from one of the UK’s first ladies of gardening. Here Carol Klein chronicles her 1950s urban childhood in Manchester through an art-teaching career, motherhood, nursery ownership in Devon, RHS Gold medals at RHS Chelsea Flower Show and then blossoming onto our tv screens as Britain’s most persuasive plantswoman. With photos and flashbacks to many of these gardening worlds you see how hard she fought to break the ‘grass ceiling’ and hear tales of plants, partners and positivity on the garden path to her survival today.
8) Compost: Transform Waste Into New Life
By Charles Dowding
Published by DK, 2024, 144pp, RRP £14.99
Composting, the steamy science of turning garden and household waste into valuable mulch, is the heart of the healthy garden, and Charles Dowding is head of the heap. In Compost: Transform Waste Into New Life, he shares more than 40 years worth of compost-making in granular detail: from simple set-up to larger scales; how to make it; what to add; how to ripen it and when to apply. Busting myths and resolving stinky and soggy piles, this handsome pocket-guide has all the facts to assure success.
9) Outside In: A Year of Growing and Displaying
By Sean A. Pritchard
Published by Mitchell Beazley, 2024, 224pp, RRP £30
Cutting-gardener Sean Pritchard is a master-of-all-trades, in fact a ‘unicorn’ in the world of garden book publishing, having grown, written and photographed this entire book. His debut title, Outside In: A Year of Growing and Displaying, is a celebration of the cottage-garden cutting-patch. In it he grows an entire year of cut flowers to have enough material to dress the rooms of his Somerset cottage every day of the year. He writes: “Mountains of flowers tumble out of vases to bring an intensity of life and spirit.” He mixes cultivated with wild flowers for every season, sharing sowing, growing and styling advice, from the cheery joy of early spring daffs to the velvety richness of late summer dahlias.
10) Visionary: Gardens and Landscape for Our Future
By Claire Takacs with Giacomo Guzzon
Published by Hardie Grant, 2024, 320pp, RRP £36
For lovers of arid landscapes and dry planting, Claire Takacs’ Visionary: Gardens and Landscape for Our Future is an album of nearly 80 climate-challenged gardens is hard to put down. This 320-page trek across Europe, America and Australasia collects the most photogenic gardens from dozens of designers tackling harsh climatic conditions. It includes designs by James Basson, Tom Stuart-Smith, Piet Oudolf, James Hitchmough, as well as Olivier and Clara Filippi.
Giacomo Guzzon notes the challenges of rainfall, temperature and plant survival while explaining the experiments and solutions these pioneers have found. From Tasmania to Texas and from RHS Bridgewater to Sydney’s Barangaroo, these private gardens and public landscapes offer sustainable solutions and visions of the future in a climate-changing world
Happy Christmas, happy reading and happy gardening.
