The best gardening books to buy this Christmas

It’s rare that there’s a book you can be sure any gardener would be delighted to be given for Christmas — but this year there’s a clear winner. Nicola Ferguson was neither a horticulturalist nor a writer by profession, being an academic psychologist but when she and her husband moved to a house in Edinburgh and she couldn’t find a book on which plants would grow best in which conditions, she wrote one herself. First published in 1984, Right Plant, Right Place went on to sell nearly half a million copies in various editions.

She was working on Double Flowers: The Remarkable Story of Extra-Petalled Blooms (Pimpernel Press, £30) when she died unexpectedly in 2007, aged just 57. It has now been admirably completed by Charles Quest-Ritson, the author of fine books on Ninfa and climbing roses, among other subjects.

Double Flowers is both erudite and seductively readable, comparable to the writings of Christopher Lloyd — and there simply hasn’t been a book on this subject before. Every gardener uses and values double-flowers for having more impact and being longer-lasting, but every gardener also has a sticking-point about oddity and profusion: extravagant Angelique tulips, yes, fussy double daffodils, no. But even naturalistic gardeners find space for some.

People who claim to dislike double-flowers “are often the self-same people who delight in growing, for example, 19th-century roses, or peonies from before the First World War, or old-fashioned pinks from goodness knows when,” Ferguson remarks.

Pleasingly organised into chapters reflecting her own subjective ratings of what’s “quaint and charming”, for example, or “showy and flamboyant”, handsomely illustrated, Double Flowers makes irresistible browsing and will have all its readers planning to use them in the year ahead.

Otherwise, At West Dean: the Creation of an Exemplary Garden by Jim Buckland & Sarah Wain, with photography by Andrea Jones (White Lion, £40) is a sympathetic and engrossing hands-on account by the husband and wife team who have restored these expansive gardens at the arts centre in Sussex over the past 25 years.

Island Gardens: Havens of Beauty Round the British Isles by Jackie Bennett with photography by Richard Hanson (White Lion, £25) is a brilliant concept, well-executed, exploring both the special joys and challenges of island gardens, featuring a signature plant for each of them: hardy geraniums on Orkney, Rosa mundi on Sark.

The Generous Gardener: Private Paradises Shared by Caroline Donald (Pimpernel Press, £30) collects 43 pieces by the Sunday Times gardening editor, talking sympathetically to people ranging from Harrison Birtwhistle to Kelly Brook about their gardens.

In A Landscape Legacy (Pimpernel, £40), the influential modernist designer John Brookes looks back over his career, owning that he is “not a plantsman… it is the shape and form of plant material that interests me”.

More sympathetic to many actual gardeners might be the appealing new compact edition of George Plumptre’s The English Country House Garden (White Lion, £18.99), dedicated to the memory of its photographer, Marcus Harpur, who died last year.

And, lastly, not a gardening book at all, just a book any gardener would love, Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori, illustrated by Lucille Clerc (Laurence King, £17.99) is enchanting: the perfect combination of love and science.