A choice of gardening books for Christmas

Do you ever think about the ground beneath your feet? I do. Having read a number of popular science books on this most precious of natural resources, I am now obsessed. So much has recently been discovered about the invaluable symbiotic relationships that form between microbes, fungi and plant roots in the soil that it feels perverse to turn one’s head away.

Lately, the book that has most influenced my thinking (perhaps because it is a rattling read) is Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy by Matthew Evans (Murdoch Books, £14.99). It’s the work of a no-nonsense Australian farmer and former restaurant critic who has bothered to read the latest research. And what he writes should astonish every gardener. Did you know that there are more living things in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are humans on Earth? And that life, especially the mix of bacteria, mites and fungi – together with the macroscopic arthropods and earthworms – is what retains carbon in the soil and enables the uptake of nutrients and water into plant cells through their roots, in exchange for sugars made by plants from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight. Soil can even cause rain to fall, our mood to lighten and our gut microbiome to function better. There is scarcely a limit to soil’s capabilities or its importance. As a species, we are stuffed without plants and, generally speaking, without soil, plants are stuffed.

If you want all this translated into practical gardenese, read Charles Dowding’s No Dig: Nurture Your Soil to Grow Better Veg with Less Effort (DK, £30). Dowding was, until about ten years ago, a prophet not without honour, except in his own country. But no longer. At his market garden Homeacres, in Somerset, he preaches what he practises by teaching courses, writing books and making instructional videos. By trial and error he has discovered that an annual inch-thick mulch of carefully curated compost is all your vegetable beds require. That old advice about digging in the autumn is not only unnecessary, it is downright harmful to the vast, complex web of connections which make up the subterranean ecosystem, about which Evans writes so persuasively.

This is so counter-intuitive. For thousands of years, farmers have ploughed and gardeners have dug; to renounce all that feels awkward, despite the rewards of increased yields without artificial fertilisers, and better carbon retention. Dowding’s energy is focused on sowing most vegetables under glass initially, which is much more pleasurable than digging; he then plants the seedlings out when large enough to cope with the weather. The book is attractively produced, with pictures on every page, and provides hard-won advice for about 80 crops. It rolls up much of the wisdom to be found in the eight books he’s written since 2008 so, if you haven’t caught up with him until now, you should find this an excellent introduction.

Vegetable growing is all very well – and all the best gardeners do it – but what about flowers, after which our souls crave? The Seasonal Gardener: Creative Planting Combinations by Anna Pavord (Phaidon, £29.95) and The Gardener’s Palette: Creating Colour Harmony in the Garden by Jo Thompson (RHS/Timber Press, £35) both deal with the vital question of how to put plants together to make beautiful garden pictures. Thanks to the dynamic of plant growth, coupled with variable climatic factors, this is the hardest trick to pull off in flower gardening, which makes books like these invaluable. Both are handsomely produced, well illustrated and worth your money. Pavord shades it on the quality of the writing (as you might expect from the revered erstwhile gardening columnist of the Independent), but Thompson, a prize-winning garden designer, also exhibits wide sympathies, deep plant knowledge and a good eye. I particularly enjoyed her choice of paintings to underscore the points she makes about colour.

Xa Tollemache, a successful garden designer from the generation before Thompson, has written at length about her own garden, together with others she has designed over a long career. A Garden Well Placed: The Story of Helmingham and Other Gardens (Pimpernel Press, £35) is a good-looking book, but no more than Helmingham deserves, since it is the most beautiful Tudor house in England (I brook no argument on this point), complete with two moats and two drawbridges. She has made the quintessential large country garden, filled with romantic borders, as overstuffed as comfortable sofas, within a secure structure. Half the book is about the Helmingham garden and the rest a lively tour d’horizon of some of her other completed design projects.

One hundred and twenty years ago, in the neighbouring county of Norfolk, the 27-year-old Constance Fielden (who became Constance Villiers Stuart after her marriage), helped to redesign her mother’s house Beachamwell Hall after it burned down, and its garden. This was the beginning of an exceptional career, chronicled by the art curator Mary Ann Prior in Constance Villiers Stuart: In Pursuit of Paradise (Unicorn, £30). The wealthy and well-connected Villiers Stuart, though forgotten now, was in her time a tremendously influential figure. I freely admit that the only reason I knew of her was because my husband inherited a fine edition of her Gardens of the Great Mughals from his grandfather, who had served in the Indian army during the Great War. I had enjoyed reading the descriptions of those palace gardens, which were vivid and compelling, particularly because I could detect no trace of off putting lofty, Anglocentric patronage. She illustrated the book with her own watercolours, which were accomplished, although not in the Daniell class.

She spent three years in India when her soldier husband was stationed at Jabalpur, writing the book soon after she returned home in 1913. She had a genuine desire to celebrate the remarkable heritage of Islamic gardens in India. In later life, she was a well-known journalist and garden designer, and wrote a book on Spanish gardens, many of them Moorish in origin. Prior’s book is a good read, particularly because she doesn’t sugarcoat history: Constance, though intrepid and energetic, could be a right battleaxe – wilful, self-centred and unkind to her daughter. This book fills a gap in the story of powerful women gardeners and resurrects a strong personality who should never have been forgotten.