Literary gardening delights

Christmas books for the botanically bewitched

Michael Pollan writes so well that, as Fred Allen used to say, he makes you feel like putting your quill back in your goose. He is the American author of Second Nature, recently published in the UK as one of Bloomsbury's first in a new series of Gardening Classics.

Mr Pollan bought a run-down old dairy farm in Connecticut, where he started to plant his first garden. The idea was to garden without upsetting the principles laid down by his hero, the 19th-century naturalist Henry Thoreau. "Do not impose your will upon the wilderness, the woodchuck or the weeds," said Thoreau, from his shanty in the woods near Walden Pond.

As any experienced gardener could have told him, Mr Pollan was doomed to failure from the start. He may have understood about sharing the bounty of the garden, but the woodchucks sure as hell didn't.

His book describes how he gradually developed a more harmonious relationship with nature. In a post-Thoreau world, he sees his garden as the ideal interface between man and the natural world. Between the two diametrically opposed approaches to the land - that is, either raping it, or sealing it off and labelling it a nature reserve - sits his garden, the perfect amalgam. Gardeners learn to use the land without abusing it, and nature and culture are reconciled.

Heaaa-vvvyy, you may think. But it's not. Along the way are endlessly entertaining digressions into compost and its moral imperative, sex and class conflict in the garden, pompous catalogues, the war against weeds. Perhaps the closest thing published by an English writer is Russell Page's Education of a Gardener. But Pollan's book is better. And bigger, in terms of what it encompasses.

Bloomsbury has published six Gardening Classics so far, all hardbacks, but at paperback prices (pounds 10.99). One of their latest is William Robinson's The English Flower Garden, which first came out in 1883. Then, it was one of the most widely read and influential gardening books around. It is just as relevant today, especially in view of the new craze for liberating herbaceous plants from the corset of the herbaceous border and letting them free in wilder, looser swathes instead.

The big book of the year (in all senses) is Dorling Kindersley's new Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants. Its official price is pounds 55, but you can easily buy it for less. I was never a huge fan of the first, green-jacketed Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers. I didn't like the way the plants were arranged in colours rather than families, and there were too many plants that had been omitted altogether. I was obviously in a minority, because that book has scarcely been off the best-seller list since it was published seven years ago.

The new, black-jacketed encyclopaedia includes details of more than 15,000 plants (the earlier edition had about 8,000), all alphabetically arranged. It is staggeringly comprehensive, easy to use, and full of photographs which have been meticulously checked to ensure that the printed colour on each one matches exactly with the plant that is described alongside it.

As if that were not enough, the book also tells you where the plants originally came from. And knowing where a plant grows in the wild, be it the Himalayas, Morocco, China or Siberia, gives a gardener the best possible clue as to how it should be treated in a garden.

As a visitor of gardens, there is nothing which makes me happier than a good kitchen garden: orderly, productive, sensuous with the smell of peaches, and glistening in the light reflected from rich, shiny leaves of ruby chard. Susan Campbell, whose earlier book, Cottesbrooke, was an account of a year spent in one particular kitchen garden, has now produced a superb study of the kitchen garden in general. Called Charleston Kedding (Ebury Press, pounds 30), it sounds suitably Anglo-Saxon, but it isn't a real place at all. It's a neat anagram of "old kitchen gardens".

The device gives Mrs Campbell the freedom to gloss over the history of the kitchen garden and to quote from other, much earlier writers. The kitchen garden was where gardening skills were honed to the highest level. It was the basic training ground for young gardeners, steadily progressing from garden boy to journeyman, to foreman to head gardener, the pinnacle of the profession.

Indeed, John Claudius Loudon's advice to a journeyman seeking to put his foot on the next rung of the ladder was to "move to a different part of the country... leisurely on foot, botanising and collecting insects and minerals, and visiting every distinguished garden on his way".

Inevitably, the book is tinged with nostalgia, but never with melancholy. It celebrates the masterly way in which these walled acres were manipulated for maximum effect: strawberries at Christmas, peaches all the year round. And Mrs Campbell's rigorous research has thrown up many quixotic delights. I've fallen head over heels for Mr Lawson of Tirydail, near Llandeilo, who built himself a cow-house vinery in 1852 so that the cows' breath would provide the necessary heating. "And very pretty the cows look too with a row of chrysanthemums on the wall in front of them," said a contemporary correspondent.

Euphorbias, by Roger Turner (Batsford, pounds 25), is one of a series of serious monographs published by the Hardy Plant Society. It is short on pictures and long on words such as cyathium, caruncle, axillary and tubercles. But it doesn't put me off, even though I haven't the faintest idea what they mean. It's quite soothing to say them over and over to yourself. Like a mantra. One day, I'll feel an irrepressible urge to look them up in a botanical dictionary, but for the moment I'm content to leave them be and concentrate on what is familiar in the book.

Euphorbias (spurges) are sexy plants; one of the few families of which you can say, "No garden should be without ..." As foliage plants, they are supreme. The strange, greeny-yellow flowers are a bonus. There are useful chapters here on identification, cultivation and propagation - but the lion's share of the book is taken up with descriptions of all the hardy euphorbias known to gardeners. That's an astonishing 90 species, if you don't include the ancillary cultivars bred from them. If you like euphorbias, you need this book.

Ursula Buchan is a professional gardener, trained at Wisley and Kew, so you know you can rely on the practical advice that is given in her sumptuously illustrated book Gardening for Pleasure (Conran Octopus, pounds 20). The text is a reworking and updating of one of Ms Buchan's earliest books, The Pleasures of Gardening, and her delight in the processes by which plants can be coaxed and chivvied to give of their best has not dimmed in the interval.

Introductory chapters on mulches, feeding, basic gardening techniques and tools are followed by sound words on ways of using different kinds of plants in the garden.

Finally, for the jaded gardener who has seen it, done it and mulched it all, is The Decadent Gardener (Dedalus, pounds 8.99), by Medlar Lucan and Durian Grey. A photograph of the authors shows them heavily disguised as James Joyce and Augustus John, in the library at Mountcullen, Mrs Conchita Gordon's finely proportioned place (Georgian, of course) in Co Cork.

Lucan and Grey have been called in by Mrs Gordon to redesign the Mountcullen acres. The book describes and explains their ambitious plans for the estate. A cruel, synthetic and fatal garden are only the first of their transformations. As in their previous book, The Decadent Cookbook, the authors reveal that there is a dark side to an activity widely thought to be the preserve only of ladies in sensible shoes.