Best new gardening books - dig in!

Best new gardening books

It\'s spring at last, it\'s time to get planting again, and there\'s a bumper crop of new gardening books crowding the shelves. Here\'s our pick of the very best books to get your garden blooming this season.

By Olivia Gordon

BBC Gardeners\' Question Time Techniques & Tips for Gardeners

The BBC Radio 4 programme Gardeners\' Question Time is a much-loved source of advice, and this book distils some of the most commonly given tips from the wise panel of experts. Each of the four gives their personal tricks of the trade on how to tackle challenges, from Anne on weed control to Matt on topiary - meaning you don\'t always get the bog-standard view, but, much better, a unique expert tip. Collectively, this forms a chatty complete guide for an amateur gardener, matched with clear, colourful photography.

BBC Gardeners\' Question Time Techniques & Tips for Gardeners, by Matthew Biggs, John Cushnie, Bob Flowerday & Anne Swithinbank (Kyle Cathie, £16.99)

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\'RSPB Gardening for Wildlife\'

Turn your garden into a haven for butterflies, birds, honeybees, owls, or even bats or foxes. This lovely book shows how anyone can attract wildlife to their back door without having to make your garden look especially ‘wild\'.  The key is to give insects and animals what they\'re looking for - a hideaway to sleep, and plants they like to eat. Adrian Thomas tells you here how to attract every kind of British wildlife right down to different species of bird and butterfly, as well as how to cultivate different habitats like a wildflower meadow or woodland, year-round.

\'RSPB Gardening for Wildlife\', by Adrian Thomas (A&C Black, £19.99)

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\'Allotment Gardening for Dummies\'

Allotment gardening is booming, and this is the perfect guide to securing your plot and tending it to fruition. It takes hard work, the author warns - you\'ll need to graft for at least ten hours a week on your plot to get results - but just think what that exercise will do for your health, on top of all the amazing fruit and veg you\'ll be eating! From preparing the soil to growing your favourite vegetables to the etiquette of hobnobbing down at the allotments, everything you need is here.

The Edible Garden

Growing your own food is the trend of our time, and in this beautiful book, BBC Gardeners\' World presenter Alys Fowler explains how to do it even if you only have a tiny city garden without space for a separate vegetable patch. A traditional cottage garden, Alys says, combines flowers, fruits and vegetables in a happy, haphazard way. From peas to edible flowers, Alys guides you through the planning and planting, and at the back of the book is a delicious recipe section with ideas for what to make with the fruits of your labours.

\'The Edible Garden\', by Alys Fowler (BBC Books, £18.99)

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Grow your own - more ideas

\'Grow Your Own Drugs: A Year With James Wong\'

Our favourite ethnobotanist is back on BBC2 soon with more garden-fresh home remedies to make, and in this, his second book, he presents over 100 new - but age-old - ways to refresh mind, body and home. Essentially, you can grow your own pharmacy, and James advises on what plants to cultivate seasonally for everything from skin problems to digestive complaints, from emotional issues to rebalancing your hormones. He explains how to infuse and decoct, making tinctures, ointments, salves and balms, from an elderberry cordial for colds to a bilberry and marshmallow munch for aching joints.

Grow Your Own Drugs: A Year With James Wong, by James Wong (Collins, £16.99)

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The back-garden pharmacy

\'Creating Your Garden Farm\'

Anyone can be a farmer with the help of this book. This is a complete guide to starting your own fruit and vegetable garden, but we especially love the fantastic section on storing your produce and raising chickens, bees and even pigs and goats! You learn how to cuddle a hen to gain its trust, how to deal with a broody hen and how to help her hatch a brood of chicks. As for beekeeping, there\'s a year-round guide to working with your own home hive, and when it comes to raising pigs and goats, all the basic principles are here.

\'Creating Your Garden Farm\', by Nicki Trench (CICO, £16.99)

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Setting up a smallholding

\'The Girl\'s Guide to Growing Your Own\'

This fun, girly book is perfect if you\'d like to eat something you\'ve grown but don\'t really get gardening-speak and refuse to end up covered in mud. It shows you how to grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables season by season, with difficulty ratings for each, cheat\'s tips, and jargon busters which decipher what can appear a dauntingly unfamiliar world to new gardeners. Easy weekend projects like making a salad box or growing sweetpeas are mixed up with recipes for your goodies. The ideal book for any beginner.

\'The Girl\'s Guide to Growing Your Own\', by Alex Mitchell (New Holland, £12.99)

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Get into gardening: our complete guide

Gardeners\' World Practical Gardening Handbook

Another brilliant book from the Gardeners\' World stable, this is a complete guide to creating your own garden paradise. From landscaping to crop rotation, and from greenhouse essentials to lawn care, this is an admirably comprehensive book which is sure to become any gardener\'s new best friend. We especially like the garden living section, with projects like making a tree swing, juice press, bin store, green roof, hazel tunnel and reclaimed driftwood bench, as well as how to grow your own Christmas dinner.

\'Gardeners\' World Practical Gardening Handbook\', by Toby Buckland (BBC Books, £17.99)

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Things to make for the garden

Collins Flower Guide

It\'s far from cheap, but this book would make a tremendous gift for the obsessive gardener in your life. It\'s a massive (and very heavy) complete illustrated guide to thousands of British flora, the stunning book itself slotting into a protective box. It\'s an heirloom book you\'ll keep in your family for generations and refer to whenever you want to identify a flower or understand its botanical history, family and how it grows.

\'Collins Flower Guide\', by David Streeter (Collins, £60) 

\'Planting\'

World-renowned designer Terence Conran teams up here with innovative gardening celebrity Diarmuid Gavin to create a super-stylish creative guide to planning outdoor spaces. It\'s as much a coffee table book to browse through as a practical handbook - with sections on colour, seasons, influences and purpose, you\'ll take inspiration from the sensational global gardens illustrated, which range from the urban to the seaside, and from night gardens to water gardens.

\'Planting\', by Diarmuid Gavin & Terence Conran (Conran Octopus, £40)

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What to plant - and where: planting advice

Grow Your Own Garden

Gardeners\' World presenter Carol Klein believes there\'s no need to spend money on expensive ready-grown garden centre plants when, with a little know-how from this book, you can propagate your own seeds and cuttings. Carol writes inspiringly of the joy of collecting seeds from your plants as winter draws in and then, in spring, seeing tiny green shoots you\'ve sown push their way through the soil. All the techniques you need are collected here, charmingly illustrated with photos of Carol at work in her own garden.

\'Grow Your Own Garden\', by Carol Klein (BBC Books, £20)

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Sow and grow: how to sow seeds, take cuttings and care for plants

Grow Your Own Herbs in Pots

It often seems so hard to keep herbs alive in the British climate, but this excellent book will have you growing basil, lemon balm, lavender, oregano and mint in no time, and show you how to use your herbs in cooking and home remedies. Growing herbs in pots is an achievable, fun first step into gardening, and here are instructions for sustaining every kind of herb you can think of, plus other small plants like rocket and garlic. For each, the author suggests an imaginative container, whether it\'s a colander for camomile or a birdcage full of nasturtiums.

\'Grow Your Own Herbs in Pots\', by Deborah Schneebeli-Morell (CICO, £14.99) 

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