Each year Gardens Illustrated rounds up its top gardening books of the year from releases throughout the past year and gives you a chance to win them.
This year's list features a host of great writers and books,including Sarah Raven's A Year Full of Pots, Pastoral Gardens by Clare Foster and Andrew Montgomery, Charles Dowding's Compost and Richard Mabey's The Accidental Garden. Read the full list below.
The winner will receive a copy of each of our top gardening books of 2024 (the list below). The promotion is open to all residents of the UK, including the Channel Islands. Delivery is included, available only to addresses in the UK and Channel Islands.
Looking for more gardening book ideas?
- The top gardening books of the year
- Best plant and gardening audio books
- Best floristry books to read
- Best plant identification books
Our full list of this year and last year's best gardening books can be found at our top garden books round up.
All entries must be received by 11.59pm on 31 January 2025. To enter you must be over 18 and resident in the UK, including the Channel Islands. Full terms and conditions below
Enter the competition here
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The best gardening books of the year 2024
A Flower Garden for Pollinators
by Rachel de Thame Greenfinch, £25 ISBN 978-1529422146
Horticulturist and Gardeners’ World presenter Rachel de Thame suggests plants we can grow that are rich in nectar and pollen in every season, but also highlights the importance of including plants that provide shelter and places to lay eggs. “By adopting a holistic, year-round approach, one can really make a difference,” she says. “I believe having a beautiful garden can go hand in hand with creating a space that delivers equally for the pollinators and other beneficial insects so vital to a healthy and vibrant ecosystem.” Veronica Peerless
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One Garden against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate
by Kate Bradbury Bloomsbury Wildlife, £18.99 ISBN 978-1399408868
One Garden Against the World is part nature love story, part call to arms. It won’t fix climate change or the threat of biodiversity collapse on its own, but it will help us gardeners focus on the things we can do in our own backyards and allotments to give life forms the best chance of survival, and us a real sense of purpose in what we can do to help. The overriding take from this book is that the custodians of the UK’s 30 million gardens can make a difference. Cleve West
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A Year Full of Pots: Container Flowers for All Seasons
by Sarah Raven Bloomsbury Publishing, £27 ISBN 978-1526667472
Following on from her two previous books
in this seasonal series – A Year Full of Flowers and A Year Full of Veg – Sarah Raven shows how to grow flowers all year round in pots. It’s packed full of practical and clever ideas on creating beautiful pots throughout the year, including how to combine flower colours using a ‘bride’ flower (the star of the show), a ‘bridesmaid’ (smaller and less conspicuous) and a ‘gatecrasher’ (the colour contrast that brings the whole thing to life). VP
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Pastoral Gardens
by Clare Foster and Andrew Montgomery Montgomery Press, £55 ISBN 978-1399992565
Regular photographer for Gardens Illustrated Andrew Montgomery and garden editor Clare Foster explore the idea of the pastoral garden and what it means today. Featuring 20 notable gardens, including Knepp Walled Garden, The Barbican Gardens and Sarah Price’s own garden near Abergavenny in Wales, it looks at the themes of informality, sanctuary, landscape and habitat, and includes essays from Jinny Blom, Nigel Dunnett, Kim Wilkie and Tom Stuart-Smith. VP
Hortobiography: A Gritty Woman’s Tale of People, Places and Plants
by Carol Klein Witness Books, £22 ISBN 978-1529144246
A memoir about the horticulturist’s
life ‘from the word go, up to the
present day and a bit into the future’.
Via her childhood in Manchester,
training as an artist and a teacher, her
first experiments in plantswomanship
at Glebe Cottage, finding an unexpected career as a television presenter, and her recent experience of cancer, Carol tells the
story of the people, places and plants that have shaped her life. VP
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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
by Olivia Laing Picador, £20 ISBN 978-1529066678
In the summer of 2020, just as the first lockdown of the Covid pandemic started to lift, writer Olivia Laing and their husband, the poet Ian Patterson, moved into the former home in Suffolk of Mark Rumary, director of landscaping for many years at Notcutts. Mr Rumary’s cobwebbed apron still hung on the potting shed door, and the overgrown garden was packed with unusual delights. As Olivia set about restoring it, they found themselves considering the idea of paradise and gardens, both real and imagined. VP
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Compost: Transform waste into new life
by Charles Dowding DK, £14.99 ISBN 978-0241661543
A companion to Charles Dowding’s guide
to his signature growing method No Dig (DK, 2022). While there have been chapters on compost in most of the books the no-dig guru has written, he has never majored in the subject. “My aim with the book was to set composting out in clear terms – I don’t want to give readers a recipe, I want them to understand what they’re doing so that they can find a method that works for them,” he says. VP
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The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia
by Tim Richardson Frances Lincoln, £40 ISBN 978-0711290921
This sumptuous book claims to be the
‘first ever large-format book to be published on the 18th-century landscape garden’ – but is there anything new to say about this quintessentially British creation, with rolling hills, forest clumps, mirror-flat lakes, grazing Longhorn cows and eye-catching monoliths and temples, so typically created by ‘Capability’ Brown and William Kent? There is. This book has reignited my interest in the gardens of the 18th century and it will do the same for you. Stephen Parker
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Mien Ruys: The Mother of Modernist Gardens
by Julia Crawford Lund Humphries, £39.95 ISBN 978-1848225640
This book – the first comprehensive study in English about the life and work of Mien Ruys – should be on every gardener’s book list, offering a thorough insight into the work of an extraordinary woman whose influence lives on through the work of many designers, including Piet Oudolf. Crawford writes: “Whether it’s a name we are aware of or not, many of us will have a little bit of Mien in our gardens, be it a railway sleeper, a diagonal line, a Phlomis russeliana or a water ball.” Annie Guilfoyle
The Plant Society Design Handbook: A Plant Stylist’s Guide to Creating Beautiful Living Spaces
by Jason Chongue Murdoch Books, £25 ISBN 978-1922616791
The designer and plant curator shows how to combine a love of houseplants with an interest in interior design. Chongue’s easy-to-follow blueprints take a design-first approach, focusing on how plants relate to the surrounding architecture, materials and environment. The advice on analysing your space, suggested room layouts and style fundamentals, including colour, texture, shape and scale, is complemented by care advice for more than 80 favourite plants, and inspiring photography. Veronica Peerless
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The Tulip Garden: Growing and Collecting Species, Rare and Annual Varieties
by Polly Nicholson and Andrew Montgomery Phaidon, £29.95 ISBN 978-1838667689
As an organic flower grower and florist, Nicholson has a reputation for discerning cuttings and arrangements. In her Wiltshire garden at Blackland House, she is indulging a passion for tulips with a thoughtful and methodical approach, all of which has been distilled in this, her debut book. Starting with their cultural and historical influence, Nicholson goes on to feature wild, species, heritage, English Florists and indeed those questionable annual tulips, giving us inspiration and tips for each type. Sorrel Everton
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The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness,and the Space in Between
by Richard Mabey Profile Books, £12.99 ISBN 978-1805220701
Over ten chapters, Mabey explores what it means to plant things, vegetations, ideas, people and places. These are wide-ranging debates that cover the gender-fluid nature of plants, decolonisation, migration, native/non-native, reparations for nature through the lens of the wood, the lawn, the pond and the flowerbed. There are times in these discussions where you feel he might not negotiate the hot coals of such topics. But don’t be fooled. By the end of each chapter he has succinctly, neatly wrapped up the deal. Alys Fowler
Read the full review
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Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting inspired by Shrublands
by Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi Filbert Press, £40 ISBN 978-1739903954
Every now and again, maybe once in a decade, a genuinely revolutionary garden book comes along. This is one. It is not about individual shrubs (garden centre-type things, with big, plastic labels) but shrubs collectively.
A lot of us are commenting on how we
need to re-engage with woody plants, largely ignored by the ‘New Perennial’ movement. This is an important book that looks at shrub communities around the world, and how we might interpret them for garden and landscape use. Noel Kingsbury
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Outside In: A Year of Growing and Displaying
by Sean A Pritchard Mitchell Beazley, £30ISBN 978-1784728854
Featuring ideas that are inventive and charming and don’t require oodles of blooms, garden designer Pritchard shares how he grows, harvests and artfully arranges flowers and foliage from the garden of his bohemian Somerset cottage all year round. Organised by season, the book shows you how to plan a garden so that every month of the year there’s something to bring indoors and display,
no matter the size of your plot or your
level of horticultural experience. Veronica Peerless
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Ts and Cs
- The Promoter is Our Media Limited (company number 05715415) a company incorporated in England and Wales whose registered address is at Eagle House, Colston Avenue, Bristol, BS1 4ST.
- The promotion is open to all residents of the UK, including the Channel Islands, aged 18 years or older, except the Promoter’s employees or contractors and anyone connected with the promotion or their direct family members.
- The closing date for entries is 11.59pm on 31 January 2025.
- By entering the promotion, the participants agree:
a. to be bound by these terms and conditions; and
b. that should they win the promotion, their name and likeness may be used by the Promoter for pre-arranged promotional purposes.
- Entrants should enter by going to gardensillustrated.com/bookscompetition and answering the question. Entries received after the closing date of the promotion will not be considered.
- Entrants must supply to Our Media Limited their name and email address. The Promoter will use entrants’ personal details in accordance with the Our Media Privacy Policy (https://policies.ourmedia.co.uk/privacy-policy/).
- Only one entry will be permitted per person, regardless of method of entry. Bulk entries made by third parties will not be permitted.
- One winner will win a copy of each of Gardens Illustrated's 14 books of the year.
- The competition is only open to residents of the UK and Channel Islands. Delivery is included, available only to addresses in the UK and Channel Islands.
- The winning entrant will be the first correct entry drawn at random from all the correct entries after the closing date. The Promoter’s decision as to the winner is final and no correspondence relating to the promotion will be entered into. The Promoter may share the details of the winner with the prize provider for the purposes of fulfilling/delivering the prize.
- The winner will be notified within 7 days of the close of the promotion by email. If the winner cannot be contacted, or fails to respond within 14 days of such notification being sent, the Promoter reserves the right to offer the prize to a runner up, or to re-offer the prize in any future promotion.
- There is no cash alternative and the prize will not be transferable. Prizes must be taken as stated and cannot be deferred. The Promoter reserves the right to substitute the prize with one of the same or greater value.
- The surname and county of residence of the winner will be available upon request by sending an SAE to Eagle House, Colston Avenue, Bristol, BS1 4ST within two months of the closing date of the promotion. The Promoter will contact the winner before releasing this information and provide the winner the opportunity to object or limit the amount of information shared.
- The Promoter reserves the right to amend these terms and conditions or to cancel, alter or amend the promotion at any stage, if deemed necessary in its opinion, or if circumstances arise outside of its control.
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