Looking for the best books about plants? Katy Merrington, cultural gardener at The Hepworth Wakefield, rummages through her bookshelves to choose her ultimate list of titles for planting inspiration and plant identification as well as mind-opening essays, explorations and missives on plants.
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The best books about plants
The Grasmere Journals
by Dorothy Wordsworth
Oxford Paperbacks (1993)
ISBN 978-0192831309
The plants that fill our favourite landscapes can embody the season for us and make a place and moment special. Dorothy Wordsworth captured her love for the plants around her in the journal that she began in May 1800, while sharing Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District with her brother, the poet William Wordsworth.
The diary was written solely for her brother to enjoy, and it inspired some of his poems. It is made up of snippet sentences that immediately pull you back to the particularity of her day over 200 years ago. She notes down her walks, the weather, the dire poverty of people she meets and the dreary reality of headaches – in a time before paracetamol.
Nevertheless, her spirits are often lifted by the daily observation of plants – the joy at seeing a cherished tree come into leaf, the precise phase of a foxglove flower opening, or the very last primrose to
bloom in the orchard in spring.
What a curious species we are, able to turn even living plants into competitive vessels and collectors’ items
Dear Friend and Gardener: Letters on Life and Gardening
by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd
Frances Lincoln (2021)
ISBN 978-0711255807
I could have chosen many books by the gardening greats Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, but this volume of letters they wrote to one another in the late 1990s gives a unique opportunity to listen in on their conversation, as they share gardening highs and lows across two years.
They are writing here in later life, with their gardens open to the public. They are very different in character but close friends, not afraid to counter each other’s opinions. You can sense the twinkle in their eyes, as they needle each other cheekily, on questions such as irrigation, or who has produced the best carrots.
You feel as if you are privy to the emotional journey that plant growing takes you on throughout the year – as you start with a strategy and then see how each move plays out. The letter format works well for capturing this seasonal rhythm of work and reflection. It is also reassuring to know that like all gardeners, they are totally obsessed with the weather.
Collins Wild Flower Guide
by David Streeter, illustrated by Christina Hart-Davies, Audrey Hardcastle, Felicity Cole and Lizzie Harper
William Collins (2016)
ISBN 978-0008156756
If a book being dog-eared is a sign that it is loved, then one of the most cherished books on my shelf must be the little chunk that is the Collins Wild Flower Guide.
For me, it comes into its own after a weeding session, or after a good long walk (on holiday if you’re lucky), when a frustration nags at you that you can’t name a plant that you have seen. This is the time to sit down with a nice cup of tea, get out the field guide and look it up.
It’s handy to refer to a photo you’ve taken of the flower – and, of course, there are apps now available to help identify plants – but one of the benefits of putting a bit of work into placing a name using
a book is that you must go on a journey through the pages to find it, meaning that you inadvertently learn other things along the way.
Meadows (British Wildlife Collection)
by George Peterken
Bloomsbury Wildlife (2018)
ISBN 978-1472960344
We can all probably picture a meadow, but lucky is the person who gets to walk through one nowadays, because here in the UK they are a near-vanished habitat. Plants don’t grow in isolation but have evolved to hold their own in the hustle and bustle of an ecosystem. This book is part of the excellent British Wildlife Collection, which explores natural history across titles such as rivers, hedges, mountain flowers and more. Each topic is covered by an expert in that field, in a scientific yet readable way.
I have chosen this one because meadows can be a bit confusing – partly due to the word, which we use so broadly as a dreamy name for any flower-rich mixture, as well as a technical term, describing a grassland mown for hay. George Peterken unpicks all elements of meadows here. What is a meadow? Is
it man-made? How does it differ from a pasture? What lives in a meadow? And how do we nurture this kind of habitat for the future?
You can sense the twinkle in their eyes, as they needle each other cheekily on who has produced the best carrots
The Gardener’s Guide to Prairie Plants
by Neil Diboll and Hilary Cox
University of Chicago Press (2023)
ISBN 978-0226805931
So many gardening books illustrate herbaceous perennials in their reproductive prime and tell us little
about the rest of their lives. This book is the opposite, treating plants holistically, as living beings across their lifetime – with underground parts, bodies that age and relationships with other creatures.
You may think, “Well, I don’t have a prairie,” but many of the stalwarts of our contemporary naturalistic planting palette, including hard workers such as Echinacea, Rudbeckia and Veronicastrum, originate in the plains of North America.
You can learn a lot from this book about the general care of herbaceous plants. Each plant profile is packed with detail – photos of seedlings, mature seedheads and notes on root type. Tables group information under helpful headings – such as plants for certain soils, or for encouraging specific insects – so you can make the most of this wealth of data easily.
This book raises the bar for plant books going forward with the sheer breadth of information that it generously shares.
Onward and Upward in the Garden
by Katharine S White
NYRB Collections (2015)
ISBN 978-1590178508
There is a lot of joy to be found in reading a nursery catalogue, conjuring a dreamy world of possibility when perused indoors on a cold winter’s day. Katharine White clearly felt this – she was fiction editor for The New Yorker, and a keen gardener. In the 1950s she began to write annual reviews of nursery catalogues, giving them robust critiques, just like she would a novel. This book collates her writing.
Nursery catalogues present a lot of complex information in a condensed format, and she celebrates and reviews the work of these unsung authors across all areas – the new cultivars they’re promoting, their tone of voice, layout, photography, and even the paper they’ve chosen to print on. Ultimately, she’s interested in a catalogue’s ability to bewitch its reader.
Katharine White had a discerning eye, like one of those valued friends you quickly trust when it comes to a recommendation. I wonder what she would have thought of the writing and content that we now find on websites and social media.
The Tulip
by Anna Pavord
Bloomsbury (2019)
ISBN 978-1526602688
Plants are so often commodities that weave their way into all aspects of art, culture and economics, but perhaps no flower has wrought such a curious path through human history as the tulip. These cups of intense colour that live half the year underground, wearing modest brown tunics, have lost none of their potency, though you no longer need to remortgage your house to buy the most sought-after specimens, as at the height of ‘Tulipomania’ in 1630s Holland.
Anna Pavord takes us on this small bulb’s journey from the rocky steppes of Asia, through waves of European obsession – a flower so singular and seductive that its image has been used to adorn textiles, paintings and patterns for centuries.
As much as this book is about the botanical powerhouse that is the tulip, it is also about people and what a curious species we are when something is beautiful and we want to own it – able to turn even living plants into competitive vessels and collectors’ items.
Planting the Natural Garden
by Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen
Timber Press (2019)
ISBN 978-1604699739
You could choose from many excellent books by the perennial innovators Piet Oudolf, Henk Gerritsen and Noel Kingsbury, but this reissued version of the 1990s classic still has so much to offer. It was a book that opened up a new palette of perennials to the gardening public, with its beautiful photography, plant descriptions and empowering sense that you too could make an artistic combination with the ingredients and wisdom from the pages.
Henk Gerritsen’s dry sense of humour makes you feel like you are walking around the nursery with him, heeding warnings as to a plant’s seediness and soaking up a lifetime of know-how about what works well together.
This edition includes additions to the plant list reflecting new cultivars on the market and the development of Piet Oudolf’s designs. It is a generous book: there are planting plans and the ever-handy list of how many perennials to use per square metre.
There’s a sense of endless creative possibility in the myriad things that you could grow or cook from these pages
The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate
by Olivier Filippi
Filbert Press (2019)
ISBN 978-1999734558
As our climate changes, plants are going to face either too much water or too little. Olivier Filippi has been a trusted voice on dry gardening for many years, inspired by the beauty of Mediterranean landscapes and working with his wife Clara to run their nursery in the South of France.
This handbook explores the mechanisms that have evolved in plants from Mediterranean climate zones to survive drought. It explains the relationship between soil type and moisture availability and provides informative profiles on recommended species.
A strong root system is vital for a plant living in tough conditions and useful diagrams illustrate the effect of pot cultivation on a root system, or how roots develop in accordance with the kind of watering they are given during their first summer. Olivier Filippi encourages us to work sustainably within the natural conditions of our gardens, to be open to experimentation and willing to let a struggling plant go.
Vegetables: The Definitive Guide for Gardeners
by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix
Macmillan (2021)
ISBN 978-1529063295
Roger Phillips’ and Martyn Rix’s books have been favourites on the potting-shed shelves of nearly every garden I have worked in. Their bright style with clear, colour photos, often isolated against a white background, gives them a trusted format that you can turn to reliably.
This reissued book on vegetables isn’t so much about how to grow them, but presents these edible objects as the offspring of wild plants that humans have bred for thousands of years. As well as origin and history, this edition celebrates the cultivar, with photos of good varieties next to each other, so that you can see just how pea ‘Hurst Green Shaft’ differs from pea ‘Kelvedon Wonder’, and it makes you want to grow them all.
Their books give me the same feeling that I get when meandering around a good DIY store, with all the separate building components organised in distinct categories. There’s a sense of endless creative possibility in the myriad things that you could grow or cook from these pages.
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