The Case for Reading About Gardening (Instead of Just Watching Videos)
There is a particular kind of futility in watching a twelve-minute YouTube tutorial on pruning roses while standing in your own garden, secateurs in hand, phone screen dimming every thirty seconds because you forgot to disable auto-lock. The presenter, somewhere in Oxfordshire, has a different rose variety, a different soil pH, a different rainfall pattern, and an entirely different definition of “winter.” You know this. You watch anyway.
I have been a gardener for twenty-three years and a collector of gardening books for nearly as long. The collection now occupies four shelves in the study and two stacks on the floor, which I tell myself is a temporary arrangement, though the stacks have been there since 2019. I have read most of them. I have re-read perhaps a dozen. I have given away twice as many as I’ve kept, because a gardening book that doesn’t earn its shelf space is worse than no book at all — it’s a book that might send you in the wrong direction with the confidence of print.
What follows is not a “best of” list. It is a working library — the books that have survived multiple culls, the ones I reach for when a plant is dying and I need to know why, the ones I read in January when the garden is sleeping and I need to remember what green looks like. They are organised by what they teach you to do, not by what they claim to be about. Some are famous. Several are out of print and worth the hunt. A few are practically unknown outside small circles of serious plantspeople. All of them have made me a better gardener than I would have been without them.
The Foundation: Books That Teach You How to See
Before you learn to garden, you must learn to look. This sounds obvious in a way that makes experienced gardeners nod and beginners roll their eyes. I rolled my eyes too, once. Then I spent an entire growing season photographing the same corner of the same border every morning at 7:15, and realised I had been looking at plants without seeing them for the better part of a decade.
1. The Well-Tempered Garden by Christopher Lloyd (1970)
If you buy one gardening book, buy this one. Lloyd was the proprietor of Great Dixter in East Sussex, a garden so intensively planted and relentlessly maintained that it became a pilgrimage site for gardeners worldwide. But the book is not about Great Dixter. It is about how to think about plants — not as specimens in a catalogue but as living things with preferences, moods, and relationships. Lloyd writes about dahlias with the intensity of a teenage diarist writing about a crush. He writes about weeding with the moral seriousness of a theologian discussing original sin. His chapter on “Plants That Offend Me” is worth the cover price alone, if only for the pleasure of watching a supremely knowledgeable gardener admit that he simply cannot stand certain flowers and has stopped trying to be fair about it.
The book was published in 1970, which means some of the cultivar names have changed and some of the chemical recommendations are now illegal. Ignore those parts. Read it for the voice — precise, opinionated, occasionally outright rude, and fundamentally generous in its assumption that you, the reader, are capable of becoming a serious gardener if you pay enough attention.
2. A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools by Bill Laws (2014)
A strange choice for a foundational text, but bear with me. Laws takes fifty objects — the dibber, the watering can, the wheelbarrow, the seed packet — and traces their history across centuries and continents. What emerges is not a history of tools but a history of the human relationship with cultivated land. You learn that the scythe predates the Roman Empire and was still the primary tool for cutting meadow grass in rural Shropshire in 1950. You learn that the first lawnmower was invented in 1830 by a textile engineer who adapted a machine designed to shear the nap off velvet. You learn, more importantly, that everything you do with your hands in a garden has been done by someone else, somewhere else, for thousands of years. This is simultaneously humbling and reassuring.
3. Plant: Exploring the Botanical World by Phaidon Editors (2016)
A coffee-table book that earns its weight. Three hundred images of plants rendered through every medium humans have invented: botanical illustrations from Mughal manuscripts, electron micrographs of pollen grains, Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes of British algae from 1843, a single photograph of a Amazon water lily leaf large enough to hold a child. The text is minimal; the images are the argument. What you absorb, over hours of page-turning, is a sense of plants as subjects worthy of the most sophisticated visual attention we can muster. This matters more than it sounds. A gardener who sees a Fritillaria meleagris as worthy of the kind of close observation usually reserved for Renaissance portraiture will garden differently than one who sees it as a bulb to be planted at a specified depth and spacing.
The Design Shelf: Books About Making a Garden, Not Just Filling One
Most people, when they decide to “design” a garden, begin with a list of plants they like. This is the horticultural equivalent of beginning to build a house by choosing the curtains. A garden is a sequence of spaces experienced in time — a year, a season, a single morning. The plants are the last decision, not the first.
4. Planting: A New Perspective by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury (2013)
Oudolf is the Dutch designer responsible for the High Line in New York, the Lurie Garden in Chicago, and a body of work that effectively invented the “New Perennial” planting style — naturalistic, matrix-based, structurally driven. This book is the technical manual behind the aesthetic. It explains his plant classification system (spires, globes, daisies, plumes, umbels, screens, and buttons — once you learn these categories you cannot un-see them), his matrix-planting ratios, his philosophy of using plants for their structure and seedheads rather than their flowers. The photography is beautiful; the spreadsheets in the back are more useful. If you have ever looked at a picture of an Oudolf border and thought “I want that,” this book tells you that you need roughly 30% grasses, 10% structural perennials like Eupatorium maculatum, and a willingness to let plants die visibly rather than deadheading them into submission.
The question of whether Oudolf’s approach works in subtropical Hong Kong is one I have addressed elsewhere at length. The short answer: the principles translate even if the plant palette doesn’t. Matrix planting works with Liriope muscari and Chlorophytum comosum just as it does with Molinia caerulea and Echinacea purpurea.
5. The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page (1962)
Page designed gardens for the Duke of Windsor, the Aga Khan, and the Frick Collection, but he wrote this book as a kind of intellectual autobiography — the story of how a man trained as a painter became one of the twentieth century’s most influential garden designers. It is not a how-to manual. It is a sustained argument for gardens as three-dimensional compositions, for the primacy of structure over decoration, and for the necessity of drawing — actually drawing, with pencil and paper — as a way of understanding space. Page’s prose is elegant without being precious. His chapter on “The Use of Water” contains the single best explanation I have ever read of why a rectangular reflecting pool is more restful than an irregular pond, and his analysis of the gardens at Versailles as a study in scale should be required reading for anyone who has ever tried to make a small garden feel larger.
6. The Japanese Garden by Sophie Walker (2017)
An outlier, this one, but essential. Walker surveys over eight hundred years of Japanese garden design through ninety gardens, from the moss temple of Saiho-ji to the contemporary work of Shunmyo Masuno. What distinguishes this book from every other English-language text on Japanese gardens is its refusal to exoticise. Walker treats the gardens as works of art and design rather than as expressions of an inscrutable Oriental essence. Her analysis of the stone arrangements at Ryoan-ji — the famous “dry” garden in Kyoto with fifteen stones arranged so that no more than fourteen are visible from any single viewpoint — examines them through the lens of Gestalt psychology as much as Zen Buddhism. The book will not teach you to build a Japanese garden. It will teach you to see space, enclosure, borrowed scenery, and the power of restraint in a way that applies to any garden, anywhere.
7. The Dry Gardening Handbook by Olivier Filippi (2008, English edition 2016)
Filippi runs a nursery in the south of France that specialises in plants adapted to dry, windswept, Mediterranean conditions — conditions increasingly relevant to anyone gardening in Hong Kong. His book is part manifesto, part encyclopedia, built around a simple argument: instead of fighting your climate with irrigation, choose plants that evolved to thrive in it. The plant directory covers over 500 species, each with a photograph and a frank assessment of its requirements. Filippi is particularly good on the aesthetic possibilities of drought-adapted plants — the silver foliage of Artemisia, the sculptural forms of Euphorbia, the unexpected lushness of certain Cistus species. He makes the case that a dry garden, properly planted, is not a garden of deprivation but of abundance. His chapter on gravel mulching — why depth matters, why the gravel must be the right geological type, why landscape fabric underneath is actively harmful — is worth the price of the book.
The Plant Obsessives: Deep Dives into Single Genera
One mark of a serious gardener is the presence, on their shelves, of at least one entire book about a single genus of plant. It might be roses, it might be salvias, it might be something so obscure that you have never heard of it. What matters is the willingness to go deep rather than wide — to learn one group of plants so thoroughly that you become the person other gardeners call when they have a question about it.
8. The Genus Hosta by W. George Schmid (1991)
Schmid’s monograph on hostas runs to 464 pages and describes over 150 species and cultivars with an attention to detail that borders on the pathological. There are botanical keys to identify species by flower structure. There are maps of native distribution across Japan, Korea, and China. There is a chapter on the genetics of leaf variegation that I have read three times and understood perhaps 40% of. I do not grow hostas — Hong Kong’s heat and humidity make them a non-starter except in air-conditioned conservatories. I keep this book because it represents an ideal: the monograph as devotional object, the willingness to spend decades studying one modest genus of shade-loving perennials and produce something definitive. Every gardener should own one book like this, even if — especially if — it is about a plant they cannot grow.
9. Roses by Peter Beales (1992)
Beales was one of the great rosarians of the late twentieth century — a nurseryman who specialised in old roses at a time when hybrid teas dominated the market and who was instrumental in the revival of interest in species roses, gallicas, damasks, and albas. His book is a comprehensive guide to the genus, but its real value lies in the narrative history woven through the plant descriptions: the story of ‘Rosa Mundi’, the striped sport of Rosa gallica ‘Officinalis’ that has been in cultivation since at least 1581; the detective work required to identify the rose painted by Botticelli in Primavera; the tale of ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, a Bourbon rose named for Empress Josephine’s garden that turned out to perform poorly in cold climates and was nearly lost before being rescued by a grower in California. Beales writes about roses the way some people write about wine — with a connoisseur’s discernment and a collector’s obsession. His assessment of ‘Peace’, the most widely planted rose of the twentieth century, as “a perfectly pleasant rose, if one likes that sort of thing” is the kind of damning-with-faint-praise that makes gardening literature worth reading.
10. Timber Press Pocket Guide to Ornamental Grasses by Rick Darke (2004)
Compact, practical, indispensable. Darke covers over 250 grass species and cultivars with photographs, cultural requirements, and design suggestions. He makes the case for grasses as the most versatile plants in the designer’s palette — they provide movement, sound, seasonal change, and a structural framework that persists long after flowers have faded. His notes on Miscanthus sinensis cultivars alone — which ones flop, which ones stay upright, which ones seed invasively — will save you years of trial and error. The section on using grasses in containers, including the surprising vigour of Hakonechloa macra in a pot, is worth more than its three pages suggest.
The Climate Realists: Gardening Where You Actually Live
The most dangerous gardening books are the ones written for a climate that is not your own. A British gardening book will tell you that Digitalis purpurea (foxglove) is a reliable self-seeding biennial. In Hong Kong it is an annual at best, and even then it will sulk through March and collapse in April. A book written for the Pacific Northwest will recommend summer watering schedules that would drown a Hong Kong garden in monsoon season. You need books that understand heat, humidity, and the particular challenges of gardening in the subtropics.
11. Tropical Plants for Home and Garden by William Warren and Luca Invernizzi Tettoni (1997)
A book so visually sumptuous that it is easy to overlook how useful it is. Warren was an American writer who lived in Bangkok for decades; Tettoni was an Italian photographer who documented Southeast Asian gardens with a sensitivity to light and texture that makes every page feel like the inside of a well-shaded courtyard. The plant directory covers over 400 tropical species with cultivation notes that actually reflect Asian growing conditions — not the greenhouse conditions of a botanical garden in Kew or New York. The chapter on Heliconia species and cultivars is particularly good, distinguishing between the clumping types suitable for small gardens and the running types that will take over a border in a single season. The photographs of Alpinia purpurata (red ginger) used as a hedging plant in a Chiang Mai garden changed my understanding of what hedging can be.
12. Subtropical Gardening by Jacqueline Walker (1992)
Out of print, difficult to find, worth the search. Walker was a gardener in Brisbane, which shares with Hong Kong the combination of hot summers, high humidity, and a winter mild enough that plants never fully go dormant. Her book is organised around the subtropical gardening year — the two growing seasons (spring and autumn), the summer lull when even the toughest plants stop putting on new growth, and the brief winter window when cool-season annuals can have their moment. Her advice on managing fungal diseases without reaching for the fungicide at every black spot — improve airflow, water the soil not the leaves, accept that some degree of leaf damage is normal — is the kind of common sense that is uncommon in gardening books. The chapter on palms is essential for anyone who has ever killed a Licuala grandis (ruffled fan palm) and not understood why. (The answer is almost always overwatering combined with insufficient humidity — a killing combination unique to air-conditioned interiors.)
13. The Tropical Garden by William Warren and Luca Invernizzi Tettoni (1991)
A companion volume to Tropical Plants for Home and Garden, this one focuses on garden design rather than individual plants. It features forty-eight gardens across Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, analysed through the lens of spatial composition, plant selection, and the integration of architecture and landscape. The chapter on the gardens of Jim Thompson’s house in Bangkok — a complex of traditional Thai teak buildings set in a jungle-planted compound in the middle of the city — is a masterclass in how tropical plants can create enclosure, mystery, and a sense of discovery in a relatively small space. The garden at the Datai on Langkawi, where the architects left mature rainforest trees standing and built the resort around them, should be studied by anyone who thinks tropical gardening means razing the site and starting over with a nursery order.
The Writers: Garden Literature That Happens to Be About Plants
Some of the best gardening books are not really about gardening. They are about attention, patience, disappointment, hope, and the slow accumulation of knowledge over decades of practice. They use gardens as a lens rather than a subject.
14. We Made a Garden by Margery Fish (1956)
Fish and her husband Walter bought East Lambrook Manor in Somerset in 1937 and spent the next two decades building one of the most influential cottage gardens in England. The book, written after Walter’s death, is a memoir of their collaboration — if collaboration is the word for a partnership in which Walter insisted on vast swathes of lawn and bedding schemes while Margery quietly built a nursery specialising in hellebores and unusual groundcovers. The real subject of the book is the negotiation of a joint creative project within a marriage, and the way a garden can outlast the relationships that shaped it. The chapter on “The Dry Wall” — a retaining wall Margery planted with Aubrieta, Dianthus, Campanula, and dozens of other rock-garden species — is a small masterpiece of descriptive writing. You can feel the texture of the stone, the coolness of the soil between the rocks, the satisfaction of a plant rooting itself into a crevice and thriving.
15. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan (1991)
Before Pollan became famous for writing about food systems, he wrote a book about gardening. It remains his best work — more personal than his later books, less polemical, more willing to admit uncertainty. The chapter on “The Idea of a Garden” traces the history of the garden as a philosophical concept — the tension between the garden as a return to Eden and the garden as an act of domination over nature. The chapter on “The Politics of the Rose” examines the cultural assumptions embedded in the American lawn, from the English aristocratic origins of closely mown turf to the post-war suburban lawn as an expression of conformity and civic virtue. The chapter on composting, in which Pollan attempts to produce a “perfect” batch of compost and discovers that this requires, among other things, collecting seaweed from a specific beach at low tide in February, is both funny and instructive. Pollan’s particular gift is for taking a seemingly narrow subject — a vegetable bed, a seed catalogue, a compost pile — and revealing the entire cultural history coiled inside it.
16. Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (1898)
The first and best of von Arnim’s several books about the garden she created at her husband’s estate in Pomerania. It is presented as a diary, though it is clearly a constructed narrative, and the garden serves as both subject and escape — a place where Elizabeth retreats from the demands of her husband (“the Man of Wrath”), her children, and the social obligations of a Prussian country estate. Her descriptions of the roses — Rosa rugosa in particular, which she planted in great drifts along the drive — are lush without being sentimental. Her account of ordering plants from a nursery in England and waiting weeks for them to arrive, then opening the crate to find that half have rotted in transit, will be painfully familiar to anyone who has ever ordered plants by mail. What makes the book endure, a century and a quarter later, is the voice — witty, self-aware, unsentimental about the garden even while loving it. “I am always happy,” she writes, “(out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are servants and furniture).”
17. The Garden in Every Sense and Season by Tovah Martin (2018)
A book structured around the senses rather than the calendar — four seasons, each filtered through sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Martin writes about her own garden in Connecticut with a specificity that makes it feel like yours: the sound of Miscanthus rustling in a November wind, the smell of Brugmansia flowers opening at dusk, the tactile pleasure of running a hand through the soft grey foliage of Salvia argentea. The chapter on “Tasting Summer” — which covers edible flowers, herbs, and the particular joy of eating a sun-warmed tomato while still standing in the vegetable patch — is the best argument I’ve read for including at least a few edible plants in a purely ornamental garden. Martin’s sensibility — curious, unhurried, attentive — is the sensibility of a gardener who has learned to measure time in growing seasons rather than calendars.
The Reference Shelf: Books You Return to Every Season
A reference book is different from a reading book. You do not sit down with it for pleasure. You reach for it when a plant is yellowing, when you need to know the pH preference of a specific species, when you are designing a border and cannot remember whether Salvia nemorosa and Nepeta racemosa flower at the same time. These books earn their place through density of useful information, reliability of advice, and the speed with which you can find what you need.
18. The Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening (various editions)
There is an edition of this book for every decade since 1992. I have the 2002 edition, which means its pesticide recommendations are outdated but its pruning diagrams remain excellent — a single page on the correct angle and position for pruning cuts has saved more trees than any number of YouTube tutorials. The book covers everything: soil science, propagation, pruning, pests and diseases, greenhouse management, lawn care, water gardening, fruit and vegetable cultivation. It is not a book you read. It is a book you consult, the way a lawyer consults a legal reference. The sections on construction — building paths, walls, fences, pergolas, steps — are surprisingly thorough for a book ostensibly about plants, and the plant directory at the back, while too brief to compete with specialist monographs, is a reliable starting point for identifying a plant or checking a hardiness rating.
19. Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs by Michael A. Dirr (2011)
Dirr is an American plantsman whose life’s work has been the observation and description of woody plants. His encyclopedia covers thousands of species and cultivars with entries that combine botanical description, cultural requirements, landscape use, and — crucially — Dirr’s own opinion. He will tell you which varieties of Lagerstroemia (crape myrtle) are truly resistant to powdery mildew and which ones are just marketed as such. He will tell you that Fraxinus pennsylvanica ‘Marshall’s Seedless’ is a superior street tree to the more commonly planted ‘Patmore’, and explain why in three sentences. The book is enormous and expensive and worth every gram and every dollar. For Hong Kong gardeners, the species coverage skews temperate, but the sections on subtropical genera — Ficus, Bauhinia, Lagerstroemia, Michelia — are detailed enough to be useful.
20. The Pruning Book by Lee Reich (1997)
Pruning is the gardening task that most people find most intimidating, and for good reason: a bad pruning cut can ruin a plant for years, and the advice available is often contradictory. Reich solves this by explaining the biology behind the practice — why plants respond to cuts the way they do, how apical dominance works, what happens at the cellular level when you remove a branch — and then providing species-specific guidance based on that biology. His explanations of the difference between heading cuts and thinning cuts, and when each is appropriate, are clearer than anything I have encountered elsewhere. The chapter on “Pruning to Create Special Effects” — pleaching, pollarding, coppicing, espalier — is a practical introduction to techniques that most gardeners assume are beyond their skill level. They are not. They require patience and a sharp pair of loppers, both of which are available to anyone.
How to Read a Gardening Book
The books on this list share something beyond their subject matter: they reward re-reading. A gardening book read in January, when you are desperate for green and willing to believe almost anything, is a different book when read in June, with the evidence of your own garden in front of you. The advice that seemed reasonable in winter — “plant Alchemilla mollis in partial shade” — reveals itself as optimistic when your own lady’s mantle has crisped to brown parchment in the afternoon sun.
The most useful gardening books are the ones you mark up. Write in the margins. Cross-reference. Note when you tried a particular technique and what happened. Note when a recommended plant turned out to be invasive in your climate, or when a supposedly difficult plant thrived with minimal attention. Your copy of a gardening book should look like a working document, not a display object. A pristine gardening book is a book that has not been used.
I keep a small notebook alongside the reference shelf — a ruled Moleskine, soft cover, the kind that fits in a pocket — where I record plant names encountered in the books, along with brief notes on cultivation and a checkmark if I’ve tried growing them. Over the years this notebook has become its own kind of garden record, a parallel narrative to the physical garden, tracking what I’ve attempted and what I’ve learned. Some entries have a single checkmark and no further notes, which usually means the plant died quickly. Others have multiple checkmarks, dates, observations: “Tetrapanax papyrifer — planted April 2018 in south-facing bed, now 3m, needs more room than anticipated, spectacular in September when backlit.”
Gardening is a practice, not a product. The books are tools for the practice. Choose a few that speak to your climate and your temperament. Read them slowly. Read them more than once. And then, most importantly, put the book down and go outside.
By The Editors.
