WHEN ALL the gardening world is focused on plants for drought, it's good to find a book for those who garden in the cold and wetter parts of the north.

Garden Plants for Scotland (Frances Lincoln £25/offer £22.50) hits the spot nicely. Kenneth Cox and Raoul Curtis-Machin know that climate well enough (Cox is part of the Glendoick Cox family of nurserymen, who have been collecting and growing rhododendrons for three generations) and so if a plant figures here, even a variety of rose, then you can be pretty sure it's going to do well north of the border and in the soggy, blasted Pennines. So keen are they on reliability that they have set up their own notional bone-hardiness rating in defiance of the Royal Horticultural Society's southern take on hardiness, and also their own Scottish Garden Award, similar to the RHS's Award of Garden Merit, for their best 500 plants, chosen after consultation with experts throughout Scotland. There are lists of plants “resistant” to deer and rabbits too - there's brave!

But one poor summer does not mean the South East is back to 1950s weather. The Dry Gardening Handbook (Thames & Hudson, £29.95/ £26.96) is just the job for gardeners coping with serious drought in Essex or London. Maybe it has rather a Mediterranean focus, misleadingly emphasised by the photographs, and there are plants here I would not expect to do brilliantly in Britain, but it certainly offers some new ideas to hungry plantsmen and it's packed with useful information. Good for England and even better for second homes in southern Europe.

For the dark nights, a broad lap might support Plantsman's Paradise: Travels in China (Garden Art Press £39.95/£35.96) by Roy Lancaster, charting his travels through China's botanical riches between 1979-89. This new edition has vastly more colour photographs and makes a wonderful visual portrait of rural China then (how the world changes) - of landscapes, agriculture, temples, plants. Lancaster's voice is audible throughout, full of honest, astonished enthusiasm. Every page will have a keen gardener saying, so that's where that comes from! A book to tell people you really want.

Better for bedtime is Diana Ross's Gardeners (Frances Lincoln, £14.99/ £13.49), a collection of interviews made over the years for the magazine Hortus. It's a book about people, not plants, about why they like gardens and plants, and what there is to be got out of garden-making. Some people you will know from outside horticulture - James Lovelock, Lucinda Lambton, Penelope Lively - and others are in the mainstream of gardening - Beth Chatto, Dan Pearson, Hugh Johnson and Roy Lancaster. Every one will charm you, and Ross paints their setting delightfully.

More ashamedly crepuscular is The Bedside Book of the Garden (Expert Books, £12.99/£11.69) by Dr David Hessayon, author of the bestselling “Expert” books. Suddenly this most practical of writers has come up with this rather clunky attempt at a Schott's Miscellany of gardening for ladies who like a little gold on their dust jackets. How do bats steer, how to burn logs, what is a woman's place or a sarcophagus - it's all here. What a far cry this all is from Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food (Allen Lane, £16.99/£15.29), not a book about gardens or even gardening, but a powerful and compelling condemnation of processed and synthetic food that will have every gardener, organic or not, reaching for a spade and a packet of vegetable seed.

William Robinson's The Wild Garden (1870) is still a bible (ie: sound, valued, but not always read) for gardeners who like their gardens to look natural. So it is good to have Richard Bisgrove's William Robinson: The Wild Gardener (Frances Lincoln, £30/£27), and to learn that despite Robinson's infamous, angry tirades against pancake-flat, intricately patterned parterres, he actually loved subtropical planting. How he would have cheered the late Christopher Lloyd's exotic garden. His career as a successful journalist and editor is all there too, and the story of his own garden at Gravetye Manor.

Again in a historical vein is Helena Attlee's Gardens of Portugal (Frances Lincoln, £30/£27). Attlee has been a regular co-host of the Times garden tours. Off we go through 20 historic gardens, a blend of European and Moorish traditions, never far from camellias, citrus trees, cool water tanks and coloured tile-work. The glorious Parque de Serralves has to be seen to be believed - a 1930's pink Deco palace, with green lawns and hedges and wide pink paths.

Where would the gardener's year be without a specialist book or two from Timber Press. Who but they, now, publish readable monographs for gardeners, as opposed to cripplingly expensive dry, botanists' tomes? For the single-minded enthusiast, comes Saxifrages (£35/£31.50) by Malcolm McGregor and Lilacs: a Gardener's Encyclopaedia by John Fiala (£35/£31.50) - the latter revised and updated by Freek Vrugtman. Specialist these books may be, but it's good to know they are there as a source to be consulted, say, on breeding or propagation, as well as the different species themselves.

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