“OH LORD, MAKE MY garden sustainable and eco-friendly – but not yet!” runs the cry of so many gardeners, worrying that their practical and aesthetically pleasing garden may be A Bad Thing. Absolution is at hand in Ken Thompson’s reissued No Nettles Required: The Truth about Wildlife Gardening (Eden Project Books, £6.99/ offer £6.29).

Thompson is a scientist, and in his amused and ironic style he debunks so much of the tosh written about wildlife gardening, substituting common sense backed by research. “All gardens are good for wildlife, and encouraging wildlife is entirely compatible with ordinary gardening, costs next to nothing and is completely effortless,” he says. The main principles? No chemicals, plenty of trees and berries, and plenty of insect(as opposed to wind) pollinated plants.

But why not look at gardens from the other side? Verlyn Klinkenborg (a name I long to be a pseudonym and anagram, but not so) has produced a paperback entitled Timothy’s Book: Notes of an English Country Tortoise (Portobello, £7.99/£7.19), a philosophic journal from the standpoint of Gilbert White’s tortoise in 18th-century Selbourne. It’s surreal, funny and sometimes achingly sad. Wise old Timothy obviously knew which way the Darwinian winds were blowing, too: “The first condition of beauty is survival.”

In poetic mood you might read Alice Oswald’s anthology The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Faber, £8.99/£8.09). It is not garden poetry – there is no such thing, if it’s to be serious – but Oswald offers a wonderful sense of gardens and landscape and even plants in a greenhouse: Cucumbers, full of themselves, The long green lungs of that still air.

There is nothing so down-to-earth as David Hessayon’s Expert books, which continue to sell in greater numbers than any other gardening books. Here is the blunt but incredibly useful antidote to No Nettles Required – an up-to-date version of The Pest and Weed Expert (Expert Books, £7.99/ £7.19). It’s simple, well-illustrated and even dares to tell you which wicked chemicals will kill which nasty pests. Invaluable, but watch out, Timothy!

Sweeter and more joined-up advice can be found in Cuttings: A Year in the Garden with Christopher Lloyd (Guardian Books, £18.99/ £17.09), an anthology of his newspaper journalism from 1989 to his death in 2006. Lloyd is crisp, witty and understands what one wants to know about a plant, instead of all the long-winded basics. The royalties go to the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, which must raise funds to preserve Lloyd’s house and garden; that has to be a good thing.

Simpler and more didactic is Chris Beardshaw’s How Does Your Garden Grow (Dorling Kindersley, £20/£18), a whistle-stop tour through plant science. The tone is rather cumbersome, but it’s balanced by tales of young twinkley-eyes’ childhood and his granny. Masses of pictures, and a book you might want to consult again afterwards.

The revised edition of Joy Larkcom’s Oriental Vegetables: The Complete Guide for the Gardening Cook (Frances Lincoln, £14.99/£13.50) will have vegetable gardeners running back to the shelf again and again. There’s everything from pak choi to amaranth, with details of how easy it is to grow, and how to cook it. If you like to grow oriental vegetables at all, it is indispensable.

Clive Nichols’s The Art of Flower and Garden Photography (Argentum, £20/£18) will have you drooling at his extraordinary close-ups and magical landscapes; truly clever stuff. The point is to help would-be photographers, but it is not exclusively technical.

Just as glamorous is the English version of Infinitely Beautiful: The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm (Nicolai, £35/ £31.50), edited by Thomas Weiss, a long-winded German way of saying that here is a book about the stunning and little-known landscape gardens around Dessau. Wörlitz is a vast, symbolic confection of lakes and temples, house and synagogue, amphitheatre and artificial volcanic island (occasionally it erupts). The Luisium is the sweetest chocolate-box house and landscape one could imagine. They are gradually being restored, so this is the time to visit. This book will twist your arm.

Ursula Buchan’s Garden People: Valerie Finnis and the Golden Age of Gardening (Thames & Hudson, £16.95/ £15.25) is a brief photo-history of late 20th-century garden luminaries, as seen through the camera of Finnis, who sailed through shoals of rich and famous gardeners with her Rolleiflex, snapping them for posterity. It’s fascinating and sometimes hilarious – the picture of Rhoda, Lady Birley, clutching her loppers and sporting an absurd hat will never be forgotten – and Finnis’s plant portraits are superb. But the abiding memory of all these old people, posed mid-prune in their borders, is that they look so weary of gardens: the dour, elephant-legged Margery Fish, the jodhpured Vita Sackville-West, the spitting image of Alan Rickman in drag. All look as if they have just been asked some embarrassing question for the tenth time.

Of all garden gazetteers, The Good Gardens Guide (Frances Lincoln, £14.99/ £13.50) is still best. This year’s edition marks a new departure and I’ll have to have it: pictures at last, in colour (and more photographs on the new website). Smaller too, so it fits better in the glovebox.

Buy the books here

Celebrity choice: Duchess of Northumberland, gardening aristocrat

I’ll be reading Ian August’s THE MAKING OF THE ALNWICK GARDEN. It will remind me of the challenges we faced in developing the garden – a project that no one thought would work. It will give me an added incentive to complete the final phase of such a challenging project, and I hope I’ll learn from all my mistakes.

The Poison Diaries by Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, is published by Pavilion Books at £14.99

Reader choice: LE GRAND MEAULNES by Alain-Fournier, as I will be in France and want to read a classic French novel. I think it will perfectly suit lazy afternoons in our petit jardin. Dorothy Haik, Tyrone, Northern Ireland

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