Not since the second world war has there been such an army of kitchen gardeners marching back to the land – and related books sprouting on the shelves. Grow Your Own Veg by Carol Klein (Mitchell Beazley £16.99) has sold more than 68,000 copies, over four times as many as the next most popular gardening book (also on vegetables). Klein’s invaluable and enticingly illustrated guide is as straightforward as the title, with instructions on preparation of the ground, then individual vegetables – from the plain old spud to asparagus and artichokes.

Glamorous photography has also made its way to the muck heap in Ken Thompson’s Compost (Dorling Kindersley £12.99), which cheerfully devotes 185 pages to the art of producing the stuff. In go cereal packets, used tissues, prunings and lawn clippings, and out comes the gardener’s black gold. As Thompson signs off, “Even if you do everything wrong, you will still make decent compost eventually.” Heartening words for the compost worrier.

A Slice of Organic Life (Dorling Kindersley £16.99) goes a step further in the fashion for grow your own. Edited by Sheherazade Goldsmith, the wife of the Conservative’s green-guru Zac, it does not pretend to be thoroughly practical – how to keep ducks, for instance, covers only three pages – but would be a good present for those dreaming of growing their own veg, making bread and mixing up recipes for beeswax floor polish while staring out of the window at a country meadow.

Andy Garnett and Polly Devlin converted their dreams into reality and moved to the Somerset countryside more than 20 years ago. They bought Cannwood Meadow, next to their house, in 1983 and have given it over to colonisation by wildflowers. A Year in the Life of an English Meadow (Frances Lincoln £20) is a poetic record (in photographs, Devlin’s words and Garnett’s flower pressings) and tribute not only to their particular meadow but to an almost lost way of life before the widespread use of chemicals on the land.

Glittering literary prizes 2007

From hidden secrets to sizzling suspense, Peter Kemp kicks off the Christmas books selection by revealing the fiction that gripped him

• Celebrity festive favourites

• The Times Christmas choice: fiction

BACKGROUND

• The Sunday Times best books of 2007: biographies

• The Sunday Times best books of 2007: trees

• The Sunday Times best art books

• The Sunday Times best books of 2007: music

BACKGROUND

• The Sunday Times best books of 2007: sport

• The Sunday Times best books 2007: gardening

• Sunday Times best food books 2007

Related Internet Links

• Purchase books from Sunday Times Books First

• Times Online: Gardens

Related Links

• Gardening book of the year: Dream Gardens by Tania Compton and Andrew Lawson

• The Times Christmas choice: gardening

Hidcote Manor, probably one of Britain’s most famous and influential gardens of the 20th century, had its centenary this year. More than 100,000 visitors tramp around the 10 acres of Gloucestershire hilltop annually, and leave inspired to recreate the vistas, garden “rooms” and exuberant borders in their own plots; here there is something for everyone. The Garden at Hidcote by Fred Whitsey, with photographs by Tony Lord (Frances Lincoln £20), celebrates Hidcote’s creator (the dapper American, Major Lawrence Johnston, “a little dormouse of a man”) and the development of his masterpiece, which is currently being restored along Johnston’s original lines.

Christopher Lloyd was up there with Hidcote in terms of influence – both in his writing and in his expertly planted garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex. He was in the middle of writing about a subject close to his heart – Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners (BBC £20) – when he died last year, aged 84. Rather than let the unfinished work go to waste, a group of his garden-writer friends picked up the mantle and, much like filling in the holes in a colourful border at Dixter, have contributed their own essays. The quality of the individual contributors, such as Anna Pavord, Stephen Anderton and Mary Keen, makes up for the lack of the central solo in parts of the book – and there is a useful directory of exotic plants at the back.

The renowned plantswoman and photographer Valerie Finnis also died last year. Garden People: Valerie Finnis and the Golden Age of Gardening by Ursula Buchan (Thames & Hudson £16.95) chronicles her gardening life and those gardeners she photographed. Portrayed at home, usually with their dogs, they are generally of mature years, dressed in tweed, flat caps and sensible shoes. The book is an endearing chronicle of a lost age – when to be a well-known gardener was more about your work than having a youthful telly-friendly appearance.

Hatfield’s Herbal: The Secret History of British Plants by Gabrielle Hatfield (Allen Lane £17.99) has a similarly old-fashioned feel about it, althoughits allusions are to an era long before the advent of photography and aspirin, when plant-based medicines were all that was available.The book is sparsely illustrated with 19th-century black-and-white drawings, and Hatfield, a contemporary botanist and plant historian, covers remedies from agrimony to yew and the history of their use. The highly poisonous deadly nightshade, for example, was reputedly used by the ladies of ancient Rome to make their pupils dilate appealingly (hence its name of belladonna), while in the 19th century it was prescribed as a cure for whooping cough. Belladonna plasters were used in this country until the 1950s to relieve rheumatic pain.

At the end of a hard day’s work, The Faber Book of Gardens, edited by Philip Robinson (Faber £20), is perfect to dip into. Arranged chronologically from Eden to recent times, it is a charming compilation of poetry, essays and excerpts from literature that reflect the tastes of the eras. I especially like the 1946 extract from Harold Nicolson’s diary about Vita Sackville-West and their garden at Sissinghurst in Kent: “She wants to put in stuff which ‘will give a lovely red colour in autumn’. I wish to put in stuff which will furnish shape to the perspective. In the end we part, not as friends.” Somehow, they worked it out to create a garden of enduring beauty, visited by millions.

BESTSELLERS

1 Grow Your Own Veg by Carol Klein
(Mitchell Beazley) 68,330

2 The Allotment Book by AM Clevely
(Collins) 14,545

3 RHS Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers by Christopher Brickell
(Dorling Kindersley) 7,340

4 Alan Titchmarsh’s The Gardener’s Year by Alan Titchmarsh
(BBC) 6,815

5 Small Garden: Hundreds of Brilliant Ideas for Small Spaces by John Brookes
(Dorling Kindersley) 6,755

Bestsellers list prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-10/11/07

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist