Traditional British gardens are so rich in plants that it's no wonder we sit back after visiting one, gloriously stuffed, and say “Ahhh!” But after the Christmas pudding, one longs for nouvelle cuisine — those crisper, more modern gardens that can be such a relief. It's wonderful, then, to find two new books that genuinely try to show what modern gardens are about.

Christopher Bradley-Hole is one of Britain's top three or four garden designers and in Making the Modern Garden (Mitchell Beazley, £25/offer £22.50) he calmly and masterfully sets out his philosophy of garden-making.

From Quebec and its festival of gardens comes the book Hybrids: Reshaping the Contemporary Garden in Métis, edited by Lesley Johnstone (Blueimprint, £18.99/£17.09), in which a score of exhibitors explain their work. It's succinct, provocative stuff, without a word of arty waffle or enviro-babble.

Lovers of traditional gardening who feel that they have any inclination at all to like modern gardens ought to read either book, just to see what they are missing. So should artists in every other medium, to see what gardens can offer beyond double-digging.

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Christopher Lloyd's exotic garden was surely the pineapple upside-down cake of gardening. Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners (BBC Books, £20/£18) is a book he was working on when he died in 2005 and it has now been completed and expanded by others including, in very small part, me.

Will Giles's exotic garden in Norwich was going well before Christopher Lloyd's and from him comes the Encyclopaedia of Exotic Plants for Temperate Climates (Timber Press, £35/£31.50). Not surprisingly, Lloyd's book is more hands-on and how-to, but Giles's has much more on the use of houseplants outdoors, something Lloyd was only just starting to do. If you have the exotic bug you will probably want both books.

A plant that Lloyd's garden brought into the limelight was Impatiens tinctoria, a perfumed, elegant perennial sister of Busy Lizzies and of the proscribed weed Himalayan balsam. Impatiens is an up-and-coming genus and Raymond Morgan's Impatiens: The Vibrant World of Busy Lizzies, Balsams and Touch-Me-Nots (Timber Press, £20/ £18), is timely.

You won't find much on cultivation but it is somewhere to look up new and tempting beauties such as I. arguta and the suddenly-popular Blue Sky and parrot-faced Congo Cockatoo. Good old Timber Press; who else now publishes useful, not-too-botanical monographs for gardeners?

Every cook needs his Delia or his Jane Grigson, just as every gardener eventually needs his Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs (newly reprinted, David and Charles, £14.99/£13.49). It's a huge listing of hardy, woody plants to which you will return again and again to work out what that plant is, to see how big it gets, or when it flowers.

There are specialised shopping lists, too, for lime or shade tolerance, fragrance, upright habit, purple foliage — you name it. It would be a good present by which to be remembered. I was once given the 1974 edition which still sits, battered and beloved, in the glovebox, for days out.

For garden history, try The Arcadian Friends (Bantam, £25/£22.50), in which Tim Richardson explores the invention of the English landscape garden in the early 18th century, and the intellectual Whig versus Whig and Whig versus Tory agendas they symbolised; how the landscape garden grew out of geometric baroque gardens rather than sweeping them away as is always claimed; and how the best, most interesting landscape gardens had already been made when the gardening superstar Capability Brown came on the scene, “striving to be meaningless, to blot out complexity with a smothering pastoralism”. Well that's him told!

History à la Richardson is wonderfully readable and he has a penchant for delightfully complicated puns that left me longing for the next, but still it's not bedtime reading.

Better in bed would be The Faber Book of Gardens, edited by Philip Robinson (£20/£18), which offers delectable nuggets of garden thinking in poetry and prose, from Genesis to Thomas Jefferson to the poet Anna Akhmatova. Most of the entries are long enough to give you time to get sleepy, too, they're not just epigrams. It's a book for everybody, gardener or not.

This season has not been rich in general, how-to gardening books, but Helen Dillon's Garden Book (Frances Lincoln, £25/£22.50) would stand out in any company. It's one of those easy, conversational yet marvellously instructive books in the Christopher Lloyd tradition.

Dillon takes you through her garden, exploring plants and planting and generally letting you in on her attitude to gardening. She's honest, funny and down-to earth: definitely worth taking to bed.

Bestsellers 2007

1. Grow Your Own Veg by Carol Klein
Mitchell Beazley, £16.99
Book of the popular television series that got Britain digging up its lawns and planting food instead. Well plotted throughout.

2. The Vegetable and Herb Expert by D.G. Hessayon
Expert Books, £7.99

3. B&Q Outdoor Living by Nicholas Barnard and Ken Schept
Thames & Husdon, £16.98

4. The Yellow Book 2007: Gardens Open for Charity
National Gardens Scheme, £7.99

5. The Allotment Book by A.M. Cleverly
Collins, £17.99

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