The Sunday Times garden book of the year

The Kitchen Gardener: Grow Your Own Fruit and Veg by Alan Titchmarsh
BBC Books £20
What steadier hand to lead the nation into the veg patch than Alan Titchmarsh. As one would expect from such a pro, his book is accessibly written and light in tone, but packed with information and authoritative advice, all mouthwateringly presented. As well as the usual staples, he also strays into more exotic territory, showing you how to grow mung beans, blueberries, kohl rabi and cape gooseberries: all the world on a plate. I have made muddy boot trails indoors to consult it at various times over the summer, and it would be a great present for a beginner looking at a patch of bare ground wondering how on earth they are going to produce anything from it.

With the economic climate now as gloomy as last summer's washed-out wea-ther, growing your own dinner has become something of a patriotic duty, and books on how to grow fruit and vegetables are flying off the shelves and into the potting shed. This back-to-the-land austerity is nothing new for gardeners, of course, as Digging for Victory: Wartime Gardening with Mr Middleton (Aurum £9.99) proves. In the early 1940s, Middleton, with his chatty and informal style and sensible advice on raising as much food as possible in our gardens, was the BBC Home Service's equivalent of Alan Titchmarsh (see below), encouraging the nation to dig up its lawns, borders and tennis courts and fill them with cauliflowers and carrots. “These are critical times,” Middleton writes. “But we shall get through them, and the harder we dig for victory, the sooner will the roses be with us.”

Having looked through The RHS Encyclopedia of Roses by Charles and Brigid Quest-Ritson (Dorling Kindersley £25), you may find that you simply can't wait for those less frugal times, and that next year you have rather more rose bushes in your garden and a rather less money in your wallet than you bargained for. This comprehensive and compelling A-Z of nearly 2,000 species and cultivars includes the habits, origins and perfumes of this most popular of blooms, each of them photographed. At least you'll be able to save some money by not having to buy cut flowers in the summer.

For anyone who followed Monty Don around the globe in his recent 10-part BBC television series, his Around the World in 80 Gardens (Weidenfeld £20) offers you the chance to appreciate his choice of locations at greater leisure. As an armchair traveller, you don't even have to go in search of the TV remote control but can lose yourself in the individual essays on each garden. Here, Don manages to expand his thoughts and bring in critical, cultural, personal and historical observations that didn't make it into the television programmes. Perhaps, though, the book could have done without quite so many snaps of Don in quite so many places clad in the same blue shirt and trousers.

Peter Cox and Peter Hutchison are also intrepid travellers: very much in the tradition of the great plant-hunters of the past, they gather the seeds of rare plants from countries such as Turkey, China and Bhutan. Seeds of Adventure (Garden Art Press £35) covers their travels from 1962 to 2002, with each Peter writing different chapters. As well as providing records and photographs of the rare plants they have come across in their adventures, and scenes of local life in far-flung places, the book also has some wonderfully Boy's-Own humorous touches. When served with snake in China, for example, Hutchinson remarks: “It was a mass of tiny bones and the general sensation was of eating stewed knitting - with the needles left in.”

There are so many forms of water garden: landscapes with lakes, formal Islamic courtyards, islands, those on the coast and great schemes filled with fountains, such as Versailles or the Villa D'Este. Leslie Geddes-Brown picks some of the most impressive from around the world in her lavishly illustrated The Water Garden (Merrell £29.95). The text is like a lively and informative travel book, and transports the reader from the ancient temple gardens of Kyoto in Japan to a contemporary town garden in Islington.

Katherine Swift doesn't go further, geographically, than a few steps out of her back door in The Morville Hours (Bloomsbury £17.99). Instead, she takes a journey back in time to examine the history of the Shropshire garden that she tills, and of the village of Morville and its surrounding area. She also works through the horticultural year, using the hours of the divine office as the structure on which to hang her book. The writing is beautiful and evocative, for example when she describes “a perfumed May Day morning, when the whole world seems 16 again”.

There are only a few line drawings in Swift's book, but the Garden Photographer of the Year: Collection 1 (AA £25) is stuffed full of beautiful images of gardens and individual plants. This book is the fruit of the first International Garden Photographer of the Year awards, held last May at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. It's just the thing for a dreich winter's day.

Richard Reynolds has caused quite a stir this year with his rallying cry for people to claim unloved and uncultivated areas of land for their own horticultural endeavours. In Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries (Bloomsbury £14.99), he cites Gerald Winstanley and the 17th-century Diggers as the first guerrilla gardeners, after they took over a patch of common land in Surrey to grow vegetables. (Their horticultural rebellion didn't actually last too long: the plot was quickly dug over and the Diggers' tools smashed by local lords of the manor.) Reynolds and his cohorts are as concerned with brightening up roundabouts and central reservations (usually illegally) as they are with producing food, and the book's call to arms can sometimes seem rather too strident, with gardeners, known only by their numbers, throwing “seed bombs” shaped like pistols on to any wasteland that comes in view.

Reynolds doesn't quite answer some fundamental questions, either, such as who has any more right to impose their taste on a neglected patch than anyone else (and who is going to look after it after it has been done). But at least the man has passion and at least he wants to make our environment a better place. Who knows, by this time next year, we may all be following his example in our bid to grow our own.

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