A tribute to the grandes dames of gardening — Beth Chatto and Penelope Hobhouse

There is no longer much point buying strictly practical gardening books, such as were a staple of the publishing industry in years gone by. Those colourful, cheery, cheap volumes have been superseded by trustworthy websites, such as that of the Royal Horticultural Society, which can quickly answer any query you have about cultivation, plant identification or pest damage.

Gardening books these days must offer something not to be found online, if readers are to shell out their precious British pounds: deep, hard-earned knowledge, elegant writing, attractive illustrations and, preferably, all three. This year, at least, there are a number that pass the test.

There hasn’t been a decent book on the notoriously elusive and subjective topic of garden scents for more than 20 years, so it is pleasant to be able wholeheartedly to recommend Scent Magic by Isabel Bannerman (Pimpernel, £30). Bannerman is best known as one half, with her husband, of a successful garden design team but, thanks to a rich cultural hinterland, she has also succeeded in writing a stylish, highly personal, scientifically illuminating account — part diary, part plant description — of her encounters with scented plants, both actual and in memory, through the course of one year. The photographs have the advantage of being all her own.

Equally readable, although more colloquial, is The Garden Jungle: Or Gardening to Save the Planet (Cape, £16.99) by the biologist Dave Goulson, best known for his sharp-witted, popular science books on bees. In this volume he considers all the common creatures in our gardens — from worms to moths — and appears to have a particular tenderness, I am happy to say, for earwigs and other disregarded insects. (On Goulson’s say-so, I plan to make ‘lagoons’ for hoverfly larvae.) Inevitably, in the environmental tradition de nos jours, the book contains its fair share of doom-crying.