The best of this year’s gardening books

What makes a garden is an increasingly pressing question, in the light of what Jinny Blom, in her witty and wise What Makes a Garden: A Considered Approach to Garden Design (Frances Lincoln, £35), calls ‘hairshirt hubris’. By that she means the refusal of some gardeners to call any native plant a weed or any slug or aphid a pest. She wishes to inject a little sense into what has become an ill-tempered dialogue between ‘traditional gardeners’ and the self-deniers who cannot see gardens as anything but parcels of sacrosanct earth, in which any major intervention by a human is to be regretted. But to Blom, garden-making is one antidote to the modern curse of solipsism. ‘Gardens insist we care for them as much, or more, than ourselves.’

She started working life as a psychotherapist, and knows a great deal about the healing and regenerative properties of gardens. Twenty years ago, she turned to making gardens for a living and runs a well-regarded international design practice, based in London. This book is part memoir, part design manual, part exploration of the senses and part reflection on landscape and the designer’s art. Crucially, it is attractively presented and enhanced by sparkling prose. You could read it like a novel, if it were not in a coffee-table format; but the apt and beautiful illustrations and photographic images, with their wide cultural references, are integral, so you’ll just have to read it on your knee.

Unlike some garden designers, Blom loves plants and understands the dynamic of plant growth. I fancy she would get on well with the Pryors. Francis Pryor is the (now retired) archaeologist who discovered and excavated the internationally renowned Bronze Age settlement at Flag Fen on the industrial outskirts of Peterborough.