Why Would a Blog Share a List of the Best Gardening Books?
Having the best gardening tips available 24/7 from your smartphone or iPhone is truly incredible, we know. That’s ultimately why we created YardSurfer.com. But sometimes we don’t want to read on our phones, do we? We want the smell of paper pages and the solitude of being inaccessible. That’s where have gardening books come in. We still want you to know what the best gardening books available to you are so that if you want to leave your phone or laptop inside, and sip tea in your back yard, you can.
Click any of the book images below to conveniently purchase the book from Amazon.com.
Picture yourself sitting under your pergola, sipping an ice-cold lemonade, reading a book. Not just any book. A book that opens your mind to the possibilities for your garden this year. The weather is perfect, a bit warm but you’re in the shade, so it feels just right.
Let’s make that vision a reality.
Picking a Great Gardening Book
All of us are at different stages in our gardening hobbies. Some of us are beginner gardeners, some of us are advanced gardeners. We’ve compiled a list that has something for everyone. If you’re a beginner but have high aspirations, pick up the holy grail of gardening books… the legend the myth! The Vegetable Gardner’s Bible.
No matter where you live, this thick book has information for your gardening region.
But as we all know, there isn’t just one type of garden. And there’s not just one type of plant.
What do you want to do with your garden?
Are you looking to grow vegetables that you can eat? Do you want the most beautiful blooming flowers on the block? Or are you super eco-conscious, looking to explore the realms of hydroponics and vertical gardening?
Every question matters. You won’t be satisfied with your gardening book if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Spend some time sitting down and mapping out your vision for the next 1-2 years. Ask yourself what you care most about. Start there.
Our Comprehensive List of Gardening Books
No matter what you decide, let us know what you think of these books. If you’ve already read them feel free to leave a comment with your list of pro’s and con’s below in the comments section.
YardSurfer appreciates the opinions of our readers. Without further adieu, here is our list of books you might pick up this spring as you begin to plant.
| IMAGE | PRODUCT | FEATURES | PRICE |
|---|---|---|---|
 | The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, 2nd Edition. | • Accessible language • Full-Color Photography | |
 | Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden: Grow, Harvest, and Arrange Stunning Seasonal Blooms | • Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden • A perfect gift | |
 | Gardenlust: A Botanical Tour of the World’s Best New Gardens Hardcover | • An extraordinary collection • Beautiful colored photographs. | |
 | Hydroponics: Gardening – 2 books in 1 | • Advantages of Hydroponics • Pests and Tests | |
 | The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season | • Works for Every Gardening Zone • A Customized Gardening Journal | |
 | The Well-Tended Perennial Garden | • Dozens Of New Cultivars • Scores Of New Photographs And Illustrations | |
 | The Grumpy Gardener: An A to Z Guide from the Galaxy’s Most Irritable Green Thumb | • Definitive gardening advice • Valuable tips for planting, troubleshooting, and growing flowers | |
 | Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty | • Pesticide-free pest-control measures • Composting heaps and bins |
Our Pick for the Best Gardening Book for Beginners.
The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, 2nd Edition.
Everything you loved about the first edition of The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible is still here: friendly, accessible language; full-color photography; comprehensive vegetable specific information in the A-to-Z section; ahead-of-its-time commitment to organic methods; and much more.
Now, Ed Smith is back with a 10th Anniversary Edition for the next generation of vegetable gardeners. New to this edition is coverage of 15 additional vegetables, including an expanded section on salad greens and more European and Asian vegetables. Readers will also find growing information on more fruits and herbs, new cultivar photographs in many vegetable entries, and a much-requested section on extending the season into the winter months. No matter how cold the climate, growers can bring herbs indoors and keep hardy greens alive in cold frames or hoop houses.
The impulse to grow vegetables is even stronger in 2009 than it was in 2000, when Storey published The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible. The financial and environmental costs of fossil fuels raise urgent questions: How far should we be shipping food? What are the health costs of petroleum-based pesticides and herbicides? Do we have to rely on megafarms that use gasoline-powered machinery to grow and harvest crops? With every difficult question, more people think, “Maybe I should grow a few vegetables of my own.” This book will continue to answer all their vegetable gardening questions.
Best Gardening Book for Planting Flowers
Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden: Grow, Harvest, and Arrange Stunning Seasonal Blooms
This beautiful guide to growing, harvesting, and arranging gorgeous blooms year-round provides readers with vital tools to nurture a stunning flower garden and use their blossoms to create show-stopping arrangements.
Best Gardening Book for Inspiration or Rekindling Your Garden Love
Gardenlust: A Botanical Tour of the World’s Best New Gardens Hardcover
A steep hillside oasis in Singapore, a garden distinguished by shape and light in Marrakech, a haunting tree museum in Switzerland—these are just a few of the extraordinary outdoor havens visited in Gardenlust. In this sumptuous global tour of modern gardens, intrepid plant expert Christopher Woods spotlights 50 modern gardens that push boundaries and define natural beauty in significant ways. Featuring both private and public gardens, this journey makes its way from the Americas and Europe to Australia and New Zealand, with stops in Asia, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Along the way, you’ll learn about the people, plants, and stories that make these iconic gardens so lust-worthy. As inspiring as it is insightful, Gardenlust will delight your passion for garden inspiration—and the many places it grows.
Best Gardening Book for the Environment
Hydroponics: Gardening – 2 books in 1
Book 1: Hydroponics: How To Start Your Own Hydroponic Garden and Grow Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit
This book contains information on the what and why of growing your foods without soil!
Hydroponics has been used in commercial farming for decades but many home gardeners still rely on the whims of the soil for their plants. Not only is this outdated it can also be extremely expensive! Why waste your money on the soil when there’s a much better choice. Hydroponics is better for your plants and will help you grow more, it even works in small spaces and indoors. The word hydroponics comes from the Latin term and loosely translates as working water. While many will assume this means your plants are dangling directly into the water this is only one method available. Hydroponics is much more than just suspending your plants and running water underneath them.
To be successful with it, you need to know how plants grow and how to spot those common problems unique to the method. A hydroponic garden is not only fruitful it’s also a far more interesting way to work. Your friends and family will be amazed by what appears to be a magical system to grow your own foods without soil. Learn all you need to know to get started, even if you’re just planning on testing it out with some strawberries. This book is for you. Packed with information such as pest control, different mediums, and why hydroponic methods will work for almost any crop.
Book 2: Gardening: How to Get Started With Your Own Organic Vegetable Garden
Gardening has Never Been Easier
Love gardening?
Hate chemicals?
Are you looking for a comprehensive guide that will help you to set up your own organic vegetable garden?
This book will give you a crash course on what it takes to start growing your own organic produce. This book contains information on plants, soil, tools and troubleshooting tips on how to get started as an organic gardener.
7 Reasons Why You Should Start a Garden
- Commercial Produce is Laced with a Huge Variety of Chemicals
- These Chemicals are Incredibly Harmful to us and the Environment
- Growing Your Own Products is the Only Way of Knowing Exactly What is in Your Food
- It Will Change Your Way of Looking at Food and You’ll Live a Much Healthier Life
- You are Doing Something Good for the Environment
- It’s Good for Your Budget, and Good for Your Family
- Gardening is a Great Way to Stay in Shape and Feel more Connected to the World Around You
Best Gardening Book for Planting and Growing Vegetables
The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season
Whether you’re a seasoned gardener determined to increase crop yields or starting your very first vegetable garden, the Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook will help you manage your schedule and prioritize what’s important. Detailed weekly to-do lists break gardening down into simple and manageable tasks so that you always know what needs to be done and when to do it, from starting seeds and planting strawberries to checking for tomato hornworms and harvesting carrots. Enjoy a bountiful harvest with this organized and stress-free approach to gardening.
Best Gardening Book for Planting and Pruning
The Well-Tended Perennial Garden
Since its original publication twenty years ago, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden has helped home gardeners successfully plan, plant, and tend their gardens. Now Tracy Di-Sabato-Aust’s trusty advice and reassuring tone are back and better than ever in this completely revised new edition. Novice and experienced gardeners alike will benefit from Tracy’s thorough details on the essential practices of perennial care—included deadheading, pinching, and thinning—along with growing information for new species and cultivars, on-trend garden design advice, a monthly planting and maintenance schedule, and details on native plants and gardening for wildlife. The Well-Tended Perennial Garden is a must-have ally in the quest for a beautiful, well-maintained garden.
The Most Comprehensive and Entertaining Gardening Book
The Grumpy Gardener: An A to Z Guide from the Galaxy’s Most Irritable Green Thumb
Gardeners from across the country have turned to Southern Living Senior Garden Editor Steven Bender – known affectionately as “The Grumpy Gardener” – for his keen knowledge and gardening know-how with equal doses sarcasm and sidesplitting humor for nearly 35 years. Finally, the collected wit and wisdom of the magazine’s most irreverent and beloved columnist can be found in a single A – Z volume, providing gardeners from coast-to-coast with his valuable tips for planting, troubleshooting, and growing flowers, vegetables, shurbs, trees and more, all delivered in his signature cantankerous style.
Sidebars throughout the book – “Ask Grumpy” – help readers tackle common garden problems (“How do I get ride of little house ants?”), and readers from the past 35 years take part in the book when Grumpy shares his favorite reader’s responses to some of his advice, his favorite rules for gardening, and Q & A’s covering your favorite plants and flowers are all inside. Additionally, beautiful line-drawings and illustrations throughout make the book as beautiful to look at as well as entertaining to read.
The Grumpy Gardener is sure to become the most trusted tool in your gardening shed!
The Best Gardening Book for Creative Companion Planting
Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty
Fight garden pests and increase your yields the natural way with this tried and true technique!
Planting vegetables and flowers together is one of the oldest ways to create a healthy, bountiful garden; but there’s more to the method than you might think. Vegetables Love Flowers walks you through the ins and outs of companion planting, from how it works to which plants go together and how to grow the best garden for your climate.
Alongside gorgeous garden photography, you’ll also learn about:
- Seed-starting, growing, and harvesting
- How to make garden flower bouquets, with “recipes” for various arrangements
- How to attract beneficial creatures to pollinate your garden and prey on its pests
- Pesticide-free pest-control measures
- Composting heaps and bins
With the right information and some careful planning, you can help your plants thrive—and beautify your garden in the process
What to Look For In a Gardening Book?
By now, we think you are convinced to get a good gardening book. But which one to choose? Not every book will suit every gardener.
Here is a list of factors you should consider while choosing a book on gardening for yourself.
1. Useful Illustrations
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This is the finest way to explain why you should choose a gardening book with good illustrations.
Theoretical knowledge is important, but wouldn’t it be considerably more tedious to read a book that doesn’t show how to perform things?
Gardening necessitates practicals, and most ways may be easily decoded if the writer demonstrates to us how to perform specific gardening tasks through infographics. Hence, go for a gardening book containing many easy-to-decipher images and charts.
2. Lists and Definitions
This is critical for all gardeners, regardless of skill level (specifically for novices). A gardening book would be useless without precise definitions and explanations.
We usually read such books to acquire new ideas for gardening initiatives and understand different aspects of gardening. But if we don’t figure out what the writer is attempting to communicate, all of our efforts will be for naught.
Therefore, a good gardening book should include terminology definitions and a list of various parts of gardening, ideas for new gardening activities, step-by-step instructions, and so on.
3. Subject and Format
With the availability of online platforms, obtaining information in various formats is no longer a difficult endeavor.
However, certain formats, such as diagrams, infographics, and sophisticated charts, will score higher in an actual book alongside extensive explanations. As a result, purchase a gardening book that discusses these aspects.
4. Indoor vs. Outdoor Gardening
There are significant differences between indoor and outdoor gardening. So, find a gardening book relevant to what you want to understand.
Choose a book that is written about your particular topic of choice. This is because a book on growing vegetables from seeds is unlikely to assist you in figuring out how to propagate blueberries indoors.
However, you can also look for books that cover indoor and outdoor gardening. Such texts, however, will lack in-depth information on both subjects.
5. Plant Types
Whether new to gardening or a seasoned master, you’ll want a gardening guide that includes different plant varieties, their characteristics, purposes, and methods for cultivating and caring for them.
The book should also address any queries you have that you didn’t realize you had. A notable example of such a book is “The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible,” which includes the name of the vegetable, its characteristics, where to grow it, and other information.
6. Experience Level
Not every gardening book is suitable for everyone. Before choosing a gardening book, consider your level of knowledge.
For example, suppose you are just learning to cultivate various vegetables in the summer. In that case, a book covering the art of creating a modern urban garden may be too difficult to understand.
So, go slowly and steadily up the gardening ladder with the help of the correct book at the right time.
FAQs
You can learn all the crucial aspects of gardening from a good gardening book. These books cover everything from selecting the right soil to the right kind of crop for your locality.
So, if you are planning to start your gardening journey, you can refer to any of the books listed above as per your expertise.
The phrase “organic” refers to something derived from or related to biological substances. So, “organic gardening” refers to the cultivation of crops utilizing gardening materials from nature, such as natural compost, living mulch, and so on.
Furthermore, organic farming foregoes synthetic chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers.
There are so many veggies that are easy to grow. Especially if you are a novice, you should look forward to starting your vegetable gardening with these vegetables.
• Radish
• Kale
• Lettuce
• Green bean
• Pea
• Carrot
• Cucumber
• Sweet chard
• Beet
• Zucchini
Following are some vegetables you should never grow side by side.
• Beans
• Beats
• Asparagus
• Cucumber
• Cabbage
• Peas
• Soybeans
• Tomatoes
There is a wide range of resources available online as well as offline that can impact in-depth knowledge of gardening. For instance, you can refer to offline books, audiobooks, podcasts, Youtube videos, gardening blogs, talk to a seasoned gardener, or attend gardening workshops.
If you’re thinking about buying a gardening book, choose one based on your skill level. For example, if you already know about various veggies that grow well in your area, purchase a gardening book that discusses growing, caring for, harvesting, and storing various vegetables.
