The Kew Gardener's Guide to Growing Perennials

The Kew Gardener's Guide to Growing Perennials by Richard Wilford / Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

This is a good general guide to gardening with perennials, as you'd expect with a book produced by the superb Kew Gardens. It would make an excellent gift to a new gardener, but is of less use to an experienced one, who would probably already have a library of books covering the same ground as well as knowledge gained through practice and through visiting other gardens, the latter always being a great source of new ideas. The publishers describe as "entry level".

The Kew guide is divided into Projects - chapters, really - on different topics such as gravel gardening, container growing, unifying a border and so on, with each project also focusing on a number of individual plants in greater depth. These are mostly bread-and-butter plants familiar in British gardens - though a handful are perhaps slightly less familiar, baptisia and macleaya for instance - but I think all would be readily available, if not at always at a garden centre then an online nursery would supply them. In the Table of Contents they are all called by their common names, but alternative names are also given, along with the Latin species, so there should be no problems identifying them. A colour drawing is given with each flower description, but there's also an inset photograph.

There's a chapter on troubleshooting plant problems which, I was pleased to see, gives more space to dealing organically with issues than to chemical solutions, which it cautions against using too readily. Propagation and retaining seedheads are covered and a final chapter gives advice on seasonal gardening; there is also an adequate index.

My copy, provided by NetGalley, was a e-book, so I can't comment on the physical quality of the book, but it  looks well-produced and the hardback edition should be nice to handle. All-in-all, a nice guide, out usefully in time for the Christmas market and, if you have a new gardener in the family, you won't go far wrong with choosing this book for them.