Gardening doesn’t leave as much time as it should for catching up on reading. Yet gardening books and journals are the way for most of us to keep abreast of developments in planting style, garden design and general horticulture.

Every year I make two mistakes. Firstly I imagine that I’ll get through lots of reading on holiday in the summer. It never happens, of course. I go away with a pile of magazines and books, and end up looking at few of them – being too busy doing all the other things one does on holiday. One of which, of course, is visiting gardens – the only opportunity I really get. Norfolk, where we have taken our family fortnight every year for more than a decade, offers a good few excellent gardens – so there’s plenty to see. To say nothing of the birdlife – my other great enthusiasm – which keeps us occupied in between fish and chips, ice creams and sitting on the beach. Norfolk has a huge amount to recommend it as a holiday venue – our children have known nothing else, and don’t complain or show signs of tiring – but all those books come back largely unread.

The second mistake is similar (identical), but at the other end of the year. I have an idealised vision of Christmas, stretching lazily from Christmas Eve en famille at the cathedral (having finished our annual watching of John Masefield’s ‘The Box of Delights’) through to some time in mid-January. Candlelight, log fire, armchair, and that pile of books again – this time coupled with all the Christmas issues of gardening magazines. And, yet again, it fails to happen. Not because I’m not enjoying myself, but because I am busy doing loads of other equally enjoyable things.

The garden reading I do get through in the year is – like any other reading I do – squeezed into the minutes between bedtime and sleep, or snatched over breakfast before anyone else is up (a good time for magazine browsing), or possibly a few stolen moments on a day when it really is too wet to be outdoors.

There’s another error I commit annually as well: asking for more gardening books for Christmas. I never learn. In case you’re looking for some inspiration, here are three books I’d ask for this Christmas if I didn’t already have them…

Rhapsody In Green: A Novelist, An Obsession, A Laughably Small Excuse For A Garden, by Charlotte Mendelson (Kyle Books). Already a pick in many garden writers’ lists, this is a fantastic book about what you can do in next-to-no space, if you allow yourself to give in to a fanatical love of plants- specifically, edible crops. Why have one variety of tomato if you can have five? It’s not remotely a ‘how to’ book – but it’s infectious, engaging, funny, beautifully written (Mendelson is a novelist by trade) – and also a lovely book in design and feel.

The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the imagination, by Richard Mabey (Profile). Mabey is the true heir of naturalist-writers such as Gilbert White (whose biography he wrote), WH Hudson and Richard Jefferies. I’d gladly sacrifice most of the (so-called) ‘new nature writing’ if I could hold on to Richard Mabey. His latest book is a fascinating collection of writing about the relationships between plants, people, art and history. Tim Dee described the book in a Guardian review as “the summation of a lifetime of looking at plants and reflecting on them” – what more, given Mabey’s depth of knowledge and insight, could one ask for?

Container Theme Gardens, by Nancy J. Ondra (Storey). An absolute gem if you have planters to work with -as we do at Horatio’s Garden in Salisbury – and want to make the best of them. Ondra sets herself a strict rule of using only five plants, but manages to produce some fantastic and unusual combinations to suit styles and seasons. Sadly, her ‘Hummingbird Haven’ (Begonia boliviensis, Cuphea ignea, Fuchsia, Canna and Calibrachoa) won’t entice the diminutive birds across the Atlantic (the author is from Pennsylvania) – but would work brilliantly as a tropical scheme all the same.

Finally, a journal to recommend. Rake’s Progress is a rather glorious thing – apparently available in selected shops, but easily obtained direct from the publisher www.rakesprogressmagazine.com. It’s full of fairly sumptuous photography and terrific words – all printed on heavyweight paper, which makes it a ‘coffee table magazine’ if such there is. Treat yourself to a subscription.