Terry Walton, author of The Allotment Almanac (Bantam, £15), has been gardening on the same allotment site in the Rhondda for well over half a century, on his dad's plot and then on his own. Since retiring from his day job he's become the resident gardener on several radio shows.

In gardening, long-experienced amateurs have a particular kind of authority, neither better than nor inferior to that of professionals, born of enthusiasm and trial and error rather than theory, and just as indispensable.

Walton's book follows the familiar format of month-by-month advice, punctuated with anecdotes from the allotments, past and present. So along with directions for starting parsnips off indoors, there's an account of how seniority earns the plot-holders on Terry's site the privilege of gradually moving down the hill. It doesn't claim to be a complete how-to manual for beginners, but gardeners of any level of experience will find it charming and dippable.

On the other hand, a drop of theory, properly applied, can illuminate the teachings of personal experience. There have been several books which aim to give gardeners a grasp of the essentials of horticultural science, but the Royal Horticultural Society's Botany For Gardeners (Mitchell Beazley, £14.99) is by far the best I've seen.

For one thing - and it's quite a big thing for those of who spent our school biology lessons reading comics under the desk - it's an inviting volume. A sturdy hardback, attractively laid out, not over-large in either format or length, it's full of excellent, crisp illustrations on quality paper.

The text is in readable, useable chunks, but at the same time it manages not to comes across as an "idiot's guide," which can be just as off-putting.

The aim throughout is that the information should be of practical use to gardeners, allowing us to better understand what our plants and soils are up to, and how our actions affect them.

For a commendably self-explanatory title you can't beat The Royal Horticultural Society What Plant Where Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley, £25). In these 400 colour pages you will find a plant suitable for just about any spot or any purpose. There are sections examining plants that are slug or rabbit proof, plants for allergy sufferers or sandy soils, plants for places with too little or too much shade, and so on. And a welcome sign of the times: the book doesn't entirely overlook food plants.

I was delighted to receive Growing Up The Wall by Sue Fisher (Green Books, £9.95), as I've been waiting for someone to write a British book about "vertical vegetables" - that is, making use of the usually wasted space all of us have available, no matter how small our patch of land. As well as walls, Fisher also covers growing edible plants on roofs and in containers for patios and balconies.

Her timing's good - there are currently lots of new products on the market, and lots of new ideas for DIY, and she's up to date with them all. She gives properly detailed advice, assuming little or no existing knowledge, on all aspects of choosing, erecting and using wall-growing equipment, traditional and novel, home-made and manufactured. Whether you're going to spend a small fortune on buying specialist containers, or spend literally nothing using recycled materials, or somewhere in between, you'll find the guidance you need.

Very few books, in my experience, contain recipes for day-lily fritters or acorn shortbread, which makes Food From Your Forest Garden by Martin Crawford and Caroline Aitken (Green Books, £9.95) the ideal present for any adventurous cook or gardener. However many cookbooks your hard-to-buy-for uncle already owns, it's surely reasonable to suppose that he doesn't yet know how to make gnocchi with
Solomon's Seal.

Aimed at those who follow the permaculture, or "forest garden," philosophy of sustainable growing, and who want to know how to eat the unfamiliar crops that other books tell them how to grow, it'll also be of great value to anyone with a general interest in unusual fruit and veg, or indeed in foraging wild food. Even if you only grow ornamental plants, you'll find many of them discussed here.

Planting Plans For Your Kitchen Garden by Holly Farrell (Spring Hill, £14.99) is a clever concept, which I think will be of considerable help to anyone taking on a vegetable patch for the first time.

For those newcomers daunted by the blank canvas of an empty plot, Farrell's modular approach, using beds 1 metre x 2, allows a garden to be brought into productivity bit-by-bit as knowledge and ambition grow, and as time and money allow. She also provides plans for dozens of ready-made modules, so that if, for instance, you want to grow veg for Christmas, or dedicate a bed to crops for stir-frying, you just have to follow the instructions for that module.

Did you know that Michael Foot coined the phrase "Dig for Victory"? Historian and gardener Ursula Buchan reckons he "almost certainly" did in this year's most stimulating work of Horticultural History.

A Green And Pleasant Land (Hutchinson, £20) is an exhaustively researched, possibly definitive, and occasionally myth-dispelling account of the role of gardeners, amateur and professional, in World War II.

But my gardening book of the year is Abundance: How To Store And Preserve Your Garden Produce by Alys Fowler (Kyle Books, £16.99), probably the best comprehensive guide to food preservation currently in print.

Covering how to grow and harvest crops with storage in mind, followed by chapters on dehydrating, pickling, fermenting, salting, jamming, bottling, and freezing, Fowler provides enough science to give readers confidence. The general advice is more detailed than usual, and the specific recipes, drawn from around the world, include many I've never seen before. Of course she tells you how to make green tomato chutney - the book would be fraudulent otherwise - but she also gives instructions for homemade tabasco sauce.