VERY little of Caroline Foley's new history of allotments is actually about allotments - and that's quite deliberate. The author's declared aim in Of Cabbages and Kings (Frances Lincoln, £20) is to remind us that allotments, like many valuable things, were "immensely hard to gain but would be so easy to lose."

Foley goes back as far as the Norman conquest to show how the people of this country became landless and have spent the centuries since struggling to regain the common land of which they'd been dispossessed.

Along the way she provides as lively and concise an account of the Peasant's Revolt as I've ever read - along with the Swing Riots, various enclosures and two world wars - before focusing on the current era and the allotment revival of the 21st century.

Unlike some previous political histories of allotments, this one is written for the general reader and it is as fascinating a read as it is an important one.

Anyone who has a plot, or longs for one, should use this marvellous book to better understand the movement they are a part of, the bloody and protracted class warfare that made allotments possible and how that which is fought for in one generation must always be defended by the next.

There's the usual amount of down-to-earth detail in Grow Your Own, Eat Your Own by Bob Flowerdew (Kyle Books, £15.99) that makes it such a valuable guide to harvesting and storing your produce and processing it in various ways to take advantage of gluts.

The book also discusses the specifics of raising crops intended for different uses - strawberries for jamming, for instance, are better grown in full sun, while those to be eaten fresh thrive in partial shade.

Pete Cassidy's candid photos deserve a mention. They are not prettied-up but honest pictures of a real working garden, kitchen and shed, in perfect keeping with Flowerdew's friendly and sometimes eccentric writing style.

Handsomely illustrated and bound, RHS Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener by Caroline Holmes (Mitchell Beazley, £14.99) is an ideal gift for gardeners who cook and cooks who garden.

Enjoyably browsable, but practical as well, it covers the history, cultivation and uses of dozens of herbs, from the familiar to the exotic which are suitable for a big garden, a bedsit windowsill or anything in between.

If any of your relatives are handy with a hammer, they'd love to get Spike Carlsen's The Backyard Homestead Book of Building Projects (Storey, £17.99) for Christmas. Here are 76 garden-related items to make, ranging in complexity and ambition from herb-drying racks and plant supports, through beehives and tool racks, right up to root cellars and polytunnels.

The admirably precise and easily followed instructions will give confidence and inspiration to anyone even moderately competent at DIY while the rest of us can spend a pleasant winter fantasising about jobs we'll never quite get round to attempting. It's originally a US book so many of the names of things are different but those which can't be deduced from context can be translated with the help of a quick internet image search.

Gardening books for beginners can sometimes seem a little intimidating, with their urgent lists of chores to be completed. The Gardener's Year (Dorling Kindersley, £20) is arranged in four seasons, which may be less overwhelming than the usual "month-by-month" format.

Alongside reminders of seasonal tasks, this big, glossy and bright hardback provides a brief scientific explanation of what's happening in your garden at a particular time of year and indicates some of the plants you could be looking at or eating.

Similarly, The Veg Grower's Almanac by Martyn Cox (BBC Books, £9.99), a small and inviting hardback from BBC TV's Gardener's World, avoids exhaustive catalogues of horticultural duties.

Instead, Cox offers a few suggestions for each month, from which any new gardener will certainly find something to their taste. He doesn't just stick to the traditional favourites either - along with leeks and beans, he includes sweet potatoes and wasabi.

Probably of most value to those with a heated greenhouse but still of considerable interest to the gardener who has any growing space under glass, The Greenhouse Gardener's Manual by Roger Marshall (Timber Press, £14.99) is jam-packed with well-illustrated advice, both specific and general, on starting a glasshouse from scratch and using it to grow food, ornamentals and hobby plants such as cacti.

We need bread but, of course, we need roses too. Louise Curley began growing cut flowers because she couldn't afford to buy them and because she became increasingly aware of the horrific environmental and human rights costs of the modern flower industry. The Cut Flower Patch (Frances Lincoln, £20) is her delightful and thorough handbook of how to fill your vases with home-grown blooms all year round.

Instead of arranging flowers, Kathy Brown eats hers. The Edible Flower Garden (Hermes House, £5.99) is a comprehensive and quite possibly definitive work dealing with the history of edible flowers, methods and recipes for using and preserving them and plenty of information on how to grow them. You may be surprised by just how many common edible species there are.

The main body of Apples and How to Grow Them by Andrew Mikolajski (Southwater, £9.99) is a superbly illustrated directory of 400 apple varieties.

That's preceded by clear, straightforward advice on choosing, planting, maintaining and harvesting an apple tree of whatever size suits your space, even if that's a tub on a balcony. This book's a real bargain - you could easily pay far more just for the directory on its own.

Gardening Myths and Misconceptions by Charles Dowding (Green Books, £9.99), an attractively presented little hardback, will bring great pleasure to any overstretched gardener as its purpose is to make gardening simpler.

Using his own experience, recent scientific studies or a combination of both, Dowding debunks some of the ideas which have been passed down uncritically through generations of gardeners, often originating in the make-work schemes of the big old estates. It's an excellent concept, well executed.

If you shivered through last winter in a dank shed, laboriously scrubbing your flowerpots and seed trays clean, you'll be relieved to read that you don't ever need to do it again.

For me, that liberating revelation alone is worth the cover price and means that I have no choice but to name this my gardening book of the year.