Dig through those garden books

This morning, I walked around our two-acre garden with a hot-water bottle.
No, it wasn't there for the execution of some clever but little- known garden trick. It was to keep me warm in the face of an unusually lethal southerly which, accompanied by blustery rain showers delivered on a half-hourly basis, has kept me mostly inside for the past few days.
August is a crappy month in our garden. The soil's warm enough to plant things but it's too cold to enjoy doing it, the beds are wet and sticky, the lawn's soggy and the wind blows all the blooms off the magnolia.
The only recourse is the bookcase. If you can't do it, read about it.
We have upwards of 500 books on landscape design and gardening but most of them, I must confess, have only been opened once. In defence of this cavalier disregard for the painstaking efforts of hundreds of garden writers the world over, let me ask you how many times you'd open something called 1000 Tiles from the Past Ten Centuries or A Treasury of Ant Species in the Suburban Garden.
However, alongside these are books which get opened daily or weekly as we search for information and inspiration to improve our outdoor living space.
I'm a bit of a blonde when it comes to garden books. I like big, hard-cover coffee table books with amazing photography and plenty of it, so it's a bit of a surprise that our absolute favourite book, 100 Best New Zealand Native Plants for Gardens, has an unexciting soft cover and my partner found it in the local takeaway shop while sneakily buying chips for lunch.
I'm not sure how there came to be copies available at the chippie for $5 but it was an irresistible bargain and is worth its weight in corn fritters.
It was written by someone called Fiona Eadie who is not famous, doesn't edit a garden magazine and doesn't present a television programme. She does, however, have a degree in botany, worked for the Forest Service for several years, and managed a nursery, and her book delivers exactly what the title promises.
We use it so often that we never refer to it by name. It's just "look it up in the book". It moves from the dining table to the arm of the sofa to the bedside table most days of the week and has solved at least a hundred of our recent gardening dilemmas.
Also well fingered is The Complete Backyard Book, which gets opened whenever we have to make something - steps, a carport, a raised bed, a jetty. It's a title that's been updated a couple of times but we're still working out of the first one and we certainly haven't noticed anything lacking.
There are various others that I pick up and look at from time to time - Secret Gardens of Santa Fe, which has heaps of hard landscaping ideas that work with the style of our house, The Outdoor Decorator, which is guaranteed to give you some ditzy, creative thing to do on a hot day when you don't have enough energy to be really useful, and Ten Landscapes by the appropriately named Raymond Jungles, which has images of 10 garden designs, any and all of which I'd be pleased to have in my backyard. There are several photographs of each project and I get at least one idea from every one of them.
A new addition to the bookshelf which is already being opened regularly is Inspirational Gardens of New Zealand by Kristin Lammerting. She doesn't present a television gardening programme either but, similar to Fiona Eadie, she has heaps of hands-on experience and she certainly knows how to select gardens that excite and inspire.
Her sidekick Ferdinand Graf von Luckner's photography is extraordinary but, along with the "wow" factor, it maintains an accessibility which has you saying "yes, I could do something like that" on every page.
I suspect it'll keep me absorbed until the weather allows me to do something more practical in the great outdoors - without taking my hottie.
If you'd like to make suggestions, agree, disagree, question, elaborate, comment or berate, please email me at info@gardenpress.net