12 Flower Gardening Books That Will Brighten Your Day

Drawing on her own experience of running a thriving flower farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Niki Irving’s Growing Flowers provides an invaluable guide to organic flower gardening. Beautifully illustrated with plentiful photographs throughout, this garden journal is packed full of helpful insights on a wide variety of topics relating to the art of cultivating flowers, ranging from planting to creating the perfect floral arrangement. Although perfect for beginners, this “winning guide to creating a flower garden” (Publishers Weekly) will also appeal to more experienced gardeners.

In Bloom combines Clare Nolan’s top tips for successful flower cultivation and floristry with beautiful photography, bringing the subject vividly to life. She sets out to demystify the growing process, particularly on the topic of the forward planning required to produce colorful and fragrant cut flowers throughout the year. The experienced interior stylist also has plenty of inspirational advice to offer on how to create spectacular all-year-round floral displays for the home without the need for complicated floristry techniques.

Flower Gardening for Beginners covers all the fundamentals required to grow and maintain a cut flower garden, making it the perfect guide for beginners. Amy Barene goes through the entire process from planning, cultivating and tending a flower garden right up to the point at which the flowers are harvested and used to add color and fragrance to the home. The book also provides an invaluable additional resource in the form of detailed profiles of 35 popular garden flowers.

Flowers have been used symbolically to represent different emotions and meanings for thousands of years. S. Theresa Dietz’s comprehensive guide to the language of flowers reveals the folklore behind over 1,000 different species, revealing their symbolic meanings and hidden powers, as well as the legends and myths attached to them dating back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Complete with full-color illustrations and two handy indexes, this beautifully presented encyclopedia will delight any flower enthusiast. 

Lisa Mason Ziegler’s Vegetables Love Flowers explores the benefits of planting flowers and vegetables together to create the perfect environment for growing healthy plants. Taking her readers through the techniques involved in companion planting, the author explains how the addition of flowers to vegetable gardens helps with pest control, attracts pollinators and improves biodiversity. Further inspiration is provided by the many color photographs of her own beautiful garden, alongside useful tips on how to create the perfect garden flower bouquet.

Pollinators like bees and butterflies play a vital role in sustaining the well-balanced ecosystem required to maintain a healthy garden, but sadly their numbers are now in steep decline. Packed full of invaluable tips, Jean Vernon’s absorbing guide explores the ways in which gardeners can help to reverse this trend by cultivating plants rich in nectar and pollen to attract and nurture pollinators. She also offers fascinating insight into a variety of associated topics ranging from the lifecycle of the butterfly to the surprisingly diverse range of insects that may be classified as pollinators.

This excellent practical guide will prove an invaluable resource for anyone with limited space or time looking to use containers to recreate the fragrant scents of a flower garden, whether indoors or outdoors. Peter Loewer shares all you need to know about the design and maintenance of container gardens with well-considered advice on subjects like handling different soil types and controlling pests. Accompanied by well-chosen photographs, he also includes suggestions for a wide variety of plants and shrubs, renowned for their scented flowers or leaves, which will add fragrance to any garden.

This “great book for beginning and expert gardeners alike” (Horticulture Magazine) features more than 100 inspirational plant combination ideas from some of America’s top garden design professionals. Rather than including designs on a grand scale, which amateur gardeners would find hard to reproduce, Scott Calhoun’s book adopts a clever “less is more” approach. Each combination includes a maximum of six different plants, demonstrating just how easy it is to create stunning seasonal displays in your own backyard.

Subtitled A Blueprint for Continuous Color, Lee Schneller sets out her simple five-step system to create a vibrant flower garden which will provide spectacular displays from early spring to late autumn. Packed full of handy gardening tips, the author guides her reader through the entire process, from the initial planning stage to the practicalities involved in making the garden work, accounting for different factors like the size of the plot and soil type. This beautifully illustrated book also includes an indispensable guide to over 200 recommended easy-care plants, conveniently organized into groups based on blooming time and color. 

Regarded as versatile and low-maintenance, hardy succulents have become a fashionable garden trend in recent years. This includes not only cacti but also a wide range of other plants including agaves, sedums and sempervirums. This comprehensive guide tells you all you need to know about selecting, growing and maintaining these unique plants. Accompanied by eye-catching images from acclaimed garden photographer Saxon Holt, Gwen Moore Kelaidis shows how hardy succulents can be used in a variety of different climates to produce spectacular results.

Gardeners have long dreamed of being able to cultivate roses without the need to resort to pesticides to keep their plants healthy and help is now at hand in the form of many new disease-resistant rose varieties. In this comprehensive guide, Peter E. Kukielski, the former curator of the award-winning rose garden at the New York Botanical Garden, explains the key to success in growing roses without chemicals. This “authoritative book about growing roses sustainably” (Gardens Illustrated Online) highlights 150 different hardy new rose varieties, with the author rating each one individually for fragrance, flowering and disease resistance. 

Alice and Brian McGowan’s comprehensive guide to successful wintertime care and maintenance of tender annuals will strike a chord with anyone who is on a tight budget or simply wishing to garden in a more sustainable fashion. The authors discuss the best methods for preserving annuals by bringing them indoors during the cold winter months and then returning them to the garden in spring, with individualized advice for 160 plants ranging from geraniums and dahlias to rosemary and lavender.