Hoe, Hoe, Hoe: Gardening books for this Christmas

After visiting Great Dixter, the late Christopher Lloyd's garden in East Sussex, I still stagger out of the place high as a kite with visions: spires of green winged orchids littering the meadow grass, a vast furcrea with a neck as tall as a giraffe's leering out of its pot in the sunken garden, wonky old espalier pears, hanging on to their Edwardian pedigrees, trying not to notice the crew of exuberant exotics sashaying through the stock beds behind them.

The place and the person can't be divided. Christopher Lloyd was born at Dixter in 1921 and lived there for most of his life until he died four years ago. The bones of the garden were laid down at the turn of the century by his father, Nathaniel Lloyd, working with the famous architect Edwin Lutyens. They are good bones, defined by generous yew hedges, wide borders, flagstone paths, and the curving circles of steps that are a Lutyens trademark.

The flesh though is all Christopher Lloyd, concentrated particularly in the massed planting of the Long Border which stretches away from the house to end in long brush strokes of tamarix, drifting in its uncertain way through summer from green leaf into pink flower. The border is the great set piece at Great Dixter, beckoning you forward to a big oak seat, designed by Lutyens and hugged comfortably by yew.

The entrance to the house with its wonky, tipsy porch lies along a straight stone path with meadow grass either side. In spring there are sheets of small crocus. Then fritillaries, followed by orchids and camassias. Then cranesbills and finally autumn crocus rolling around in bed with fat colchicums.

This approach, with its rough grass and eclectic selection of trees (they include the thorn Crataegus laciniata) needs to be taken slowly. This is your chance to throw out all preconceived notions of what can be achieved in a garden and open your mind wide, wide, wide.

Look at the pots clustered by the porch. Most of us think we are doing reasonably well if we manage to get a clutch of petunias and helichrysum through the summer without the plants folding up with thirst, or being attacked by earwigs, sat on by the cat or devoured by mildew. But why do we always reach for the same small palette of plants? At Dixter, by the porch, you might find huge bowls of the creamy scented narcissus 'Sir Winston Churchill', mixed with Geranium maderense and blue spires of echium. Glossy black-leaved aeoniums are favourites, pushing perhaps through the foliage of a climbing Tropaeolum tricolorum with bright green leaves and tiny nasturtium-like flowers. Once, I remember the fleshily exotic pink flower spike of Beschorneria yuccoides rearing out of the herringbone cotoneaster that grows by the porch. What a pair. Imagine Madonna on the arm of Ken Livingstone and you get the idea.

For more than 50 years, Christopher Lloyd gardened at Dixter in his complex, powerful, devil-may-care way. But then in 1993 Fergus Garrett arrived as Dixter's new head gardener, henna-haired, half Turkish, half Irish, wholly original, and Dixter exploded into even more magnificent displays. Vast, strange exotics crept in among the roses. Bedding schemes – orange, purple, pink, yellow – outdid Versace. There was a buzz about the place. Between them, Christopher and Fergus attracted a crew of young gardeners unlike any other in England.

Christopher had an extraordinary gift for friendship, evident in Dear Christo (Timber Press £18.99), a collection of pictures and memories both of the man and Dixter itself. I thought I knew him well, but there are wonderfully surprising vignettes here – Christopher blasting away with his rifle at rabbits breakfasting on Dixter clematis (a memory from Romke van de Kaa, the head gardener in the Seventies), Christopher burning a portrait he hated on the fire in the solar. Food plays a part in many memories and not surprisingly, for Christopher was a famously good cook. When he came to stay, I always worried more about the food than the state of our garden.

Not surprisingly, he makes several appearances in Robin Lane-Fox's new book Thoughtful Gardening (Particular Books £25) for the two bickered amicably over the subjects of each other's columns in Country Life and The Financial Times. When the roses were ripped out of the old rose garden at Dixter, Lane Fox did not approve. "I hope that each June he is repenting as he looks through a locked gate in heaven at St Peter's rose garden where there is no black spot and the dead-heading is done miraculously by angels."

Christopher often pointed out that the best gardening writers were those who were interested in a lot else besides gardening. That's certainly true of Lane-Fox, Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College Oxford. As a member of the cavalry led by Hephaestion, he galloped through the film version of his own book, Alexander the Great. "I doubt if any other gardening columnist has left hoofprints among the trees of a botanical forest," he writes, in a wonderfully roundabout column featuring the Phukae Botanic Garden near Bangkok.

Dixter features fleetingly too in Rory Stuart's monumental survey Gardens of the World: The Great Traditions (Frances Lincoln £30). The book is organised around the different gardening traditions of Islam, China, Japan, Italy, France and England, with a final chapter called "The American Experiment". In that context, he quotes Tom Paine: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." America's role was to teach old nations a new civilization. In gardening terms, thinks Stuart, that has yet to happen, though the New Perennial movement surely owes as much to the landscape of the American prairies, as it does to Dutch garden designers.

All gardening is borrowing and because of the way the book is organised, Stuart can frequently demonstrate how much one tradition may influence another. We are used to the idea of Japanese features sitting (not always easily) in European gardens. But I did not know that the Hubya Public Park in Tokyo was laid out according to the designs of various German parks. The scope of this book is extraordinarily wide, but Stuart's narrative steers clear of bog. It's a pleasure to read.

Mariano Bueno, the Spanish author of Mediterranean Kitchen Garden (Frances Lincoln £25) is an organic gardener and an expert in organic agriculture, geobiology and ecological building. His book, expertly translated by Evelyn Fitzherbert, therefore has much to say about the soil, making compost and the phases of the moon. Planting by the moon has long been practiced, but I did not know that there were right and wrong times to turn your compost. Fortunately mine never gets turned. I have been saved at least one gaffe. I like the Bueno style and his plant associations and rotations are just as valid in the UK as in the Mediterranean. He seems very much at home with the plants he describes. Rosemary, he says, "generates a good presence."

Yes. That's it exactly.