Your first choice is the Financial Times’s gardening columnist Robin Lane Fox’s Thoughtful Gardening, which is a collection of 80 essays about the difference between gardeners and gardens around the world.

I think it is a brilliant book. The most complimentary thing I could say about any gardener is that they thought of what they were saying themselves. The way of lecturing that used to be for gardening talks was very stuffy, a bit like a university lecturer would be. I am talking about the older generation in their 80s and 90s.

Were they using lots of Latin names and things like that?

Yes. And I think the only way you are going to get anybody to read anything is to think of oneself as an entertainer of very charming elderly ladies.

And Robin Lane Fox is obviously good at that!

Yes, he has got it all sewed up. They eat out of his hands. He is totally brilliant. My problem with Robin is that I thought he was very laid back, but actually he is terribly clever, which is quite alarming.

Which one of his essays do you particularly enjoy?

All of them are so good. The naughtiest thing he does, which is just so funny, is to have a good go at badgers. I think it is perfectly genuine, and he is not a bit afraid of upsetting the cuddly-toy type animal people. Just when you think he has forgotten about badgers, he starts off again!

Next up is Christopher Lloyd’s The Well-Tempered Garden, which has been around for 30 years but is still regarded as one of the key gardening books. Why?

I was just glancing at this book again this afternoon, and what I like about it is that it is full of information and no waffle. I know for a fact that he used to be holding the thing that he was describing in his hands. It could be a flower, leaf or fruit, and he would be describing it just as he saw it, rather than looking it up anywhere else.

When I started garden writing myself, I was looking up everything, and if someone described something as pink, I thought, “Right, it is pink”. But if someone else had a different idea, I went with that, so I ended up getting thoroughly muddled. What is so excellent about Christopher Lloyd and Robin Lane Fox is that they know all this information. They get it for themselves, rather than relying on reading about it elsewhere. I also think that Graham Stuart Thomas, who wrote that wonderful book on perennials, Perennial Garden Plants, is excellent as well. In fact, I think he does the best ever plant descriptions. I try very hard not to look at them when I am doing my own, otherwise I will just copy them word for word because they are so good.

Tell me a bit more about Christopher Lloyd.

He was a very famous British gardener who won the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest award of the Royal Horticultural Society, which was given to him for the work he did to promote gardening. A particularly memorable moment for me was one of the last interviews he ever gave, which was really very moving in retrospect. He sat there in his wheel chair, looking like the cuddliest old man you ever saw. His hands were in little mittens, he had his head down, with a scarf around his neck, and his eyes seemed to be closing. But I don’t think he liked the interviewer, who was from some arts programme. When he was asked a question he didn’t like, he looked up, and there were these brilliant, piercing, sharp, intelligent blue eyes staring out of what looked like a cuddly toy sitting in a chair.

In fact he was terrifying, because he would go for the jugular straight away. It was what he loved doing most, and then he might smile about it afterwards. You had to stand up to him. If you were, “Hail, oh most wonderful old gardening person!”, he absolutely hated it. It made him feel quite ill I think.