New books: The Gardener's Garden and Garden Design Close Up celebrate hundreds of horticultural endeavours

Shingle bed: The garden of the late Derek Jarman in Kent warrants inclusion in two new books, The Gardener's Garden and Garden Design Close Up.

Imminent closure of Open Gardens Australia notwithstanding, our appetite for perusing what people do in their gardens shows no sign of abating. While every garden visitor knows that nothing beats poking around people's roses and rills in the flesh, two newly published books let us sample vicariously, at least hundreds of gardens all over the world.

The voluminous The Gardener's Garden was launched this week and provides a horticultural compendium of gardens fashioned (and, just as importantly, preserved) over centuries in Finnish forests, Iranian deserts, New York City rooftops, everywhere really.

It profiles 250 landscapes that date from the 14th century to the present and while the style, planting and climatic conditions are outlined for each, it mostly conveys the gardens' allure through pictures. Photographs have Patrick Blanc walls looking like mountains and 18th-century Russian palaces depicted in all their gilded, folly-filled grandeur.

The Marrakesh expression: Jacques Marjorelle's Morocco garden is also profiled in the new books.

Stretching to almost 500 pages and weighing close to four kilos, this is no portable proposition, however. In the smaller, and consequently more negotiable, Garden Design Close Up, published in September, English writer Emma Reuss narrows the number of "exceptional gardens" to 100 and almost halves the page size.

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Reuss takes gardens the outdoor space attached to a penthouse in Hanover, for instance and distils critical "design ingredients". So for the German courtyard (almost identical in appearance to the penthouse interior, save for the carpet being grass and the sculpture being a collection of multi-stemmed Amelanchier lamarckii in futuristic white planters) she talks about simplicity, humour, limited colour, allegory and unity.

It doesn't make it into the German section of The Gardener's Garden, however, and it is telling just how little crossover between the two books there is. While both have some historic spaces in common (the Loire Valley's Chateau de Villandry, say, or Kyoto's Ryoan-ji) and both describe the off-beat offerings of Derek Jarman on flat shingle spit in Kent and Jacques Majorelle against a backdrop of ultramarine in Marrakesh, there are whole sweeps of gardens that each book has on its own.

It's a sign of both how much there is to choose from, and how subjective any final selection must be. While The Gardener's Garden entries were nominated by a team of consultants around the world, Reuss chose hers with an eye to presenting a "wide range of styles and situations".

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New books: The Gardener's Garden and Garden Design Close Up celebrate hundreds of horticultural endeavours