The garden season is about over, and we’ve even had a bit of snow. It’s a good time to check out the new crop of gardening books. With few outdoor tasks to attend to until spring, not only do you have time to read for your own pleasure, but you can look for books to give the gardeners in your lives for the holidays.

Charlie Nardozzi’s “New England: Getting Started Garden Guide” may be one you want to keep for yourself. It’s the sort of book you read and then want to keep near at hand to grab whenever you are adding plants or having problems with a plant already in your garden.

Nardozzi, who lives in Vermont and grew up in Connecticut, has been speaking and writing about New England gardens for 20 years. He opens with a description of the region’s climate (usually cool and moist) and soil (usually rocky except in river valleys). He moves on to hardiness zones, and then he gets to the good stuff.

A good 90 percent of “New England: Getting Started Garden Guide” is about plants, divided into sections for annuals, bulbs, lawns, perennials, shrubs and trees. For each species, Nardozzi provides full-color photographs, planting and growing tips, ideas for companion plants and design and a list of varieties he likes. (Large-format paperback, Cool Springs Press, 240 pages, $24.99.)

“Coffee for Roses … and 70 Other Misleading Myths about Backyard Gardening” not only debunks fallacies about gardening, but also provides good and humorous advice for gardeners. C.L. Fornari is another New Englander, writing and working at a garden center on Cape Cod, and speaking to garden clubs across New England.

The misconceptions he debunks range from rusty nails turning hydrangeas blue to chewing gum killing woodchucks. “Coffee for Roses” covers composts, mulches, specific plants and more, and includes many color photographs. (Hardcover, St. Lynn’s Press, 146 pages, $17.95.)

The heavy hitter of this year’s garden books, literally and figuratively, is “The Gardener’s Garden,” written by a team of experts and introduced by garden designer Madison Cox, whom the Wall Street Journal has called “the most important garden designer you’ve never heard of.”

The book describes more than 250 of the world’s great gardens. It’s a big book – nearly 500 pages – and while I haven’t weighed it, it certainly fits anybody’s definition of a coffee-table book. It is well organized, by continent and then country. Each garden gets a column of text that details the garden’s history and creator, lists some of the plants and provides a concise description. The book has some 1,200 photographs; major gardens, such as Versailles and Monet’s garden at Giverny, get up to four pages of photographs.

I’ve been to only about 10 of the listed gardens, my wife Nancy a few more, and part of the fun is trying to figure out the selection process. “The Gardener’s Garden” includes no bad gardens, but does omit some great ones, in our opinion, such as the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (the latter is new, admittedly, still…) (Hardcover, Phaidon, 480 pages, $79.95.)

“Saving Vegetable Seeds” by Fern Marshall Bradley is part of the Storey Basics series promoting self-reliance. Saving seeds used to be a commonplace practice, but as huge seed companies came into being and gardeners bought seeds, it nearly died out. Seed saving is just now coming back.

The book gives reasons to save seeds, explains how seeds are formed, and tells which seeds are best to save and which are easiest. It also gives advice on specific plants and on testing seed viability. The text is accompanied by black-and-white drawings. (Paperback, Storey, 92 pages, $8.95.)

For those interested in the thriving permaculture movement, “Integrated Forest Gardening: The Complete Guide to Polycultures and Plant Guilds in Permaculture Systems” by Wayne Weiseman and Daniel Halsey, provides major insights. Plant guilds are when different plants grow together and benefit each other, and are a key element of the permaculture movement.

The book’s many color photographs and illustrations will be of interest to both farmers and interested amateurs. (Paperback, Chelsea Green Publishers, 310 pages, $45.)

“Cultivating Garden Style: Inspired Ideas and Practical Advice to Unleash Your Garden Personality” by Rochelle Greayer will take readers through the entire process of designing a garden. She offers several different garden styles, with advice and 1,400 color photos to help gardeners create the look. “Cultivating Garden Style” goes beyond plants. Greayer also writes about furniture, pavers (a gardening term for bricks, tiles, etc. used to pave the outdoors), accessories and containers. (Hardcover, Timber Press, 320 pages, $35.)

Nancy J. Ondra’s new garden-design book, “Five-Plant Gardens: 52 Ways to Grow a Perennial Garden with Just Five Plants,” offers fairly simple plans, which are grouped into full-sun, part-sun and shade gardens. Ondra also provides garden plans for different types of soil conditions. Five is the perfect number, she contends, because it is enough to provide variety, yet still easy to manage. The book has plenty of color photographs. (Paperback, Storey, 184 pages, $18.95.)

If you want to do your gardening indoors, consider “Air Plants: The Curious World of Tillandsias” by Zenaida Sengo with photographs by Caitlin Atkinson. The book provides information on how to grow air plants and display them, and has six projects for people to try. But if you choose this one, remember you’ll be gardening all winter, so you may not have quite as much time to read the other gardening books. (Paperback, Timber Press, 224 pages, $19.95.)

Tom Atwell has been writing the Maine Gardener column since 2004. He is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth and can be contacted at 767-2297 or at tomatwell@me.com.

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