RHS How to Garden When You're New to Gardening
The Basics for Absolute Beginners
Royal Horticultural Society / DK · DK, 2024
The absolute-beginner outdoor book: assess your soil, pick a style, plant something, don't panic.
The other is RHS How to Garden New Edition (2021, ISBN 9780241459768, 352pp, also £20). It's ninety-six pages longer and explains how plants actually work rather than just what to do. DK does not differentiate them for buyers. If you want one beginner book that's still useful in year three, the 2021 title is arguably the better £20. This one is the more visual, more immediately followable of the two.
What's actually in it
- Assessing your soil type and aspect.
- Choosing a garden style, and matching plants to your soil.
- Definitions of the plant types — what "herbaceous perennial" actually means.
- Step-by-step planting, potting and pruning; training climbers.
- Designing hanging baskets and seasonal displays.
- First crops, including tomatoes and root vegetables.
- A jargon buster, and year-round seasonal guidance.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- Jargon-buster boxes scattered throughout rather than a glossary at the back — the term is explained where you meet it. The book makes no assumptions about prior knowledge.
- Soil first, plants second. It starts by having you establish your garden's aspect and soil type, then choose plants that suit them — the opposite of how most beginners actually shop.
- Named projects, each with an equipment list: growing tomatoes, training decorative climbers, designing seasonal hanging baskets, building raised beds, laying a lawn, planting sunflowers, growing root crops, dividing grasses and pruning a wisteria.
- One thing to check before you follow it: a reviewer flags the book's advice about putting crocks or rocks in the bottom of pots for drainage. Modern horticulture disputes that — it reduces the useful soil volume without improving drainage.
Buy it if
You've just got a garden, you've never had one, and everything you read assumes you know what a rhizome is.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who has gardened for even a season or two — you'll outgrow it almost immediately.
Where it falls short
No plant directory, no house plants, minimal pest and disease content, very little on fruit or greenhouse growing, and no hardiness detail. Garden design goes no further than picking a style. It's a book to borrow from the library, use for one season, and pass on — which is a compliment to what it does, not a criticism.
Who wrote it
The 2024 edition carries no individual author byline at all — DK credits "The Royal Horticultural Society", retailers list "DK", and the only named human on any record is Lucy Philpott as editor. It wasn't always so. The 2018 first edition was credited to the RHS alongside Jane Simmonds and Emma Tennant. Two named contributors have since disappeared from the cover, and we could not verify the horticultural credentials of either from any source. For a beginner's book sold on institutional authority, that is worth knowing.
Where it was written
UK seasons, UK soil types, RHS advice base. Sold unchanged in the US and Australia, where the seasonal calendar is simply wrong.
The facts
- AuthorRoyal Horticultural Society / DK
- PublisherDK
- Published2024
- FormatHardback, 256 pages
- ISBN-13
9780241636237 - LevelBeginner
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.