The florist was closed. Ditto the bookshop. The opportunities for picking up a housewarming gift for my friends were few. I was due to leave in an hour and I could not turn up empty handed.
In desperation, I turned to the garden. Not a flower in sight. I roamed the path looking for anything I could cut and tie with raffia to hand to my friend as they opened the door. Then I spotted them. The little oval pearls of white set among the dark green of the hellebores. Clusters of snowdrop shoots, a few in bud, a promise of things to come.
I have a box of old terracotta pots, each barely big enough to hold a single crocus. Stuffed with garden soil, each one took three diminutive snowdrops, tufts of emerald-green shoots, and another whose buds were visible but still closed tight. I pressed leftover moss from my potted hyacinths around the stems, as if tucking my bulbs into bed, and slipped them into a small brown bag. The little pot with its charming cargo of green shoots was ready in less time than it takes to wrap a book. Rarely have I seen a gift so warmly welcomed.
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Bulbs bought in a wicker basket from the garden centre are perfectly acceptable, but how much more thoughtful if they are varieties you have chosen and planted yourself. A word of warning, if I may: keep your arrangements restrained. A friend’s gift of screaming pink, electric-blue and white hyacinths planted in the same wicker basket ended up flowering all alone in my cellar (as they deserved).
The problem with giving Christmas gifts to a gardener is that most of us have our kit sorted already. No matter how expensive that present of new secateurs might be, it is the old pair to which we still probably turn. The same may go for trowels and hoes, dibbers and rakes. We welcome such generous gifts, but in reality it is difficult to part us from our old trusted tools that we have chosen ourselves.
That gift of a pink hydrangea may not receive the enthusiastic welcome you imagine.
Kit of any sort only works as a gift if you know you are not going to duplicate the recipient’s much-loved cache. My own life was changed by the arrival of a Japanese hori hori. I can’t imagine how I ever gardened without one. I am probably preaching to the converted, but it would only be a small exaggeration to say that I haven’t used a trowel, fork or dibber since my wooden-handled, blunt-edged hori hori arrived. It rarely seems to be out of my hand.
Christmas gift ideas for gardeners:
- The best gardening gifts: top gift ideas for gardeners in 2025
- Garden gifts for kids: Christmas presents
- Last minute Christmas gifts: gardening memberships and subscriptions
- Best flower subscription services
- Best hand cream for gardeners
There are, however, other opportunities for the gardening gift giver. Few of us will turn our noses up at a present of wooden plant labels tied up with ribbon. Old terracotta pots cost a pretty penny, but make a very special gift to someone who will cherish their chips and fine cracks.
Gardening books are easy to wrap up, rarely unappreciated and always feel like a luxury. It is fun choosing a book for someone else. But scouring second-hand bookshops is worthwhile too and you may come up with a forgotten gem. I found a cloth-bound tome on plum varieties recently, long out of print and so endlessly fascinating that I didn’t want to give it away.
Few Christmas presents can be as sweet as a collection of seed packets, an assortment from which the recipient can cherry-pick those they fancy growing, and give the rest away to others. I do think they should be annuals, though – a frivolous element that will interfere only briefly with your friend’s careful garden plans. And here is where I would caution about giving a perennial, no matter how carefully considered. It might not be the best of ideas. That pink hydrangea may not receive the enthusiastic welcome you imagine.
As a child, I once rolled my eyes when I found a wooden flower press in my Christmas stocking. Thanks Dad. Did I really look like the sort of boy who pressed flowers? (Apparently, yes.) But it turned out to be the most delightful and much used of gifts. There is something both whimsical and charming about flipping through a book and finding the dried, flattened buttercup, geum or narcissus you had made and used as a bookmark. I rather wish I still had it.
My own Christmas list seems humble enough. Balls of tarred twine, for their evocative potting-shed smell that I have (whisper it) always found strangely erotic; the aforementioned wooden plant labels; a small copper watering can for my window boxes and new pair of gardening gloves to replace those that Mr Fox chewed and spat out. I would also be grateful for hand cream for my cracked thumbs, and a new, small, folding saw.
Of course, I still dream of a small greenhouse; one whose roof comes in two pieces so I can get it through the front door. Nothing grand, just a winter home for my pelargoniums and salvias, and somewhere I could get my seeds going that is more hospitable than the laundry windowsill. Fat chance.
But back to the home-made gift ideas. Imagine opening the Christmas wrapping paper to find a little box of dried rose petals from the giver’s garden, or a tiny envelope of seeds from their hollyhocks. Perhaps a jar of jelly from their medlar tree or a slab of quince membrillo made in their own kitchen, and a cutting from a plant you have admired in their garden, now rooted and ready to go.
If you have always wanted to keep chickens, a copy of Arthur Parkinson’s Hen Party with a jar of lemon curd, made with eggs from their own hens. Or best of all, that snowdrop in a tiny, vintage flowerpot. A gift that once replanted in your garden will spread and multiply each year. A gift that will forever remind you of them. Happy Christmas
