All too often big fat reference books are dull: you dip in and out of them, taking only the information you need. And all too often personal accounts of gardening are dull too: they don’t teach you enough to make you feel well-fed with gardening knowledge and inspired.

But Anna Pavord’s book, Bulb: a hand-picked selection of the world’s most beautiful bulbs, manages to straddle both categories with a great deal of elegance. It is supposed to be a personal selection by Pavord on the bulbs she loves the most, but I can’t help treating it as something of a definitive guide. Yet I don’t find myself flicking it open for a few minutes and then leaving it. In fact, I can’t leave it. It is one of the best gardening books I have ever read.

Pavord skips through the common and the rare with an incredible authority. One review I read described her as ‘erudite’, but I think that suggests she’s terribly technical and boring when in fact she’s enthusiastic and fun. She digs up bulbs you will never have heard of before, illustrating them all the while with Andrew Lawson’s masterful photography. But even though this is the woman who wrote an entire book on tulips, she doesn’t take herself, or the bulb world too seriously. She gently ribs the strange and obsessive world of galanthophiles (snowdrop geeks to the rest of us), and warns readers not to be snooty about Hippeastrum (formerly Amaryllis) just because the flowers are enormous and flamboyant.

This is a marvellous book. You might have just missed the boat for getting it as a Christmas gift, but buy it yourself. Or ask for it for next Christmas. It is the best, the most beautiful book you will read for a long time, and it is worth every penny and every minute you save towards it.