Its President, Franjo Tudjman, lies in a suburban hospital, apparently close to death and stripped of his powers. Which of his lieutenants will succeed him is unclear - certainly, none possesses his respect and authority. Meanwhile, Mr Anwar shows no signs of giving up the fight from inside jail - even if he spends years there, he will remain a formidable political power for the foreseeable future.Even if it does win, the National Front is expected to be returned with a reduced majority, perhaps even losing the two-thirds necessary for constitu- tional change. I enjoyed the Deaf School Topiary Park in Columbus, Ohio, with its topiary version of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and the relief map of Bermuda in a garden pond on that island. The text is not particularly discerning; it is the first-rate pictures that do the talking.

I confess that some of these gardens made me feel a little queasy, especially when too many disparate elements jostled together. But they will please someone, somewhere, no doubt.Likely to please a great many people, for he has a faithful following despite his occasional mischievous urge to epater le bourgeois, is Christopher Lloyd. His latest book, Christopher's Lloyd's Gardening Year (Frances Lincoln, pounds 25) is concerned with the garden at Great Dixter, in East Sussex, where he was born and has always lived The book has a chapter for each month. If that format rings a bell with Christophiles, the similarly titled The Year at Great Dixter (1987), is organised in the same way, but the only duplication is the first part of the introduction, when he recounts his life history. Much has happened at Dixter since then, most famously the uprooting of the Rose Garden in favour of tender plants, a great deal of experimentation with bold colours, and the employment of an inspired head gardener, Fergus Garrett All these happenings find a place in the book. At 78, Christopher Lloyd is still observing plants minutely and writing freshly about them.The photographs by Jonathan Buckley are beautiful, apposite and well reproduced.Photographs are the main feature of the latest in the Garden Plant Series, by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix. Annuals and Biennials (Macmillan, pounds 19.99) joins a lengthening shelf of 10 titles in this series.

The format is deceptively simple: more than 1,000 plants have been photographed in the studio, the garden or the wild, and each is accompanied by a short, part-botanical, part-horticultural description. There is a surprising amount of authoritative information, especially about provenance and habitat, in these short texts, and the clarity of the pictures, especially those taken in the studio, makes identification easy.If you are after something more literary and expansive, I suggest Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall's handsome tome, Peonies: the Imperial flower (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 30). Known particularly as a garden designer and expert on roses, Mrs Fearnley-Whittingstall has chosen plants that 18th-century Western travellers to China described as "roses without thorns". This is a non-technical book aimed at an international readership of curious gardeners. There is exemplary and illuminating information on plant associations, cultivation, sources of plants, and good peony gardens around the world.The least successful parts for me are the descriptions of the many peonies, both species and garden cultivars, which are available somewhere on the globe; I could often happily have done with more information about height, spread, and size of flower.

There are a sprinkling of colour photographs and some fascinating illustrations, of which I particularly enjoyed a colour drawing entitled "Harvesting peonies in Communist China", portraying smiling female workers on a tractor with a foreground of peonies."My Grandmother and Her Peonies" by Michael Fox is one of the most memorable and charming of the short essays in Jamaica Kincaid's anthology, My Favourite Plant (Vintage, pounds 7.99). The authors chosen include well-known, literary garden writers from both sides of the Pond: Michael Pollan, Mary Keen and Graham Stuart Thomas, as well as poets such as DH Lawrence, William Carlos Williams and Henri Cole; and plant-hunters such as EH Wilson and Frank Kingdon Ward. The anthology's transatlantic nature means that every reader should discover with pleasure writers hitherto unknown to them. The terrain may be strange, but the experiences are universal.. When the National Gall- ery's Sainsbury Wing opened, for the first time in living memory the 15th century sections started to get more visitors than the French Impressionist galleries. One of the reasons for the inordinate popularity of Impressionism is that the subjects are pretty easy for modern viewers to understand - service industry things like shopping, drinking, prostitution and tourism. For earlier art, especially on mythological and religious subjects, even the experts need help from guides like (no relation) James Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols In Art (Murray, pounds 15.95), or John Drury's more specific Painting the Word: Christian pictures and their meanings (Yale, pounds 14.95).

Andrew Graham-Dixon's Renaissance (BBC, pounds 25), which accompanies a six- part TV series, is a prodigious feat of compression, exposition - and package tourism. The main thesis is that in 13th-century Italy, St Francis's respect for even the most humble things in nature, gave rise to an art of unprecedented naturalism. This in turn generated interest in classical art, seen to be especially naturalistic. Graham-Dixon sees the Renaissance as a European phenomenon, albeit centred an Italy. But his attempts to be even-handed, and to give non-Florentine art its due, make the book too diffuse, and several sections end with businesslike but platitudinous summings-up.