Stealing time outdoors as the sun goes down, pruning and retying a shrub rose to itself. Some roses are better suited to the Jenny Barnes treatment than others
Read moreDay 24: delay no more
Could this be the year I finally get around to...? There are so many ways to end that sentence when it comes to my garden…
Read moreDay 23: cold start
Up before the hour of the flatulent sparrow, and I have the garden to myself. The plastic tarpaulin – offensively blue under the security lights – quickly laid out in anticipation of a tipper-load of manure…
Read moreDay22: smashing pots
Crash. The sound of breaking terracotta is distinctive, and one I’ve become quite accustomed to this past year. Even in the relative shelter of the side return to our house…
Read moreDay 21: sarcococca
Today the rain stopped just sufficiently long to allow the birds a brief moment of song, and the smell of Christmas Box wetly to take flight..
Read moreDay 20: make room for the mulch
I do like to leave the seed heads of herbaceous perennials and grasses for as long as possible – for the birds, and for frosty displays – but around now practicality comes into the gardening equation…
Read moreDay 19: job creation
Winter brings a certain kind of clarity. I’m clearing around the plants in the beds, making sense of the green jumble of self-sown weeds and ornamentals and the runners of alpine strawberries, buttercups and tiny brambles…
Read moreDay 18: what lies beneath
Scratch the surface of my garden, and all manner of foreign objects begin to reveal themselves. When I first laid out the beds I discovered a 2 metre square patch of glass sheeting, as if someone had flattened a greenhouse and then turfed it over…
Read moreDay 17: good day sunshine
In spite of efforts to the contrary, I can feel the gloom of a damp January tugging at the edges of my thoughts…
Read moreDay 16: staying the hand
I have to stay my hand. I am no neat-freak in the garden, and quite possibly the one true king of Leave-it-for-the-Birds Land, but I feel my right hand rise towards the hip where habitually my secateurs can be found…
Read moreDay 15: romping with style
If plants are going to romp unrestrainedly about the garden (and the best ones will, given half a chance), let them do it with style, with panache. Let them bring something beautiful to the space in exchange for the licence we give them…
Read moreDay 14: pudding promise
The veg patch greets the new year with rhubarb. Quite possibly the first thing the garden gives us after Christmas to stick into a pudding, things like hellebores and snowdrops – even daffodils – being a touch on the toxic side…
Read moreDay 13: showing off
There are days when some plants simply show off. There’s really no other way to put it and, when you think about it, it’s entirely natural. We all have to peacock about a bit at some time or other in our lives in order to get noticed, catch the eye of someone we fancy…
Read moreDay 12: new beds
Few things in the garden stoke the fires of the imagination as hotly as the notion of a newly-defined planting area. First in concept and then marked, carved and dug out upon the land, the power is in the potential…
Read moreDay 11: and the beet goes on
I was a latecomer to beetroot. I think I’d had uninspiring experiences of the pre-boiled and shrink-wrapped version (surely the weirdest way to sell any foodstuff, boiled and then suffocated in a bag. What’s next, ready-masticated veg? “We chew so you don’t have to”), and decided it wasn’t for me.
Read moreDay 10: Water like a stone
The freeze is well and truly here, and the daily observances include making sure there’s accessible water in the birdbaths for the feathered contingent of the garden…
Read moreDay 9: Seeds of hope
I remember one of my gardening lecturers telling the class that you’d have to be bonkers ever to buy a pot of Verbena bonariensis, given that it seeds so freely about. He was right – on one level at least…
Read moreDay 8: licence to scrabble
Some scrabbles are permissible, in the garden at least. I wrote on Day 3 of the bramble inveigling it’s way into the branches of a viburnum, but there are occasions when we deliberately send a climber clambering up into a tree…
Read moreDay 7: Under glass
A morning of heavy rain and flooded roads, the icy January wind probing insistently, intent upon exploiting any gap between scarf, hat and coat. Coming and going, low clouds shroud the North Downs and offer teasing glimpses of distant snow-covered slopes…
Read moreDay 6: Bricking it
When we originally laid out the garden, I always intended a path of old red bricks winding its way between beds. For various reasons it’s yet to happen, and while a sinuous grassy path is not a thing to be sniffed at, turf doesn’t make for the most practical of surfaces…
Read more