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 moreDay 5: Marked for removal
Somewhere lurking beneath the mahonia and fatsia jumble is an odd little tutsan (Hypericum androsaemum) that’s in decidedly the wrong place. The three were planted together fifteen years or so ago, after a trip to a local nursery specialising in shrubs and rather before I had much of an idea what I was doing in the garden.
Read moreDay 4: Winter warmers
Snow is falling, everywhere but here. At least, that’s how it seems, the best we can muster in this part of the world apparently being a fleeting filigree edge to the leaves of Salvia uliginosa (the bog sage).
Read moreDay 3: Belonging
Winter presents the ideal opportunity for getting to grips with the brambles, but who really belongs more in the garden – the weeds, or the gardener?
Read moreDay 2: Vivipary
The antics of my artichokes have become a talking point. Beneath a similar picture to the above, posted to my Instagram account a few days ago, a friendly discussion ensued as to whether or not what’s going on here is vivipary in its truest sense.
Read moreDay 1: Betwixtmas
Back in your inboxes and the blog after the year we won’t mention, and belatedly shovelling tulip bulbs into the ground like some kind of demented squirrel. It’s what Betwixtmas is all about.
Read moreThe Gardens, Weeds & Words podcast, Series 3 Episode 2
There’s a community of souls working in relative isolation, surrounded by nature, perhaps in a shed or outhouse in the garden, whose plant-inspired practice infuses the entirety of their output. Its light and energy is baked into the porcelain used by Birmingham based potter Katie Robbins, and reflected back into the world from the gorgeous glazes she takes such pains to develop. In this episode, we’re invited on a tour of Katie’s garden studio, while we discuss her pots, her business, and the influence of the natural world upon both.
Read moreThe Gardens, Weeds & Words podcast, Series 3 Episode 1
The Gardens Weeds & Words podcast is back with season 3, and in this first episode I’m joined by Jennie Spears of Lemon Tree Trust. We talk about the work of the charity with refugees and internally displaced people in northern Iraq, and how plants and gardening can help to create a sense of home.
Read moreStihl cordless hedgetrimmers: HSA 86 & HLA 85
It’s more than two years since I first looked at Stihl’s cordless hedge trimmers for the blog, and in that time the range has grown and consolidated its position at the head of a crowded field of battery powered garden equipment. More to the point, these machines have become part of my everyday toolkit, none more useful to me than the two reviewed here.
Read moreThe Crumble Garden
Everything in the garden reminds me of food, but never more so than now.
Read moreHow to grow your dinner
Lockdown happened, and interest in growing your own food exploded. No-one’s going to become self-sufficient over night, but being less reliant on vulnerable systems seems more attractive by the day. Which is all very well if you have acres, but what if you garden is a balcony, or a window ledge? With this book published today, Claire Ratinon shows us how to grow fresh, exciting vegetables in the smallest of spaces.
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