One of those meetings where you can’t quite place the individual before you, though something about them seems so familiar…
Read moreDay 193: gardening opinions
We can often find ourselves frustrated with the crowds at plant shows or gardens; so many people, getting in the way of our photographs…
Read moreDay 192: across the divide
On and on the garden grows, the sky continuing to irrigate the beds and borders so that the path requires pushing through at one point. Black and white meeting across the turf…
Read moreDay 191: the usefulness of beardtongues
It took me a while to cotton on to the usefulness of penstemons (also known, rather wonderfully, as the ‘beardtongues’)…
Read moreDay 190: Spiraea japonica 'Gold Mound'
When I look after Spiraea japonica for other people, I tend to keep it fairly tightly clipped. Mostly grown for foliage rather than flowers it will happily take regular snipping…
Read moreDay 189: big plant, small plant
There’s no denying that giant scabious (Cephalaria gigantea) is a big plant – it’s right there, in the name. Twice…
Read moreDay 188: Rose ‘Lady of Shalott’ – update
Two years on and this glorious orange rose has settled in, though the short-lived perennial wallflowers that bobbed and chattered about her feet have shuffled off…
Read moreDay 187: closely planted
Following a model of close planting, or ‘cramming it all in’, as I like to think of it, can often yield a pleasant surprise…
Read moreDay 186: surprised by chicory
One advantage to being slightly slapdash in the garden (and there are several that I could enumerate, and probably shall, another time) is the gift of unexpected flowers…
Read moreDay 185: Heuchera 'Palace Purple'
Every now and then, you catch a glimpse of a familiar plant from a different angle, and it’s like meeting it for the first time…
Read moreDay 184: when weeding goes wrong
Sometimes, you can be too good at a thing. Weeding is something at which I’m deeply proficient…
Read moreDay 183: potato flower
Spuds. Earthy, reliable, decidedly subterranean – that much I think I always knew. But I remember being distinctly non-plussed…
Read moreDay 182: bedraggled jewels
Paying no heed to the grey skies, the flowerbeds are putting on a show. Given the choice I’d always opt for an overcast day over one with bright sunshine…
Read moreDay 181: bellbind
Aren’t we pretty, though? Delicate white trumpets upturned with a coquettish gaze, innocently knowing, butter-wouldn’t-melt. You’re not kidding me…
Read moreDay 180: fennel fluff
Fennel, a favourite border floofler, giving both height and volume with an airy grace that somehow manages to avoid bulk. It’s quite a trick to pull off…
Read moreDay 179: bramble busyness
Nothing reaches into the week beyond midsummer with quite such unbridled enthusiasm as a bramble. Flowers already beginning to fade…
Read moreDay 178: Salvia 'Hot Lips'
I put my faith in Hot Lips this year. Salvia ‘Hot Lips’, I should specify, for the removal of any misunderstanding…
Read moreDay 177: Phlomis russeliana
Boo to the custard-haters, the disparagers of yellow in the garden, they who would ban the butters and the creams from the beds and restrict them to the kitchen and the breakfast table…
Read moreDay 176: planting with Mother Nature
Mother Nature and I have different opinions about how this border should be planted up…
Read moreDay 175: pollen sac
I distinctly remember having to give the boot to one quite established client who steadfastly refused to view poppies as anything but weeds…
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