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Pleached trees are a garden-design favourite, because they provide an instant leafy screen that looks stylish as soon as it’s planted. They offer privacy for you and they help to muffle noise and that’s becoming more important in our busy world. They provide a living screen that’s far more eco-friendly than a stark wooden fence…
Green is such an important colour in the garden. In winter it provides warmth and reassurance, like a beating heart ticking away while the rest of the garden slumbers. In summer, it’s the complete opposite. Rich-green cools and soothes the garden and the gardener alike, acting as a backdrop or shade caster. The rich foliage…
Gardeners are nurturers by nature: it goes with the job description! We care for plants and, hopefully, they grow for us. We’re also in tune with nature, simply because we’re outside an awful lot. When we’re looking at our plants, we notice the spiders, the bees and the butterflies. They are the living layer: the…
Every garden’s got a boundary or two and it doesn’t necessarily have to have a formal hedge, because regular clipping normally reduces flower and fruit. If you use a mixed planting of ornamental shrubs instead, it’s less maintenance and you’ll get insect-friendly flowers and possibly fruit as well. This will add diversity to you plot…
Gardening is so much more than hard work and dirty fingers: it’s a sensuous and hedonistic experience too. Sometimes the pleasure’s completely visual and, at this time of year, it might be a red peony shoot thrusting through the soil or a lumbering queen bumblebee dusted in pollen. You could be admiring an unexpected arrival,…
National Tree Week is upon us and it always happens in around the last week of November and the beginning of December. This is just the time when the beech trees above my cottage are deciding whether to let all their autumn-tinted leaves go to ground, or not. The wind usually makes the final decision…
When autumn fades into winter, the structure of the garden becomes apparent, and hedges play a vital part. They may create a backdrop, or define a boundary, or they may subdivide a garden into separate areas. They’ll do it surprisingly quickly too. English yew, Taxus baccata, always cited as the slowest evergreen hedge of all,…
Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention. Yes, just like Frank Sinatra, I’ve done it my way, but in Val-Bourne style. And that’s why I love to garden, it’s one of the things in life that still allow personal freedom in a world dominated by restrictions and regulations. I can…
One of the Golden Rules of gardening is growing plants that thrive in your particular conditions and our tiny island provides plenty of variation in soil and climate. If you’re close to the coast, it’s a mixed bag. The presence of the sea definitely mitigates low temperatures, so you can grow plants that would probably…
The late Christopher Lloyd, who gardened at Great Dixter in East Sussex, only realised how important foliage was in his latter years. His actual words were “it is an indisputable fact that appreciation of foliage comes at a later stage in our education, if it comes at all.” We all make the mistake of thinking…
The word ‘hedge’ probably conjures up a wide, man-high barrier on the garden boundary, but there are plenty of plants of shorter stature that can be used to subdivide different areas of your garden. They will add clean definition, whether it’s a straight line, round circle or crinkle-crankle wave. They all create planting opportunities and…
One of the iconic plants of high summer is lavender, a sun-lover with shimmering silvery foliage and nectar-rich flowers in shades of purple, lavender and blue. Once the temperatures rise, a sweet lavender aroma is released from the oily coating on the foliage and I find myself frisking the leaves and taking a deep breath…
Although we’re used to seeing wisteria climbing walls, festooning bridges and spanning pergolas, their fragrant, late-spring flowers must have seemed incredibly exotic to those gardeners who’d previously had to make do with simply shaped roses and sweet woodbine instead. Their cascading pea-like flowers, which mostly arrive as spring begins to welcome summer, define them as…
Red is such an important colour in the garden, because it seems to bring the whole colour palette to life. J.M.W. Turner, the famous 19th century landscape painter, knew all about this. He deliberately added the merest touch of red to many of his landscape paintings. It might have been a red lifebuoy, or a…
Hedges are a vital part of any good garden. On the practical side they screen those less-than-lovely, but totally necessary, areas like the compost heap! They cast shade and offer shelter and this helps to protect nearby plants from strong overhead sunshine, or searing winds. Their roots drain the soil as well and our erratic…
Hornbeam takes its common name from the wooden yokes placed over the necks of farm animals, whether ploughing or transporting crops. It’s literally the beam between the horns and the Latin name Carpinus also refers to its use as ox yokes. Wooden milk churns were also made to hold the milk and cream and the…
I’ve been writing for almost thirty years now and, should you be fed up with my literary efforts, you should blame the Great Storm of October 1987. The first I knew about it, was an early morning telephone call from my mother, who lived near Kew Gardens. The wind had flattened all the trees in…
If you garden close to the coast, your plot will almost certainly be exposed to salt-laden winds at times. The western coasts are warmer and wetter than the Eastern side of the UK, which is drier and colder. Many plants struggle close to the coast, but it’s not all bad news. The close presence of…
