The Late, Late Tulip Show
Reading time 6 minutes
Cold weather in spring can only hold our gardens back for so long. It’s like a catapult, the further the sling is pulled back […]
Flowers
The Late, Late Daffodil Show
Reading time 12 minutes
In a normal year, I’d consider myself lucky to have one or two daffodils blooming in May. By May Day their dominion is over […]
Arctic April
Reading time 14 minutes
It has been the strangest month; cold – indeed the frostiest April in sixty years – and desert-dry. Although we’ve escaped spring frosts here […]
Discovering Daffodils
Reading time 11 minutes
It’s a little known fact – so little known that one might almost call it a secret – that the first job I ever […]
Hurrah! the Ides of March
Reading time 7 minutes
Our garden is at its lowest ebb from early February until the Ides of March, on the 15th of the month. Battered by gales […]
Iris Reticulata ‘Pauline’
Reading time 7 minutes
In an exciting new development, the following post can now be enjoyed as a podcast as well as in text and photographs. Cultivars of […]
February Flowers
Reading time 8 minutes
It’s that time of year when galanthophiles (the polite name for snowdrop bores) start to bombard social media with images of their pearly-white treasures. […]
Baby steps (towards spring)
Reading time 10 minutes
Every weekend is pretty much the same during the lockdown. A time to catch up on sleep, to read, phone friends and family, make […]
Hairnets and Harry Wheatcroft – The Chelsea Flower Show in 1973
Reading time 11 minutes
The Beau is a thoughtful chap. For my birthday earlier this week he managed to track down a copy of the Chelsea Flower Show […]
A Year of Plotting
Reading time 21 minutes
January 2020 After waiting only four months, we got the news that we had reached the top of the allotment waiting list: if we […]
BITTERSWEET MEMORIES OF 2020
Reading time 22 minutes
The year 2020. Where to begin? It’s tempting to dive straight into the obvious negatives – and let’s face it that would be rich […]
planting ahead
Reading time 7 minutes
The first draft of this post began with a rather gloomy assessment of the year’s events. By the time I reached the third paragraph […]