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Hidden Talent
I have always thought of my paternal grandfather as a practical, gentleman gardener. When I was a child he was head gardener on a country estate in Buckinghamshire, playing his part in the steady...
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Daily Flower Candy: Narcissus ‘Elka’ AGM
Narcissus: daffodil, daffadowndilly, jonquil, Lenten lily Daffodils are synonymous with Easter. In England they are associated with Lent and occasionally referred to as Lenten lilies. Legend has it...
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How to Create a Spring Bulb Theatre
One can never plant too many spring-flowering bulbs. However tedious the chore may seem in late summer and autumn, planting spring bulbs is one of the most reliably rewarding gardening activities I...
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Getting to Grips – Part 2
Weather wise, the start of 2016 is beginning to feel like a re-run of 2015 – a mild winter followed by a chilly spring that refuses to get going. A number of false starts and we are back to cold nights...
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Waste not, want not
I don’t have many dislikes. Of those I do, chief among them is waste. Rather ambitiously, one might say naively, I spent £300 on spring-flowering bulbs in September. A lucky few were planted in early...
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Goodnestone Rising
It was possibly a little too early to go out snowdrop spotting. In another year it might almost have been too late, but January and February have been cold and the flowers have responded accordingly....
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Signs of Spring
I’ve been out of town this weekend, enjoying the delights of Surrey’s innumerable hostelries in the company of my university friends. It’s the 19th year on the trot we’ve held a spring reunion. The...
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Coughs and Caterpillars: An Hour in the Garden
It’s all going on in the garden right now. The plants have had a sniff of spring and now they are intoxicated, thrusting out of the ground, sending tendrils hither and thither and scrambling up in...
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Running to Stand Still
With April bright on the horizon I am already having to get a wiggle on to keep up with what needs doing in our garden. Within a fortnight that wiggle will have become a jog, and by early May I’ll be...
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Spring at The Salutation
If I were to win the lottery, The Salutation is the house I’d want to live in. I’d spend every spring and summer there, before overwintering in Capri, or the Caribbean; I can’t decide which. It’s...
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The Great Dixter Dozen
It’s rare that I sacrifice commentary for imagery, but as I look back over the photographs I took at Great Dixter last weekend, I can’t help feeling they speak for themselves. And, being without my...
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Great Dixter: Pots of Plenty
The recent chilly weather has had its pros and cons. The downside for eager gardeners who have been nurturing seedlings and planting out bedding is that these tender charges now need protection to...
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A week is a long time in gardening
It was British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who first said ‘a week is a long time in politics’. Almost sixty years later, his words have proved as sage now as then. Had Harold Wilson been a keen...
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The Late Late April Show
Spring is arriving in slow motion at The Watch House. I’ve been watching a single bud of Narcissus ‘Golden Ducat’ striving to open for ten days, willing it to reveal the acid-yellow petals tightly...
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Cornwall Spring Flower Show 2018
As great days out go, I rank a visit to the Cornwall Spring Flower Show up there with Chelsea and Sissinghurst. It’s a special day for many reasons. The setting alone, deep in rolling parkland at...
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Easter Extravaganza
Oh the irony. For the last three years our National Gardens Scheme area organiser has been asking if we’d open the garden for a spring viewing and this year we thought we might just take the plunge....
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Hurrah! the Ides of March
Our garden is at its lowest ebb from early February until the Ides of March, on the 15th of the month. Battered by gales laden with salt and sand, scorched by snow and starved of light, everything but...
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Discovering Daffodils
It’s a little known fact – so little known that one might almost call it a secret – that the first job I ever applied for was with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. As a Landscape Architect I...
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Arctic April
It has been the strangest month; cold – indeed the frostiest April in sixty years – and desert-dry. Although we’ve escaped spring frosts here on the East Kent coast, it has been bitter day-in,...
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The Late, Late Daffodil Show
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 and tulips reign supreme. This year is an exception; I have more daffodils...
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