With such a dull, damp and dismal start to the year, I didn't feel very motivated to venture into my garden. That all changed last Friday [...]
With such a dull, damp and dismal start to the year, I didn't feel very motivated to venture into my garden. That all changed last Friday as I watched Carol Klein's new series, Life in a Cottage Garden, documenting her gardening year at Glebe Cottage, North Devon.
The first episode covered January and February. Carol showed how to lift and divide snowdrops in her woodland garden, then demonstrated a rarely seen propagation technique called twin scaling. This technique is much used by professional growers to raise new bulbs, but rarely by amateurs. By simply cutting bulbs into tiny sections with two scales attached to a piece of basal plate, a single bulb can yield perhaps a dozen or more new bulbs in just a few years.
Carol moved on to lay a new hedge, plant garlic in modules, lift and divide clumps of phlox, and prune an overgrown Clematis viticella. Her husband Neil held the ladder, watching as Carol climbed an alarming distance. Perhaps, like me, he doesn't have a head for heights!
Ever fancied breeding your very own new colours of hellebore? Carol explained how, making it look remarkably easy. That's another thing I'll enjoy doing when mine come into flower soon.
No gardening programme would be complete without, in Carol's words, the 'magical material' - compost. "I never feed my plants, I feed the soil". Great advice.
Well, with a list of jobs running to several pages by the end of Carol's programme, I certainly had a busy weekend planned. Her infectious enthusiasm rubbed off and I ventured outdoors - the perfect way to dispel the winter blues.
Carol's series continues for the next five weeks, every Friday on BBC Two at 8.30pm.
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