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Christmas is over and many of you will be shaking yourselves back to reality after a fortnight of lolling about eating chocolate. Gradually reality is returning. The urge to conquer new territory and learn new skills has perhaps come upon you

proper holiday without a couple of books to while away moments of idleness. A bit of light and trashy fiction is the usual choice teamed with one or two of the books that you were given for Christmas and have not got round to reading yet. Oh

products at many garden centres. Christmas takes centre stage as baubles and singing Santas replace spring-flowering bulbs, and once again I'll be left searching in vain for gardening inspiration.Now, I'm not saying that all these fabulous marketing

will you be growing in 2011?Wishing everyone a fantastic Christmas and a great gardening year.

January already: Christmas neatly tucked away and another year of fabulous gardening stretching away ahead of us. The beginning of the year is the time for fresh starts and change but, rather than pestering you with annoying resolutions which few

What a spring we're having. Provisional Met Office reports suggest April was the warmest on record. It was also the 11th driest, based on average rainfall across the UK. Scotland's rainfall has been 110% above normal levels, while the South-East has

Tim Burton might have dreamed up for The Nightmare Before Christmas.The culprits are blue tits, who cling on to the stems and peck holes in the body of the seedhead. I always think that they must get an awful shock as their beaks flood with hundreds

This has slender branches and forms tussocks about 1.5m wide and high. With its attractive whorls it looks similar to horsetail. It has golden-brown flower heads in spring, followed by dark-brown seedheads.Elegia capensisThis bears thrusting 3m tall stems

), aided by 13-year-old. The 11-year-old swept up and the 3-year-old ate biscuits.And you'll be pleased to know that no wildlife was inconvenienced by the tree's removal. I knocked a Jersey tiger moth from the small cherry tree as I entered the garden area

and Their Haunts by the Rev. C.A. Johns, was published in 1862 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, on the back of his success with Flowers of the Field (1851). Both books were in print for over a century, and it's easy to see why.To start, Johns