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white and clean and beautiful and the garden has no visible imperfections. On the other hand it can be jolly inconvenient and I think I'm just a little bit bored of being snowed in: I wonder how long until we get cabin fever and start hallucinating

A belated happy new year to one and all. May your beans be beauteous, your snapdragons sensational and your turnips on time. As I write this in the blushing dawn of the new year I feel it appropriate to come clean about something that I ought

advantage of snow is that I cannot see the tangled mess of decaying foliage that I know lurks just beneath it. At the moment everything is clean and neat. This will not last.In the next week or so the rain will come, the air temperature will rise

to love was Gerard Mullen's "Home abhaile" - clean modernist rendered walls with windows showing the view of the lake and some good pockets of planting: well done but not exactly original. I have seen it before and the point of shows like

in clean water so probably still a bit risky!A great plant for the edge of a woodland or a large border although it does tend to seed itself in inappropriate places. The American Constitution was written in ink made from the berries of Pokeweed.

irises.I digress; my favourite roses at the moment are the Hybrid Musk roses. They were mostly bred by the Rev. Joseph Pemberton in the early 20th Century and make great shrubs and small climbers. They are soft coloured, like cowrie pink 'Penelope', clean

higher odds on getting a hard frost which, I think, is even more beautiful. Snow blankets and muffles the features in the garden turning all a soft virgin white - even rubbish heaps and messy areas are suddenly transformed into something clean

'Lucifer' and all the hostas are taking the long walk.By all means leave as much as you can but keep looking and selecting. The autumn clean-up is not a matter of manically chopping down everything now but of slowly and steadily editing things out through

found two hedgehogs in it last year). In amongst this shredded stuff we put all vegetable waste, old leaves and cleanings out of chicken houses (and, when we had such things, hamster cages). I also add the lawn mowings but, in order to stop it becoming a

. Pale custard-yellow flowers, blackish stems and great leaves.Sanguisorba canadensis - I'm a complete sucker for a sanguisorba. This was one of the first I grew and is an absolute star. Spires of sparkly clean white flowers that stand beautifully all