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at it too. Like every child (and indeed most adults too) they love the 'planting pretties' side of gardening. They're forever growing flowers for their plots (currently polyanthus and more polyanthus!). But they also seem to thrive on hard graft. Just a few

as not to increase petrol consumption, and the less mud the better I suppose, if you love your car.Seriously though, there are many ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and driving around with a load of flowers on your roof probably wouldn't cut it. Planting trees

. 'Chelsea shoulder' is a common ailment suffered by journalists who don't stick to those rules (one that I've suffered from each year, and not just at Chelsea). But I'm still getting my hair cut. I'm calling it the 'Chelsea chop'.I'll be blogging from

the ground. (I love dandelion leaves. There're so crunchy and refreshing after a winter of meagre salads. The trick is to pick them before they flower, after which they can taste bitter.) Then the nettles and wild garlic appear (which together make a

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

-forgiving whiteness has gone and left behind it … well, a lot of soggy, mucky chaos. Hedges are staggering slightly after supporting all that weight and my flower borders look about as attractive as roadside ditches. I tend to leave my herbaceous plants standing

, bumblebees prefer to nest in messy gardens (although they will feed anywhere with suitable flowers), so I want to give nest-searching queens the illusion that I don't garden at all. The grass will grow long, the borders will rot into themselves

the cooking tray as a guide. Keep as many bricks whole as possible to reduce the need to cut the bricks.Mix five parts sand to one part cement, adding enough water to get a stiff consistency. Check the level of the site before spreading the first layer

and kept below their normal height. They're not much good if you're looking for flowers, but for sheer well-cut elegance you can't really go wrong. You know the sort of thing: yew hedges with razor edges, parasols of pleached lime and frost-dusted box

and they're looking a bit scraggy round the edges. Usually I have no objections to a bit of scrag, but if they are cut back, the geraniums will put on some lush new growth and the salvias will flower again later in the summer. The allium seed heads look