Search - Articles

of autumn colour. If you can spare a moment from harvesting pumpkins, admiring dahlias and cutting things back then this is a good time to think of your last garden visits of the season. Get out there and see some leaves.The great places for autumn visits

, your safest bet is the white double Dianthus 'Mrs Sinkins' which smells like the wrists of wood nymphs. It's one of the old garden pinks (great scent, short flowering season, most of them about 30cm high) and was originally bred in 1868 by John Sinkins

I do love the garden in October - especially in the sunshine. In the early Spring it is all about hope and waiting: all that mulch and neatly tidied brown border. A month or so later and there is green stuff and bulbs all over the place. Then we

many of my clever plans for the winter garden have come to nothing.Things that were supposed to look sparkly and incandescent in the low light and frosty mornings are now lying in a crumpled heap like laundry in a teenager's bedroom.In particular I have

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

I'm sitting on a train as I write this, something I do more frequently than I used to, in an effort to cut back on the number of miles I drive each year. One of the best things about taking the train is being able to gaze, semi-comatose, through

I've just spent a fair bit of time trashing and destroying parts of my garden. I do this not out of irritation and frustration, nor have I temporarily lost control of my senses at the first sign of some half-decent weather. No, I do this because I

A few weeks ago I wrote about trees for small gardens. Among the comments (well, to be honest, 33% of the comments) was a request from Daphne for very, very small trees - "very small being up to three metres".Tricky. Three metres is barely a shrub

and an interesting story.The elder has always been considered a magic plant, supposed to ward off evil and provide useful protection from witches - in some parts of the world cutting down an elder may bring the wrath of some evil sprite upon you. If that is the case

is so extremely laid back and relaxed.In this garden there isn't much really urgent work that needs to be done. Many plants have done their bit and are just hanging around waiting for the winter; those that are still flowering do so with an admirable air