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the dahlia was persona non grata in our gardens and was banished to the vegetable garden, where it was grown purely as a cut flower or for competitions. Dahlias were they garden equivalent of battery hens. Now they range happily through our borders bringing

Do you have an autumn clear-up in your garden? Do you cut down all your herbaceous stuff so that everything is tidy for the winter or do you leave everything until the new year? Most people nowadays leave it until later to give food for small birds

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

In the words of Benny Hill: "I'll never know how a rose can smell so sweet and pure, And hold its head up high when it's standing in manure!".Old Benny cannot have been much of a gardener (a statement borne out by the fact that he lived all his life

photographs of my first garden. I wasn't faintly interested in plants as a child - I had better things to do - but when confronted with my own garden (in 1984) I began to see the light. It was a very small concrete yard - the corrugated iron fence was a

the chain link fence to colonise at least eight neighbouring gardens. It was now so thick that I could comfortably walk along the top of the fence like a tightrope walker.We could have cut the whole thing down, but there was a further problem. The growth

, cleaning them off and spraying some oil around. There are certain tools without which I cannot cope and others which I hardly ever use. Among my favourites are:1. My small border fork and spade, which are perfect for planting and diddling around.2. A steel

, 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

).This hedge was originally in a garden I built at Chelsea in 1999 and has been through a number of incarnations. At the moment I have clipped it (or rather, Simon has) in a strange swooping and rearing shape that I think goes rather well with the Stipa