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This week at the Chelsea Flower Show there are thousands of gardeners admiring out of season daffodil blooms in the show gardens and floral exhibits.In order to get their daffodils blooming at this time of year, growers force the bulbs to grow using

Sometimes plants do the strangest things, and some of these could make you a small fortune. One of the first dahlia blooms to open in my garden has put on more of a show than expected by producing a flower head with two faces! It looks as if two

The final build up to the Chelsea Flower Show has started. It's become something of a tradition to open the herb farm to the public the weekend before Chelsea. Visitors who aren't going to the show can see the display plants and it's a great boost

There's something really rewarding about cupping your hand under an old foxglove flower, tapping it gently and collecting the seeds that cascade out of it. It must be something like collecting coins from a slot machine when you've hit the jackpot

Although the time for roses is long past they can be remarkably resilient. Here we are at the beginning of December and I have two flowering in my garden at the moment - Rosa 'The Prince' and R. Moonlight. It is true that neither bloom is much

. While I was there I thought I may as well do a couple of jobs, so I set about thinning out the fruit on the apple trees. This year my three apple trees have flowered and set fruit beautifully; the branches are laden with bunches of marble-sized fruits

the pretty ones, leaving the others to grow to gargantuan proportions.Broad beans need picking regularly to ensure the plants keep flowering and producing beans, so mine have inevitably stopped cropping. The stems are laden with pods so large they're getting

Flowering plants come in two forms: those whose flowering we can delay and those that only flower once every season. With five weeks to go in the countdown to the Chelsea Flower Show, it's critical that we get our timings right.This year and last

How generous of my oriental hellebores to not only flower so profusely for the past months, but to now reward me with such a bumper supply of swelling seed-pods. Each one of these hellebore heads will be packed with shiny black seeds just waiting

It's always exciting when we move the stock outside from the polytunnels to 'harden off' and 'grow on', so that they're just perfect for the Chelsea Flower Show. I guess it's rather like farmers letting cows out onto the grass after a long winter