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is full. Hurry up spring. My compost bin fills up every winter. It’s a lovely wooden beehive type that looks perfect in our tiny garden. It’s sited against the south-facing wall and gets really hot and steamy in summer. The frogs love it and it’s full

.Laois. It is the next step in shows like Chaumont in France or the (late lamented) Westonbirt show in Gloucestershire (I had a garden there in 2004).Many people are justifiably wary of the word conceptual in relation to anything, especially gardens as it is often

noticed, except the butterflies, of course, and the blackbirds and the robin and the frogs.I can see the benefits of having an artificial lawn, a lawn that stays green and lush under trees and in between goal posts, that you don't have to get up to mow

In 1985, Chris Baines created the first ever wildlife garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Apparently it caused quite a stir - wildflowers in those days were often dismissed as 'weeds' - and his medal was mistakenly inscribed "Chris Baines, for a

to pesticides where possible, so I don't use slug pellets. This season I've discovered the versatility of copper in my battle with Britain's No.1 garden pest. It's been found that copper rings and tape provide an effective barrier across which slugs and snails

as great gobbets of turf and topsoil are heaped into enormous piles and then, slowly, from the chaos, a pond emerges.I know this is very different from many people's experience of building a pond as this is a garden which is bigger than most

A few months ago I wrote about vine weevil, which I had inadvertently brought into my garden in a pot of hellebores. I was worried they'd kill my orange tree (which pretty much always has something wrong with it) and my 'nursery' of seedlings. I

into pieces, drilled holes in them and then arranged them in the box with some bamboo, sunflower and teasel stems, all from the garden. The last bit of the trunk went into the pond so frogs could enter and exit more easily.This year I'll use the whole tree

What a spring we're having. Provisional Met Office reports suggest April was the warmest on record. It was also the 11th driest, based on average rainfall across the UK. Scotland's rainfall has been 110% above normal levels, while the South-East has

to squeeze gardening in before work, and I'll go hungry when I get home in the evening to spend the last hours of sunlight with the plants, frogs and bees.But that's enough of me. I asked around the office and, not surprisingly, the answers were all similar