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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

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

is that part of the shelter belt was planted with Rhododendron ponticum.The wildest rhododendron of all, R. ponticum was first introduced into cultivation in the 1760s. It's sometimes used as a rootstock for other, more distinguished, rhododendrons, although

, with regular deadheading, keep going until the autumn. Propagation is also quite simple: take cuttings from the non-flowering shoots in the summer.I haven't even started on alpine and annual varieties but must mention D. carthusianorum - a really good perennial

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 bush you are clipping with water as that stops the sap sticking to the clipper blades (which blunts them) and secondly to keep taking a step back to make sure that you are cutting the right lines. There is also a project on this very website about hedge

. This is not nearly as scary as it sounds as it is simple to manage. It sends up fast-growing, very vertical shoots, with tinkling silver leaves that bustle and worry in the breeze. When one trunk gets too big you cut it down and let another take its place.

and dissolve 1.3kg sugar in it• Take off the heat and add the flower heads• Slice 2-3 lemons into a bowl (at this point you can add citric acid to prolong shelf life)• Pour the liquid over the lemons, cover and leave for 24hrs• Strain into a bottle• Add ice