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It's January. The weather outside is pretty ghastly. There is not an enormous amount in the garden worth looking at so we must be more imaginative when seeking out our horticultural pleasures.Often the mundane can be very beautiful if you look hard

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

Does it matter what one wears for gardening? Obviously most people look for warmth in winter, cool in summer and comfort all year; elegance is not really much of a consideration. My father-in-law, for example, has a waxed jacket which is more hole

.It has, as I'm sure you've noticed, been a bit cold over Christmas — like a proper winter. The ground is too hard and the east wind too ticklish for relaxed gardening, but there is still great pleasure to be had from looking at and photographing gardens

) was of a Chinese juniper 1.5m tall and 3.5m wide growing in a small, overcrowded garden. Over a period of years it was dug up, pruned and replanted until it fitted into a pot. The whole process took about a quarter of a century and is far from over.The art

March is not really prime garden visiting time: a few gardens with specialist collections are open for the wonderful National Gardens Scheme, but most of them are keeping their powder dry in readiness for spring and summer.However, gardeners still

to this the fact that the cider was often more potable than the water and if you freeze cider (easy enough in the snowy winters of the Midwest) then you end up with 60% proof applejack (or apple brandy).Since his death in about 1845 the legend of Johnny Appleseed

I have just got back from a thoroughly blissful week on the Isle of Colonsay. The more observant readers among you will have noticed that I have blogged about Colonsay in previous years: here are my 2007 and 2008 holiday blogs. This year the weather

to be done. Spring is a bit like a rollercoaster: you get very slowly winched up through the long days of winter until you teeter on the top. Then suddenly it is downhill rush as everything starts sprouting and growing and flowering and, unless you

the garden there are birds eating as much as they possibly can to put on a bit of extra weight for the winter.Seems like a good way to spend the rather dead month of August. Pass the biscuits...