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is so extremely laid back and relaxed.In this garden there isn't much really urgent work that needs to be done. Many plants have done their bit and are just hanging around waiting for the winter; those that are still flowering do so with an admirable air

trees for a small garden. The current wave of interest in 'grow your own' should see even more people including fruit trees in their gardens, and the coming months are a perfect time to plant them. Last winter I made space for a 'family' apple tree

with lines of pink and orange as the sun tips over the horizon.I mention this because with the autumn comes the last chance to get out and visit gardens. All the big stately home gardens are beginning to close down for the winter but not before a last fanfare

out of reach up in the foliage. I've only ever seen it once in summer, when dozens of specimens were flying about under a large tree in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. In winter it heads for the bark and is always there. I show them to the boy

, this male keeps trying to stab me with the end of his tail in mock attack. The males don’t last long, after mating they and the last remaining workers die, leaving just the fertilized queens to live through winter, hibernating under loose bark, in log piles

habit of clustering together in small knots over the winter; the photograph here shows four I found snuggling down on a carved stone angel in Nunhead Cemetery a few years ago. The early arrivers give off a 'safety' pheromone (chemical scent) which

.So, what's left? Thankfully, I was tempted to buy a couple of hardy evergreen ferns from Fernatix while at Gardeners' World Live a few years ago and now, planted in tall terracotta pots, they take pride of place on my patio during winter.Ferns have rotten

These cold, dark winter evenings are costing me a small fortune. Not in heating costs for my greenhouse, or for electricity to light up the front of the house with decorations bright enough to be seen from the International Space Station.No, it

few weeks of leaflessness to spread its genes far and wide.Nature is so very clever. Maybe catkins do deserve a sonnet after all…Oh Catkin facing winter blowDoth spread its pollen to (and fro)Where waits another, all fecundDe dum, de dum, de dum, de

 domesticate it are always a disappointment. When I used to rush around London replanting window boxes we often used heathers for a bit of winter colour - along with those rather ghastly Solanum (the ones with orange berries). Although they looked sort of