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Last week marked the beginning of a very important part of the gardening year. It was the official launch of the National Gardens Scheme Yellow Book. As many of you will be aware this is the bible for garden visitors. It lists about 3000 gardens

You can tell it is autumn, the grass is yellow. I've just come back from a pear-harvesting foray, and as I stomped through the scruffy grass in the field I looked ahead and saw numerous patches of miserable, yellow grass.I assumed the yellowing

The temperatures are dropping and the hill opposite where I live is a magical mix of golden, yellow, orange and bronze, as all the trees, largely oak and beech, are showing their autumn colours.It is a sight that is a pleasure to see, even though I

This year we held our annual Gardeners' Question Time Garden Party at our GQT garden at Sparsholt College near Winchester, Hampshire.  This year it was a serious scorcher with baking sun and sometimes oppressive heat, but it certainly seemed

the disappointing summer crop and anticipate the pleasures of autumn – a great time for garden visits and choosing new trees and shrubs.Some of the leaves are showing the first signs of autumn colour, with golden yellow developing in tree canopies. I’m looking

was there to give a lecture to the stalwart folk who run Scotland's Gardens Scheme (the Scots’ equivalent of the Yellow Book) and had time to kill before catching an aeroplane home again.Some might think that botanic gardens are a bit sterile and lack the intimacy

of apple trees, a greenhouse (that sadly got stolen), a wonderful bright yellow tub trug, an orange tree, and an incredibly sharp gardening knife. But I've also received some horrors, one of which was so bad I took it back to the shop and exchanged

Is your garden stimulating all your senses? Like many people, I'm sure, the main driving factors behind my choice of plants are colour, size and shape. In other words, I'm most interested in what they look like. Nothing wrong with that. I want my

of the mark on those two statements.Parsnips, like carrots are biennials. This means that they flower in the second year but we tend to have eaten them all before they get to flowering stage, so we seldom see the rather fabulous yellow flower - the carrot has

carrying laden trays to the far ends of the garden. The easier it is, the more you will eat outside.Try to avoid pink paving stones, especially when laid in a pattern with yellow slabs. You don’t want to end up sitting on a slice of concrete Battenburg cake.