Two days left of spring, and the sun has arrived in time for the Whitsun bank holiday…
Read moreDay 150: a magnificent geranium
The garden is breaking out in violet and mauve; first the alliums…
Read moreDay 149: masterwort
The astrantia is in flower – I’m fairly sure that this one is ‘Ruby Wedding’ – and I’m enjoying the slightly fussy complexity…
Read moreDay 148: purple sage
Just a few feet away from the salvia we’d thought lost, a culinary relative is spilling over the edges of one of the raised beds…
Read moreDay 147: mountain bluet
If ever a plant were needed to give an impression of being connected by its roots to some kind of national power grid, that plant would be the mountain bluet …
Read moreDay 146: pinching out dahlias
I’m not growing dahlias here this year. Life, and its antipodes, rather got in the way at the time I should have been potting them up…
Read moreDay 145: elder
Everything in the garden looks fresh just now – even the elder, coming into bud…
Read moreDay 144: No Mow May
No Mow May is going fabulously in my garden, at least from the lawn’s perspective…
Read moreDay 143: gardening à deux
Greeting old friends you’ve not seen in the garden since before the winter is always an occasion for joy, though this time tempered with an extra layer of emotion…
Read moreDay 142: herb robert
The woodland floor is filling out, the volume of Green Stuff growing exponentially by the day just now. Bright green dock and wood avens are the latest to appear…
Read moreDay 141: a reckoning of tulips
There is to be a reckoning of tulips. Normally everything stays put in the ground…
Read moreDay 140: cow parsley
I’ve been waiting patiently for cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), that froth that sits along the edges of roads and woodlands…
Read moreDay 139: nettles for dinner
Every year around now – that first great flush of growth that always comes in May after rain – the stinging nettles appear at their most inviting…
Read moreDay 138: garden pest
I’ve identified the new critter in the garden. The creature that’s been biting the flowers off the tulips…
Read moreDay 137: in praise of the crabapple
Why would anyone not want a crabapple tree in their garden? Firstly, there are the flowers…
Read moreDay 136: Veronica Speedwell
I’ve always thought the name Veronica Speedwell sounds like a character straight out of a sixties spy novel…
Read moreDay 135: stopping for bluebells
We are invariably in a rush to get somewhere, you and I. For one so completely at home in the cool, green calm of the woods…
Read moreDay 134: lilac dance
The lilac is on the point of bursting into bloom; I can’t help sticking my nose into each candle-shaped inflorescence…
Read moreDay 133: woodland floor planting
There’s a subtlety to the way that Mother Nature plants that eludes the human gardener, so far from the grids and patterns of our planting plans…
Read moreDay 132: scented sentries
A building without plants by the entrance always seems a little austere – doubly so when it’s a home…
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