I like to think that I am a proper gardener, by which I mean that cataracts and hurricanoes have to spout until they drench our steeple (we live next door to the church) before I am coaxed inside for tea. However, although I can be stalwart if a task needs…
What is it with gardeners and coloured foliage? Why do purple, red or yellow leaves seem to appeal so strongly? Is it a positive aesthetic reaction to these colours or is it that garden centres push them so hard, as ‘exciting’ alternatives to the supposedly boring old green versions of…
In the late 1980s, I was involved in the making of two series of programmes for Channel 4, entitled Village Show. We visited flower shows all over the kingdom, including one close to where I lived. I remember the director saying to me, with a melancholy shake of the head,…
I can’t help it. Every time a friend tells me that they bought their house because of the wonderfully friable, medium loam soil in the garden, I gnash my teeth. How I should love such a house. But I chose to live in Northamptonshire, where there’s a good chance any…
Ah, the merry month of May. How much we look forward to it, since it always feels like the time of greatest promise in our gardens. You can almost taste the optimism in the air. The late tulips are in full flight, herbaceous perennials are in fresh green clothes. The…
I am slap bang in the middle of the seed-sowing season, that most hectic of times when the ‘windowsill’ propagator is packed with small pots, the staging in the greenhouse is filling up too quickly with seedlings in modules and trays, and I have begun sowing and planting outside in…
Kale is not only trendy, but remarkably simple to grow at home. Fuss-free and hardy, it will survive late frosts, grow back again and again and generally demand very little attention. Follow Willy Newland’s advice on how to grow kale. Kale works excellently with game. Try our pheasant, curly kale…
