Category: Blog

Solar garden fountains have come a long way in the last few years. What used to mean a feeble trickle on a sunny day, stopping the moment a cloud appeared, has evolved into a genuinely practical and attractive garden feature — with battery backup, decent pump pressure, and designs that look at home in everything…

A well-grown hedge is one of the most valuable things in a UK garden. It provides privacy, shelter from wind, habitat for wildlife, and a living boundary that improves with every passing year. But getting there — from a row of spindly bare-root whips in November to a dense, handsome hedge that actually does its…

If you could only add one perennial to your kitchen garden this year, rhubarb would make a very strong case for itself. Plant a single crown in the right spot, and you will be harvesting from it for twenty years — possibly much longer. It asks for almost nothing in return: a mulch each spring,…

You’ve grown your tomato plants from seed or bought healthy plug plants in spring, potted them on carefully, tied them in, fed them, watered them — and now the flowers are falling off before they’ve set a single fruit. It’s one of the most dispiriting moments in the kitchen garden, and one of the most…

Garden lighting changes everything. A garden that looks perfectly pleasant in daylight can become something genuinely magical at night with the right lights placed in the right spots — deep shadows, pools of warm light, the silhouette of a tree thrown against a wall. Done well, garden lighting UK-style extends the usable hours of your…

A cutting garden is one of the most genuinely pleasurable things you can create in an outdoor space. The idea is simple: a dedicated area — it can be a whole bed, a row on the allotment, or even a few pots — given over entirely to flowers grown not for display in the garden…

There are very few vegetables that make you feel quite as accomplished as a parsnip. They’re slow, they’re occasionally stubborn, and they demand a bit of planning — but pull a long, pale, sweet root out of the frozen ground in December, something that you sowed from seed back in April, and it’s genuinely one…

Topiary for beginners sounds intimidating — all those immaculate peacocks and spirals you see at National Trust gardens, clipped to within a millimetre of perfection. But the truth is that topiary is far more forgiving than it looks, and you don’t need years of experience or a team of gardeners to pull it off. You…

Growing dahlias from tubers is one of the most rewarding things you can do in a UK garden. You start with something that looks like a wrinkled brown root vegetable, and by late summer you’ve got a plant covered in blooms that would stop traffic. Dahlias are bold, long-flowering, and surprisingly easy to manage once…

A garden arch is one of the most powerful design tools available to a UK gardener, and one of the most underused. It costs far less than a pergola, takes up almost no ground space, can be installed in an afternoon, and has the ability to transform a flat, directionless garden into something with genuine…

Sweetcorn has a reputation in the UK as a warm-climate crop that’s more trouble than it’s worth — something you grow successfully in Cornwall or the warmest pockets of Kent, but that the rest of us gloomily watch turn brown and unripe as October arrives. That reputation is out of date. The decision to grow…

Few plants do more for a garden with less effort than the hollyhock. To grow hollyhocks in the UK is to invite something genuinely old-fashioned and magnificent into your borders — those towering spires of silky flowers in shades of burgundy, blush, white, yellow and near-black that have been brightening cottage gardens and farmyard walls…