Every Plant has a Story!

Every plant has a story and these add to the interest and enjoyment gardeners get from them. Noel Kingsbury, in his Flora, The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants in Your Garden, has taken a selection of 133 plants, not an encyclopaedic collection but enough to enthuse and encourage the readers to, perhaps, search …

Dream Gardens

They dream of finding an abandoned house in a wild garden and then plan in great detail what they will do with it. They are Isabel and Julian Bannerman. I have visited one of their gardens, Hanham Court near Bath, which was their home for many years and can say that they made that reality …

We Boiled a Frog!

Change, especially when incrementally small and over a long period, is often imperceptible and we occasionally need someone to ring the alarm bells and alert us to dangers. Charles Handy, the business/management guru of the 1980s, in his book The Age of Unreason told the parable of a frog being put in a pot of …

Not as it should be!

It must be comforting to be able to lift one’s head, direct one’s gaze to some beauty in a garden, and ignore the weeds around one’s feet. Some will visit a garden, seek out the good and ignore the bad but I find this difficult to do and can find a garden visit spoiled when …

Much more than that!

It is disappointing to see a good garden receive scant and silly coverage on a television gardening programme. Recently, BBC’s Gardener’s World visited Jimi Blake’s garden, Huntingbrook, and gave more time to Jimi on a trampoline than to the garden and plants. With any television programme there will be editing and selection of material but …

She has it looking lovely!

  So my visiting companion said as we were driving out of June Blake’s garden this afternoon and, of course, the conversation continued as we drove: “I loved that lipstick pink phlox…and that new dahlia in the lower part of the garden…and that blue geranium near the house – what was its name? That monkshood …