The Ins and Outs of Gardening.

Sunday last was one of those days; one of those days when it strikes you that, when gardening, we are on a repeating cycle, day in and day out, year in and year out. There was a touch of the Hokey Pokey about our day with one plant going in and and another coming out. …

Six on Saturday, 17/07/2020

The big event of the week was the arrival of this pheasant hen with seven chicks. These are wild pheasants and have been part of our garden scene for many years. We used keep a few hens and the availability of easy food attracted the pheasants and several generations of them have been reared in …

Just because!

Just because I loved them when Mary brought them from the garden and put them in this blue vase - our first picking of dahlias this year:

Red Neck and Bronze Crescent

Yesterday was the hottest day of the year to date here and was spent, morning to evening, in the garden. There was a job to be done. Our over-winter stored dahlia tuber had been potted up at end of January and put into a glasshouse where they came into growth, a process which helps make …

The End of Days!

No, it is not quite a prophet of doom scenario but it is that time of year in the garden; a time of winding down; of less grass-cutting; of tidying up and adding to the compost heaps and nothing for us marks this more clearly than the decision to lift the dahlia tubers and store …

Dahlias, Back in Fashion Again – I Feel So Old.

My wife and I started gardening together almost forty years ago and dahlias were the height of fashion at that time. That was also the era of azaleas under planted with heathers and interspersed with dwarf conifers - oh, how misplaced was that "dwarf" description. We had a border where azaleas and dahlias were - …

The Plant Lover’s Guide to Dahlias by Andy Vernon – A Review.

A gardening book written by a knowledgeable, enthusiastic and experienced gardener quickly wins the heart and the mind and makes for enjoyable, informative, applicable and pleasurable reading. Andy Vernon is writing about the razamatazz element of many of our summer gardens, dahlias, and provides wonderful background information on these plants, excellent advice on growing and …