Visitors to BBC Gardeners World Live have a busy, exciting show ahead of them this year. With 10 show gardens, 6 smaller gardens, more than 20 beautiful borders and over 100 stands selling plants and gardening equipment, the show will provide inspirational ideas for everyone to take home. Inspiration is everywhere at this year's show Made … Continue reading BBC Gardeners World Live – All About Inspiration
2018 has brought me not one but two almanac treasures, each a joy to read and written nearly 200 years apart. The first is a beautifully illustrated hardback: The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide To 2018 by Lia Leendertz which I bought a couple of months ago along with copies for friends, but hid away so I … Continue reading Year Of The Almanac
The speckled flowers of Clematis cirrhosa ‘Freckles’ and its creamy white counterpart ‘Jingle Bells’ are twining along the bare apple espaliers with some intrepid stems nearly reaching the ground. I planted the clematis by the post closest to the dining room window so that we could see it from the table and judging by the … Continue reading Creating A Winter Garden (Part 1)
I was asked recently to write a piece on where my personal gardening passion came from. The origins of inspiration is a subject which interests me in both my work with children and my writing. This is what emerged when I put pen to paper... As a child scrambling though the scrubby heather on Conwy … Continue reading How Did Your Love Of Gardening Begin?
These days I spend much of my time in private and community gardens (and sometimes even my own) working with plants and I've learnt a great deal over the past few years about where garden plants will thrive, how they will combine with their fellows and when they will steal the limelight. But my knowledge … Continue reading Exploring wild flowers: 5 coastal plants with interesting edible histories
Ten years ago I went on the allotment waiting list. Local sites are heavily oversubscribed and I was expecting a substantial wait. Five years later, with one small child and another on the way I decided to come off the list as allotmenteering seemed unfeasible in the blur of family life. Instead we worked on … Continue reading Allotment Beginnings
Earlier this year I decided to focus on pollinators at the school summer fete plant stall and since then I've been a little obsessed with growing and learning about plants which give our pollinators a helping hand. I've been raising a small army of dwarf sunflowers from seed (Helianthus annus 'Little Leo' and 'Waooh!'), dividing garden plants … Continue reading The Bee’s Knees