What NOT to do in January
They say (it's all true, promise you!) :- Recycle your Christmas tree by shredding it for mulch. Yey! Drive the neighbours mad with the racket!! The noise any decent sized shredder makes is excruciating. However, the jamming can be a nightmare and the resulting pile...
Not Snowdrops Again
Ok, I may hate gardening, but the slightest glow of winter sunshine draws me irresistibly outside. The sun is lost to this garden for a few weeks in the winter, because we are sheltered by a high ridge to the South. When the sun at last returns to the garden it can...
Garden visiting.
Thanks to our wonderful motorway system, overuse of which I do, of course, utterly deplore, we happily travel three hundred miles in a day from Veddw to visit gardens. Which means I've now seen an awful lot. (You can read that both ways.) A long time ago we used to...
An activity with no results?
I've just been wandering round the discovery engine sites. StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit - that sort of thing. It is a new term to me too, but they are a kind of filter to web articles you might be interested in. Like this one. In order to focus your selections they...
What not to do in your garden in November
A new feature for the lazy gardener. This month a response to the (rather desperate, it seems to me) Mirror. ____________________________ Apply a bulky organic mulch around the base of trees, shrubs and climbers to keep weeds down and the root area moist should...
Opening for the NGS: shocked, but not surprised.
"..I've been to open gardens where I had to go round twice to make it seem I wasn't leaving too quickly (and even then five minutes was too long).." John Grimshaw in The Garden June 2016. Those people who know that we opened for the NGS for many years - we have our...
Garden light.
I'm after beauty. It's why I made the garden. But it really needs light. Wet dulls it down, drags it down, and just now should be the very best time of year for the beauty light brings. In 2010 I wrote this about early autumn sunshine on the yellowing foliage:...
Reconnoitring Veddw
A genuine request for information. I'm closing the garden this week - our last coach party is on Friday. I find keeping the garden looking as good as possible through May to September quite tough and end up exhausted at this time of year, in desperate need of a...
The way to get things done in the garden
The way to get things done in the garden is to go out there intending to do something else. So I went out yesterday all girded up to plant the 30 odd plants that were all sitting there demanding to be planted. For some reason the other plants that had been dug...
Worth the trouble?
In the kind of weather we've been having it is impossible to keep a garden immaculate. And, besides, there will always be a time when something is past its best or has just been cut down or replanted. That's the nature of the beast. But there are other things which...
A miserable summer (so far)
It really has felt like a continual nightmare. There are just the odd moments which are like the brief waking up from a nightmare, when you realise it's not real, before getting dragged back down into the nightmare's pit. I mean - this summer in the garden. But it...
The Sacred Objects of Gardening
It's strange how some garden implements have acquired iconic status - and perhaps inexplicable. When I first started gardening I 'invested' in a Hawes watering can - not because that is my husband's name but because they had such a great reputation. It was expensive,...
Did we get this right?
This is the before picture - with a tentative cut where we thought we might do it. (thanks Jeff!) The block on the left had always seemed too - well, blocky. Heavy and out of scale. So, much discussion and contemplating. Today Charles went and did it. It...
The dubious worth of garden writers’ opinions?
Stephen Lacey was possibly a bit of an idiot to put the Laskett in his recent Telegraph piece about the best garden makers? See these opinions elsewhere. I'm sorry to be exampling the Laskett again - it's simply that there are not many gardens that have been so...
Cleavers
I do wonder as I'm pulling out streamers of cleavers ( Cleavers, Clivers, Goosegrass, Stickywilly, Stickywillow, Stickyjack, Stickyleaf, Catchweed, Robin-run-the-hedge, Coachweed, Bedstraw) which break off as I pull - would I do better to be patient, let it fill out...
Fashion or taste?
Yesterday a garden visitor asked me what I was intending to cover my black pergola with. I felt mildly shocked - I love it just as it is. He seemed equally shocked that I would permit unadorned black wood in my garden. I wondered why he picked on that? However, when...
Voted one of the UK’s Top 100 Gardens by Garden News
Recent Posts From: thinkinGardens
Are Gardens just for Gardeners?
Do you visit art galleries and museums? Do you enjoy theatre and concerts? Hauser and Wirth – art gallery and Oudolf Gardens As a garden writer and garden maker I deeply regret that my audience for both appear to be almost exclusively gardeners. It is as if the works of painters and sculptors were only […]
Should thinkingardens migrate to Substack?
I think it’s possible that such platforms are the future. At least for as long as blogs were, once.
Otherworldly Gardens by Mary Keen
“The question to ask is, ‘what is here that is true, that is underneath the superficial things? What is here that matters?”
Autobiography of a Garden by Patterson Webster: a review
Autobiography of a Garden is about the garden making, Pat’s life, the history of the land, the ideas, the art, the plants and the devouring deer.
Garden regionally, get inspired globally by Marianne Willburn
But to dream, and perhaps more importantly, to innovate, we should inspire ourselves globally:
Chelsea or Chaumont? by Catharine Howard
“Have issue. You were so adamant that you wouldn’t go to Chelsea again. Discuss, please”.
Gifting the Ephemeral
. And now, knowing we won’t live forever, we’re thinking about what will happen to the house and garden when we die.
Hadspen aka The Newt in Somerset, by Anne Wareham
The garden is actually interestingly old fashioned. It’s not just the bedding but the relentless inclusion of every garden cliché, however brilliantly executed.
This site built by
