Decay
Finished.
Digging damage.
We need a landscaper with a little digger and much drainage work doing. This relentless rain is beginning to make our yews suffer. The only way you can kill a yew, besides ruthless attack, is making it sit in water. And that is just what this weather is doing, despite...
White Houses
It seems absolutely the done thing to paint your house white. In the last few years other colours have made a small inroad indoors, but if you look round the countryside you'll see that white for the exterior is still the thing. As if we'd just invented white wash....
Here comes the Judge
Judging the Garden Media Guild 'Inspirational Book of the Year' The word ‘inspirational’ gets barrowed around the garden world with great enthusiasm. It is rarely clear what it means, and it is rarely clear what the book, article, garden, blog post, plant...
It has to go.
I've been told often enough now. That tree has to go and major reworking done. Most notable of the commentators is Rory Stuart in his book What are Gardens For?, who described the 'formal avenue of top-worked Corylus colurna' which 'disappointingly,..leads nowhere.'...
Just cut it down
Half of gardening is putting things in. Things then tend to grow themselves. Then we cut them down. Very simple, really, for a whole industry of advice giving. I have now been gardening at Veddw for over 25 years, so I think I can have confidence that what we do...
Ladders
I don't advertise anything here except Veddw and my excellent Christmassy -present - book, The Bad Tempered Gardener, which are possibly excusable. Nor do I, in spite of endless tedious requests, sneak in little mentions of products under the guise of copy. However,...
Why Highgrove?
OK. No names – right? Because the garden world is not robust enough for people to express their opinions openly and I don’t want to upset people more than I already have. But this was illuminating to me and so it may be to you. I was at a social event with garden...
How does it happen?
above: The Cornfield Garden, Veddw Many years ago I designed and created the Grasses Parterre at Veddw. By which I mean I covered a small hillside with a design of hedges taken from the local Tithe Map of 1848 and then, with great difficulty, tears and expense, filled...
The Reveal
No, this has not become bad reality tv. This is gardening in the raw. Least it feels like that. This is one time of year when hard work in the garden is unavoidable. The Crescent Border finishes the great Campanula lactiflora and Epilobium 'Stahl Rose' fest. I have to...
Throw the Hoe
I’ve never used a hoe. I bought one originally, thinking it was sort of necessary, a gardener’s necessity. Since when it has just taken up space in the potting shed, like the equally useless riddle. It’s no good mulching and then trying to hoe in the mulch – and...
Wild gardening, Veddw style.
At this time of year I make a point of getting away to see what other people are doing in their gardens and it always prompts a great deal of thinking. One thing I got preoccupied with this year was tidiness and the wild. I cheerfully say to visiting coach parties...
If you tell a lie big enough…by Anne Wareham
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” - Paul Joseph Goebbels This piece was originally published in the Spectator, 29 October 2011 as The Emperor's New Weeds. I'm republishing it here because it may be behind a...
The bars of a prison
There’s a convention in the cultural world that people shouldn't respond to criticism of their work. That no doubt had its merits once, but the world is livening up and dialogue is increasing everywhere as a result of the web. For the garden world this should, at long...
Weeds – what’s weeds?
Weeds attract repetitive garden articles, as useful as those about slugs. So I'll try and spare you the cliches and report my current thinking. A visitor yesterday took me to see the flower of ground elder, thinking it was cow parsley. No difference as far as he was...
Using a matrix
A matrix is " A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained". That's one, above. Now I know that the usual way of planting in the uk is to buy a plant, wander round with it in its pot, looking for a space where...
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.
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