Notes on growing ornamentals and edibles, and musings on other matters that interest me.
After covering soil pH in my last article (Spring 2026), this one looks at understanding the moisture and composition of your soil/compost. You visit a garden centre and find a plant you like. Holding your breath, you turn over the …
A few years ago, in a previous garden, I was trying to grow a Clematis and it just wasn’t growing well. After two seasons, the growth was still weak and it wasn’t flowering. Puzzling over this, it suddenly hit me …
ME Awareness Day means…being aware that at 58, I’m probably going to be sick for the rest of my life. This isn’t being negative, it’s an honest assessment that the chances of a cure being found before I shuffle off …
Whenever I’m asked what’s the first thing to do in the garden, my response is: take a picture. Why? Because gardening is work, and gardeners have a tendency towards focussing on all those ‘just jobs‘ that need doing, and they …
Whilst I harvested my garlic back in July, I only got around to cleaning, sorting and recording the results recently. This year I had tried 8 new cultivars and of those, I’m saving the best of 4, maybe 5, to …
You would think having a lovely garden to sit in, you would find me regularly resting there. You would think. However, the one curse of being a gardener, even one with ME, is that after five minutes of sitting there …
TIL that I’d been mistakenly calling all Redwood trees Metasequioa. In fact, the only one with this name is Metasquioa glyptostroboides, the Dawn Redwood, which originates from an area of southeastern China. Sequoiadendron giganteum (giant sequoia) and Sequoia sempervirens (coast …
Whenever someone asks me, what is my favourite plant, I stumble. As an admitted plant addict, there are so many I love, that I find it hard to choose. Early in the year come snowdrops, the harbingers of Spring. I …
The more I learn about plants, the more fascinating I find them. Recently I have been developing an interest in the origins of plants. I don’t mean from where individual plants originate; although that is of course interesting. Rather, my …
Sharing some photos of some pretty that has recently been flowering in my garden. Keeping it simple with just photos! So what’s been flowering in your garden?