Life is a Garden

Your first trip to the garden centre often means coming home with a trolley full of things you were sure you needed, which then gather dust in the garage within months. What you actually reach for, week after week, tends to come down to about five things. With spring just around the corner, it is exactly the right time to sort yourself out before everything starts to grow...

A good spring garden doesn’t happen in September. By then you’re just watching the results of what was done weeks earlier, when the garden looked bare, and nobody was paying much attention. August is where the real work sits; the pruning, the soil prep, the quiet jobs that most people only remember once the first flush of spring growth has already started without them.

Pruning is one of those garden jobs that people put off, usually because it feels risky. Cutting into a plant that took years to establish goes against every instinct, and the fear of getting it wrong keeps a lot of gardeners from doing anything at all. But most pruning mistakes are recoverable, and most plants are far more forgiving than they get credit for. A bad cut here o...

What to do with your lawn when the cold sets in

A lawn in winter is often ignored while you wait out the cold weather. This is a shame, because a little care during the cooler months makes all the difference to how your lawn looks and grows once spring arrives. Luckily, winter lawn care is largely about doing less, not more.

Most lawns are...