What's new, what's growing, what we're learning. Updates, guides and stories for people who take their garden seriously.
Most perennials are modest feeders, and too much fertiliser harms more than too little. Here is how to feed your perennial bed with compost and mulch, without overloading it.
Hostas solve the shade problem elegantly, if you mind one thing: the slug. With the right spot and the right variety choice, you enjoy their foliage for years.
Your clematis grows but won't flower? Almost always the pruning shears are to blame. Here's how to sort your clematis into its pruning group and cut each one right.
Bare-root roses go into the ground in autumn and take root over winter. Here is how to prepare the soil, plant step by step, and set the graft union at the right depth.
Wisteria only flowers lavishly with two cuts a year. Here is how to shorten the whip shoots in high summer and free the flowering wood in late winter.
A bed grown just for cutting keeps the vase full all summer. Which flowers succeed, when to sow and how to harvest so it keeps on blooming.
You sow foxglove, mullein and honesty in high summer, but they only flower the year after. Here is how to sow biennials successfully, and how to let them self-seed.
Some summer flowers resent every move and bloom even more freely when sown in place. Which species suit direct sowing, when the window is open, and how the bed refills itself year after year.
Scatter crocus, snowdrops and daffodils into the lawn once, and they come back every spring and multiply. Here is how to build a natural flower carpet, from autumn planting to the one iron mowing rule.
