Indholdsfortegnelse for February2025 i Gardens Illustrated Magazine

We are focusing on plants this issue ahead of the new growing season to help inspire your gardening ambitions and perk your interest with expert recommendations of the best cultivars to grow, the best ways to grow them and more. We're delighted that designer Jinny Blom is sharing a list of 50 of her all-time favourite plants, with personal insights and anecdotes for each (page 38). For those seeking seasonal interest, Tony Kirkham highlights the best late-winter and early spring-flowering shrubs (page 82) and Dan Pearson selects his top plants for February (page 20), plus we profile heucheras, tiarellas and their hybrids (page 66). Beech Gardens at The Barbican Estate was revitalised a decade ago by Professor Nigel Dunnett, who looks back at how these iconic plantings – essentially roof…

15 FEBRUARY Winter Tree Identification Become a tree-spotting expert in this winter workshop and walk. 10am-1.30pm. £30. Doddington Hall & Gardens, Main Street, Lincoln LN6 4RU. Tel 01522 694308, doddingtonhall.com 20-22 FEBRUARY Shepton Snowdrop Festival Indulge your inner galanthophile and enjoy talks, walks, workshops and art installations around Shepton Mallet. Free. Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Tel 07714 783009, sheptonsnowdrops.org.uk 24 FEBRUARY Landscape Photography Workshop Learn how to take perfect shots. 9.30am-1pm. £80. Leonardslee Lakes & Gardens, Brighton Road, Horsham, West Sussex RH13 6PP. leonardsleegardens.co.uk…

I have gardened at Sissinghurst for more than 30 years, and as we lead up to 2030 – which marks the centenary of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson buying Sissinghurst – and beyond, my focus is firmly planted on how we adapt as a heritage garden to the challenges of the future, particularly climate, in a rapidly shifting landscape of change. I was recently reminded of the past with a visit from Sibylle Kreutzberger. Sibylle and Pam Schwerdt were Sissinghurst's joint head gardeners from 1959 until their retirement in 1991. Sibylle's visit was the first time she had returned for 32 years. It was fascinating to compare our challenges today with those she faced more than 50 years ago. She pondered, carefully, each area where we may need to replace…

I want to ensure that growing spaces create habitats for nature and a sort of calm chaos for the soul Earliest garden memory Sitting in the long grass and Yorkshire fog on my mum's allotment, eating handfuls of peas and giggling with my little sister while listening to my mum talking to her allotment neighbours, interspersed with the snip, snip, snip of secateurs, the leafy rip of lettuces and fleshy rip of tomatoes as she collected produce for dinner. First plant love A short gooseberry bush on mum's allotment. Bright-green, eyeball-like orbs, blushed crimson and burgundy with little hairs on them. I fell in love because it was so spiky, but the fruit was so delicious in mum's gooseberry crumble and I loved how unassuming it was. Who has inspired…

On the edge of Auckland, New Zealand, where hardware megastores give way to cattle yards and pines, flower breeder Keith Hammett is making the world a little brighter. Over a 60-year career, Keith's sense of himself has evolved from that of an engineer to “a practitioner of the visual arts,” he says. Indeed, his leafy property – where 100,000 clivias shelter under towering sycamores and liquidambars, and where, depending on the season, a rainbow of sweet peas and dahlias reach for the sun – is closer to an artist's studio than a scientist's experimental plot. Here, Keith envisions radical new colours, shapes and forms, and patiently creates them. “The essence of breeding is to imagine something that doesn't exist and bring it into being,” he says. Keith was born in…

1 Jo Wakelin's half- acre garden in Central Otago, New Zealand, sits gently within a rugged, dry and dramatic landscape. Flowing, organic groupings of hummocky, low plants with vertical interjections also have plenty of space in between. One of the larger, Paisley-shaped beds, is a striking design element, composed of locally sourced stone, and no planting. Jo cites the influence of Beth Chatto on her planting philosophy, especially in her gravel garden, where Beth used hoses to test outlines and positions of planting beds prior to planting. 2 American designer Kelly D Norris is known for his rich, ecologically resilient planting. In this project in Ames, Iowa, he has transformed a 300-square-metre, linear strip of lawn into a prairie-style garden that cleverly disguises the linearity, and masks the narrowness of the plot with softened…

Janice Shipp Janice selects the best heucheras, page 66. “Deciding which heucheras to grow makes me feel like a kid in a sweetshop. I hope this article will make others feel the same.” Lottie Hedley Lottie photographs sweet pea breeder Keith Hammett, page 64. “Spending time with Keith is always a reminder that plant breeding operates at the intersection of artistry and science.” Michael McCoy Michael visits the private garden of fellow designer Maurizio Usai, page 74. “It's always fascinating to see a designer's own garden, when they're not answerable to anyone else.” CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Charlotte Harris Charlotte co-founded the values-driven landscape design practice Harris Bugg Studio with Hugo Bugg in 2017. She has won three Gold medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, as well as Best Show Garden…

CORNUS MAS The Cornelian cherry is a favourite winter-flowering shrub. One of the first to flower in February and naturalistic in feel, so it's good on the edge of the garden or in a landscape setting. Native to mainly central Europe, where it is found on woodland edges, it is a cold-tolerant tree. Not fussy about soils, it prefers retentive but free-draining conditions. The acid-yellow flowers amass in tight clusters among the bare, dark-stemmed branches. Good autumn colour and scarlet fruits beloved by birds. A moderate grower, retaining shrubby proportions for more than a decade, it will eventually form a small tree. Height and spread 5-12m x 4m. Origin Europe to Transcaucasus, Syria and Lebanon. Conditions Moist but well-drained soil; full sun to part shade. Hardiness RHS H6, USDA 4a-8b†. Season of interest January…

New sowing times Spring-sown annuals are difficult to get established in the drier soil of May. We are experimenting with sowing most of these annuals in the autumn. Once potted into 9cm pots, we put them into a sand bed to encourage strong and fibrous rooting, before planting them out in February when the soil is moist. New job timings The first frosts come later than they used to, so plants like our dahlias stay in the ground longer, meaning we must plant them wider apart to accommodate the wallflowers and foxgloves planted around them that would normally be planted in their place. The window between leaf fall and catkin burst on our nut trees has narrowed, making coppicing for pea sticks almost impossible. Roses hold their leaves for longer,…

Nothing quite beats the taste of home-grown produce. Apart from cultivating them, my favourite hobby is cooking with fruit or veg I've grown. And there are crops out there that are so good to eat, freshly picked, that they seldom make it into the kitchen at all. I'm not alone: one in three adults in the UK grow at least some of their own food. During lockdown, sales of vegetable seeds out-stripped that of flowers for the first time since the Second World War, and around 120,000 people are now waiting for one of the UK's 300,000 allotments. There are so many ways in which gardening is beneficial for our health, but harvesting fresh fruit and veg is a very special bonus. You are what you eat Growing our own…

At RHS Garden Bridgewater in Salford, Tom Stuart-Smith has designed the arrival section of the gardens using a striking mosaic-like layout for the planting beds. This pattern of interlocking, gently irregular polygons creates a flowing and intuitive experience for visitors. The design is based on the mathematical principles of Voronoi patterns, often found in nature's geometries. When I spoke with Tom about this garden, he likened it to the patterns on a giraffe's skin. Similar tessellations appear throughout nature, which is rich with inspiration, from the cellular structures of plants and animals to seedpods and the cracked polygons of dried mud. Using Voronoi principles to design planting beds is surprisingly simple and adaptable to gardens of all shapes and sizes. At RHS Bridgewater, Tom's beds provide a transition between the…

ROUGH PATCH by Kathy Slack Robinson, £18.99 ISBN 978-1472148858 Author Kathy Slack was consumed by depression after quitting a high-flying career, but found solace in an unlikely place – her veg patch. She tells her story of recovery during the year she spent growing and cooking her harvests. THE BOOK OF MOSS by Marcin Marty Ruta £14.99 An introduction to the wonders of moss by bryologist (someone who studies moss) Marcin Marty Ruta, with imaginative uses for moss for in lawns, gardens, terrariums, mossariums and bonsai, and how moss could potentially help us lower carbon emissions. Available via mossclerks.co.uk or from Etsy. HEROINES OF HORTICULTURE by Stefan White Schiffer Publishing, £36.99 ISBN 978-0764365492 A celebration of 100 women who helped shape North America's gardening heritage and landscapes over the past…

MARCH • Bright, brilliant colour with jewel-like lewisias • Creative container ideas from Cedric Morris's Benton End • The garden of nurseryman John Massey • Seasonal delights at Doddington Place in Kent • Designer Arjan Boekel's own small urban garden, bursting with interest for early spring PLUS Dan Pearson's best plants for March, Charlotte Harris's front garden inspiration and how to find the right houseplant for those tricky spots ON SALE 5 MARCH Save money when you subscribe to the digital edition – see page 18. Also in selected Waitrose, Sainsbury's and Tesco stores, as well as WHSmith, and all good magazine retailers.…

EXHIBITION PICTURE THIS Human creativity and expression has long been influenced by flowers, a theme London's Saatchi Gallery explores in its new exhibition. Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture showcases the enduring role of flowers, not only in art forms such as painting and sculpture, but also film, fashion and science. It includes more than 500 art pieces across nine rooms, from individual photographs, such as Andrew Zuckerman's image of the pink-flowered shaving-brush tree (Pseudobombax ellipticum) and Martin Schoeller's floral portrait of Jeff Koons, to huge, immersive displays and digital projections designed for gallery visitors to interact with. Look out for Rebecca Louise Law's impressive La Fleur Morte installation in room five, which features more than 100,000 dried flowers. The exhibition is open from 12 February to 5…

The ground lies undisturbed. The fork and trowel sit in silence. The rake unused, almost forlorn. At this point in the year, there is nothing much to plant or prune, little to trim or tie up. Most of this month's gardening is done in my head rather than with my hands. That said, there is still important work to be done. By which I mean dreaming. The kitchen table is scattered with more garden catalogues. My laptop is open at a page of perennials and my notebooks are overflowing with lists. Each brochure and online shop brings with it a trug-full of opportunities. These displays, and especially their gorgeous photography, are the stuff of dreams. Turn the pages for overflowing buckets of pastel-coloured dahlias; grasses whose feathery plumes are caught…

Plant Heuchera and x Heucherella in spring or early autumn, in part shade or sun. Plants with darker and brighter leaf colours tend to have better colour in sun while paler colours are better in shade, but there are exceptions. Plant Tiarella in part or full shade. Most garden soil is fine, but don't plant into heavy soil that's waterlogged in winter, and don't let it dry out completely in summer. Keep the crown of the plant just above the soil level when planting. Water well after planting and keep watering in dry weather until they're fully established, when they should be more drought tolerant. If growing in pots, use a multipurpose compost with added grit to improve drainage. Trim away dead and tatty old leaves in spring before new…

As we arrive at the end of winter, new life in the garden begins to signal the start of spring, with the plants bursting back to life after a long sleep and rest. We're enticed back out there, mainly to see how our plants have overwintered and fared through potentially unfavourable weather such as rain, cold and snow. After the autumn colour in the garden, this is my favourite time of the year, and I'm drawn out to visit the various larger gardens to see what I'm missing in my own smaller suburban garden. As I live in the south of England, two gardens that I regularly visit to see and smell the start of spring are The Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park and Borde Hill in West Sussex,…

Gone are the days, it seems, of perfectly edged, high-maintenance borders and central lawns; at the moment, it feels like we're all embracing plant communities, rethinking how we treat the soil as the foundation for a thriving garden and considering alternative planting mediums. We are shifting from the notion of the garden as a perfect and manicured space to a more flexible, ecological approach, and the design of contemporary planting beds reflects this change. In our studio, we like to design gardens by imagining the space as fully planted, and then carving out paths and pause points, rather than starting with a list of components and treating planting as decoration around them. While it might sound semantic, this intentional approach makes the planting the raison d’être of the garden, and…

What is your new book about? The lives and work of the three Redouté brothers. All were phenomenal artists based in Paris during the turbulence of the French Revolution, Napoleonic era and into the Restoration. The eldest, Antoine-Ferdinand, was a painter of murals and large landscapes. Next came PierreJoseph, who is probably best known for his works Les Roses and Les Liliacées but worked extensively depicting plants for botanists in the Jardin du Roi that became, after the Revolution, the Jardin des Plantes of the Museum d'Histoire Naturel. Last, but not least, Henri-Joseph was one of the artists on Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and who, like his brother Pierre-Joseph, painted plants on vellum for the King's Vellums or Vélins du Roi in Paris. What did you learn from writing it? An…

Intelligence has long been considered a uniquely human trait. It has certainly played a defining role in the evolution of our species, from the development of new technologies that have helped us to thrive, to the simple yet effective ways we navigate our daily lives. Carl Linnaeus even had the boldness to name our species Homo sapiens, or ‘wise man’. However this idea has gradually been challenged, as it is now generally recognised that other animals also possess similar abilities, usually based on their resemblances to our behaviour. But what if we take a wider view? Let's consider, as I do, intelligence to be the process of sensing information from the surrounding environment, analysing it and then acting accordingly to ensure survival. Then, every lifeform possesses it. Intelligence is an…