Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i The English Garden

Edward Flint Head gardener of a private Sussex garden, Edward is a keen plantsman and a lover of ordered borders and chaotic wilderness. He lectures and teaches and writes about Rosemary Alexander’s garden on page 32. Selina Lake Selina is a stylist, author and columnist who has exhibited at RHS Chelsea Flower Show and whose work features in magazines worldwide as well as in 11 best-selling books. Be inspired by her Signs of Spring, p103. Sussie Bell Sussie began photographing the natural world with her first camera at the age of 13. She maintains that spending time creating images of nature’s beauty is a true joy. Her photos feature on page 103.…

Kathy Slack The vegetable grower, writer and cook talks about her career U-turn and the restorative powers (and unpredictability) of nature My route into growing was unintended. After university I took a job in advertising and lived life with my high heels and my BlackBerry for ten years until my body and brain gave out and I was signed off work. My husband and I had moved to the Cotswolds a few years earlier, and we’d put in some raised beds, which we’d totally neglected. After staring at them for days, I chucked in some seeds. Seeing them germinate felt almost spiritual. When the whole world seems to be falling down around you, it’s powerful to watch things grow because of you. From there I began growing in earnest. Some…

As winter deepens and the hues of the hills and hollows of the north Devon landscape are muted by leaden skies, the borders at Higher Cherubeer sing with an ensemble of wondrous flowering plants. Overhead a blaze of coral bark willow stems is rekindled each morning as slanting sunbeams break through the trees. It’s a magical scene, and the first of many that unfold as different groups of plants mark the changing seasons. “I arrived here with an expanding collection of snowdrops, but we always planned to have a year-round garden because I kept bees and wanted a diverse range of species,” explains Jo Hynes who, together with her husband Tom, has created this harmonious picture. Wedged between Dartmoor and Exmoor on a windy hill overlooking a patchwork of hedgerows…

Andy Karavics, former head gardener at Sledmere House and Scampston Hall, now works at a private estate in Wiltshire. He’s always been a big fan of using metallic tones in a garden: “From a planting point of view, silver plants bring lightness to a palette,” he says. “White can be quite hard on the eye, but silver can add sharpness to the border. Silver- and grey-leaved plants usually also work in dry conditions. They tend not to need much in the way of moisture, but they do better in free-draining soil and they probably want it warm.” Metallic plants more naturally lend themselves to spots in full sun, but Andy has included a number of woodlanders in his list of ten favourites. 1 Eryngium giganteum “The height and sharp form…

Steve Bustin Garden writer and chair of the Hardy Plant Society, Steve gardens at his home in Brighton Thalictrum ‘Elin’ is a signature plant in my garden. It grows to 2.5m tall, has steely purple stems, fresh foliage and a froth of flowers. Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ is a classic for a reason. It’s a good doer with great vertical spires of purple. It looks very good planted around and below the thalictrum. Some salvias veer towards pink, but this one is a strong purple, flowers for ages and is as tough as old boots. I’ve planted Oenothera lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’ through the salvia where it floats, flutters and almost twinkles. It is big and bold enough to have presence without being too much. Verbena officinalis ‘Bampton’ is smaller and more…

The wiry-stemmed, clear lilac-pink flowers danced unstoppably through my border from August Last March I was surprised to receive a heavy, decidedly damp parcel with a Cornish postmark. Inside was an enormous tuber of Dahlia merckii. I had pretty much invited myself to Dominic Black’s gloriously exotic walled garden in Mousehole, Cornwall, and had left completely enchanted by the extraordinary world he has created. It is a lush garden full of huge, wonderfully shaped leaves and electric colours from South America, Madeira and the Azores. I had no idea that Dominic would be sending me a present the following spring to add a little cloud-forest magic to my South London garden. I divided the tuber in two, potted up the pieces and planted out vigorous plants in early June. The…

I have high hopes for my garden this spring. Another autumn of bulb shopping (both planned and impulse), followed by many hours on my knees in the garden slightly regretting just how many times I’d clicked the ‘add to basket’ button, means that with a bit of luck, I should be in for a treat. I can’t wait to see the dainty heads of Narcissus ‘Sailboat’, a new addition inspired by Adam Hunt and Lulu Urquhart, who recommended it, among other bulbs, in our October 2024 issue. Before the daffodils, the boldly striped chalices of Crocus ‘Pickwick’ should appear, having been on my wish list ever since we featured crocuses in February last year. Excessive plant lust is by far this job’s biggest occupational hazard, and no doubt this issue…

Trilliums have a range of evocative common names, such as wake robin, wood lily and toad shade. All these names have come about because these distinctive woodlanders flower in shady conditions just as spring breaks through. There are 50 or so species, but the trilliums that grow most successfully in British gardens are the ones found in shady humus-rich conditions in North American deciduous woodland – these are the conditions they need in the garden. Michael Myers, a man with a passion for woodlanders, says the secret to growing trilliums successfully is “finding the right spot and learning to be patient”. He has a fine collection in his half-acre garden in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire. “I began growing trilliums at the age of 11, when my family moved here in 1977,…

Starting off your seedlings or new shoots in a greenhouse will give far better results than growing them outside, as you can protect these young, vulnerable plants from cold, wet and windy weather, while increasing the air temperature to accelerate growth. They can then be hardened off ready for the garden or grown to a size that can be potted on for the greenhouse. Growing on young plants under cover also makes it easier to protect them from pests, allowing them to grow strong and relatively large – and therefore more resilient to pest damage – before planting outside. Growing plants from cuttings If you want exact multiples of some of your favourite plants, at almost no cost, taking cuttings is the propagation method for you. Plants propagated from cuttings…

Time is of the essence and, as the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland finds, there’s simply not enough of it in March. It’s a stop-start time of year – one day spring another back to winter again – but time is running out, and there are lots of things to do, lots of places to be and lots of things to plant, prune, mulch and generally prepare for the coming spring. Like the rabbit, I might be spotted running around muttering to myself in a distracted fashion, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” March is its own deadline: the last chance to move or plant anything big and bareroot, the last opportunity until the end of the year for significant rearranging in the garden. My…

Many gardeners blithely grow annuals from seed without a second thought – sweet peas, nasturtiums, cosmos, all those favourites we sow year after year. But nowhere near as many of us sow perennials. Perhaps it’s down to the garden centre’s racks of seed packets, mostly filled with cheery annuals, or the fact that perennials take a little longer to grow. It could be because we’ve all got so used to buying our perennials in 9cm or 1 litre pots that it doesn’t even occur to us to grow them from seed ourselves. “I think most people have that mental block,” says Derry Watkins, owner of Special Plants Nursery near Chippenham in Wiltshire. “With an annual you’ll have a result in three months, but with a perennial you won’t have a…

Dig and DIVIDE Snowdrops are affectionately known as ‘fair maids of February’, and it’s a complete joy to see their delightful flowers emerge as a new year gets underway. There are thousands of varieties to choose from, with the rarest and most highly prized commanding astonishing prices, but a great drift of the common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, is a spectacle in its own right. Boost your collection by digging up healthy clumps while they’re ‘in the green’ just after flowering, tease them apart and replant. Order from Mr Snowdrop himself, Joe Sharman, at monksilvernursery.co.uk…