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I have a sister (colourful, excitable, b. 1959) who used to describe some flavours as tasting exactly like the smell of something else.  My Dad (v non-excitable, b. 1928) told her she was speaking a ...

I’d read, some time back, about Clematis x durandii used as a cut flower in the Netherlands.  It didn’t sound plausible.  There’s something really stringy and splitty about its stems that make ...

Many thanks to GardenDrum, which inadvertently answered a lurking plant identification problem I had. It’s curious, in this day and age of information accessibility, how hard it can be to identify u ...

My nose tells me that there must be a genetic link between flower colour and flower scent, but it’s not something written about at all in the garden literature.  Maybe I’d find something in the l ...

So I declare, straight up, that PGA (Plant Growers Australia) occasionally gives me plants to try out.  They’ve never asked me to write about them, and I’ve never offered to, let alone promised t ...

I have a client who cuts off all her wisteria flowers.  She loves its ability to follow a wire and create a precisely controlled woody structure, but hates the simpering mauve of the flowers. I have ...

I’ve watched flowering cherries come and go for over thirty years.  For most of that time I’ve accepted the brevity of their flowering without ever having taken notes or any other records in orde ...

Its that time of year when even the most depressing of hardware garden centres is underservedly graced, for just a few weeks, with the ambrosial – the paradisiacal – the entirely matchless – sce ...

I can’t stop looking at these hellebores I’ve been given.  I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what they reminded me of – where I’d seen that colour combination elsewhere in nature.  I kep ...