I’m just back from Nelmac Garden Marlborough – a garden festival like no other, based in Blenheim, in the Northern-most part of the South Island of New Zealand. I boldly state ‘like no other’ ...
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 ...
How sweet are these words, at the end of a long article by one C. E. Baines. More succinctly (and with more humour, and humanity) than any other piece of writing that I know, these casual words acknow ...
It’s a big moment for me: the moment of the flowering of Tulipa batalinii. I guess it could be any species tulip really – they all thrill me – though this one does have something of a story fo ...
Imagine a world before screens, when all images depended on reflected rather than penetrant light (OK, OK, except those in stained-glass windows). Go back earlier and imagine a world before photograph ...
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 ...
One of the unsung aspects of gardens is their super-ability to have one foot in timelessness and the other in the current moment. In a French garden, for instance, or an English garden, it’s possibl ...
Seems like all you have to do to see the outrageously wonderful Michelangelo-designed square on Capitoline Hill in Rome entirely on your own is to get there at 5:30 am. Its intimacy and grandeur in pe ...
Well, I’m off to Italy for a few weeks. Leaving this afternoon. In about 30 hours from now, I expect I’ll be sauntering through the Piazza Navona with my group, gelato in hand. Can’t wait. W ...
I stumbled upon a quote yesterday by a guy who had apparently never liked jazz until an occasion when he watched a jazz muso playing with his eyes closed, in visible bliss. He concludes “Sometimes ...
It’s hard to face. Difficult to accept. But it’s time for a new wheelbarrow. It’s astonishing, when I think about how much work my wheelbarrow has done over the last seventeen years. With it ...
I was making a hasty departure from Longwood a few weeks back, and with no time to take a proper look at the excellent shop near the exit, snatched up a book on meadows near the door. After a very q ...
Flowers are pretty thin around here right now. I’m gagging for a bit of colour. A couple of years back I wrote about adding inorganic colour to your garden, but for some reason (can’t think wh ...
I’ve received two seed catalogues in the mail in the last couple of weeks. The Diggers Seed Annual and the Lambley Nursery Seed Manual. They’re almost identical in size and glossiness etc, but ...
I remember a few years back being struck by the point made in an architectural book that one of the best ways of making low ceiling heights less oppressive was to bring the ceiling down lower still in ...
I can’t get enough of the High Line. I’ve visited three times in the last two years, but now that I’m stuck for a while on the other side of the planet, I can’t understand why I didn’t go ...
You may have seen Gardening Australia on Saturday night. I was talking to John Patrick about a garden I designed in Woodend North, Victoria. If you’re interested, you can catch it on iView here. ...