One way or another, I’ve managed to see ‘Five Seasons’ three times. Once as an online ‘review’ copy, and twice at the cinema. Firstly, I’ve just got to say how amazing it is to live in a ...
I was amused, relieved, and a little embarrassed a few weeks back when a respected and long-standing Landscape Architect stated, in a meeting of industry leaders, something along the lines of ‘what ...
Piet Oudolf is a phenomenon. Not since William Robinson has a single figure given the gardening status quo such a shake-up, and drilled their way into the imagination of gardeners, recalibrating the ...
We’re all obsessed with making our gardens LOOK good, but the outcomes may be better if we spent more time thinking about how they FEEL. Interested in mastering the balance of a garden that looks gr ...
Primarily for the benefit of those on the ALC pre-conference tour today…. Before work began on the perennial garden. Initial excavation. September 2011 Laying out the plants… After four months of ...
I knew when setting out to do the perennial planting for a client that what I wanted to achieve was a big undulating plateau of colour and texture between about 800 and 1200mm, punctured by taller and ...
You may remember, from earlier posts, my ‘steppe’ planting (a misnomer that will remain until something better presents itself) from November 2015. Back then it looked like this: The intention w ...
It’s astonishing how few opportunities there are available for the home gardener that is keen to learn more. So it’s time to run some courses. I’ve been talking about it since I started this b ...
Are there any plants that better display the supreme qualities of elegance and poise than the species tulips in bud? I just want to look up close at one – Tulipa clusiana var. chrysantha The more I ...
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 ...
Yep. This morning the windscreen was iced over – the wipers frozen into immobility. It was the second frost this February – the last being last Wednesday, which happened also to be a total fire ...
While much of the country has been sweltering, we down south in Victoria have been enjoying the most perfect summer. We’ve had regular rains, and no days over 40C. The countryside around me is sti ...
Back on the 4th April, I gave a quick run down on my latest bit of trial planting of very low plants. I almost gave up on it in early spring, when it looked like being overrun with weeds, and I star ...
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 ...
A couple of years back my mother-in-law gave me the best present ever – a gift voucher from a bulb supplier. In this case, Marcus Harvey’s Hillview Rare Plants. I didn’t ordering anything spec ...
I’m sitting up in bed, re-dawn, french doors open to the following view. Its morning number four and I’m yet to get bored with it. That’s Vesuvius in the background, the currently snoring pres ...
I planted as I built my stone wall, following good Gertrude Jekyll principles. Some things succeeded and other things failed. Some, like the honeysuckle and the dianthus, grew really well initially, ...
Well-planted pots can pack a punch totally disproportionate to the number and volume of plants involved. A couple of times a year I replant the largest of my pots, which then sit in prominent position ...