Let's Grow! Spring special
Now is the time to give gardens a burst of love
Wishing you a very happy long weekend filled with flowers and chocolate! To help inspire you, I thought I’d send a roundup email of useful articles filled with spring gardening ideas.
I know I’m often saying you don’t have to do all the garden tasks thrown at us but I’ll level with you, this is the weekend where we do have give a burst of energy to sow seeds, divide plants and make plant moves.
Ground is still wet, rain will still come and summer’s dry is long enough away for plants to get established if we act now.
I’m going to set you three simple challenges for this weekend:
Find a plant to divide and spread around you garden for free
Look for seedlings of a plant and move those seedlings around
Pause with a cup of tea and try to spot different insects
Nothing onerous but good for our hearts and minds.
Guides free to everyone
21 projects for starting a wildlife garden
Wildlife is under ever increasing pressure and, if we’re honest with ourselves, things are going to get much worse for the natural world before it gets better. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature, the WWF, recently reported that on average wildlife populations around the world have
In support of scrappy grass paths
There was a time when I shunned grass paths, they just didn’t look right to me. Then we moved to our new garden in Yorkshire and the idea of paved or gravel paths felt wrong in this luscious part of the world, alive with green.
What can you find in your garden?
What I love about the end of winter, on the cusp of the growing season, is that gardens are at their lowest and barest. This allows us to take a good close look at what surprises and treats may be waiting for us.
How to feed and encourage birds naturally in gardens
In my book A Greener Life I wrote about my preference for growing food for birds in gardens I design rather than artificially feeding them with bought feed. To me this has always felt like the best way of helping any wildlife, to establish a longterm self-sustaining habitat as in the wild, rather than short term fixes. I was also concerned that bird feeding is a vector for disease and lures birds out into the open, making them more visible to us, but also to predators - giving cats in the UK an unfair rep, when it is in fact us, messing with ecosystems and reducing habitat that is the problem (I’ve written about
16 ways gardeners can live alongside slugs and snails
I’ve always felt sorry for slugs and snails, they move around slowly, minding their own business. Gently nibbling plants peacefully. And then along we come to spoil their day. Well, a few years ago I said to myself ‘no more’ they stay and I’ll find new ways to live alongside them. Below I’ve shared what these are...
8 ways to reduce compost use
Our herb bed, shown above, has been grown using minimal amounts of compost by following the below techniques.
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10 essential tips for choosing plants for your garden
If you're thinking about new plants for your garden, as I am, my best advice to everyone is to follow the below steps to selecting plants as the professionals do.
10 tough plants for early April joy
It’s a gloriously sunny start to April and there is a lot going on in our garden, demonstrated by the above area. I am insanely excited about it all - nothing’s perfect but there is progress. I’ll try and explain.
Wild Way garden design guide
Fulfil your potential as a gardener with easy to follow advanced garden design guides using the Wild Way’s new nature-led plant community techniques. Suitable for beginners and more experienced gardeners learning new methods.
Wild Plant A-Z
Wildflowers and other wild plants without woody stems that either grow and dieback in winter or are evergreen. Herbaceous wildflowers are colourful resilient plants. Wildflower database »
Divide perennials for free plants
Most of the plants in our garden have been grown for free by dividing. This is the process of cutting one plant into two or more pieces and then growing them as separate plants. Over the course of five years I’ve grown hundreds of plants in this way saving us a thousand pounds or more. It’s also a fast way of growing because divisions are usually fully grown plants ready to roll. Division is done on herbaceous perennial plants, the ones that live from year to year and generally grow larger with more growing points.
What is plant community design and does it work?
Our garden is a loose plant community that changes every year. As the gardener I of course steer it in one direction by adding or dividing plants, but the plants are my gardening partners. Foxgloves, teasel, tufted hair grass, oxeye daisies and many other plants self sow where they want and I often leave them to surprise me. I didn’t plant any of them in the above photo.
Mixing shade and sun plants
The very small garden of this stylish new build by Gagarin architects in the grounds of a stunning mill conversion had multiple challenges to design around. Sitting on the top of a hill in the Pennines it is exposed to the strongest winds the UK can throw at us, is overlooked by apartments opposite and while it can be baked by direct sun in the morning, is in full shade the rest of the day.
14 competition tolerant suppressing groundcovers for rainy climates
I am obsessed with ground covering plants these days, for three main reasons. I enjoy the look of low planting with lots of empty space to see over them; they help reduce maintenance by suppressing other growth; if chosen carefully groundcover can help with successional planting in the same space. A garden with only groundcovers would be an incredible design but combined with a mix of other plants, will cause jaws to drop. And the best thing is, you’ll know the secret that they reduce the amount of maintenance you have to do.
Sadly away visiting family this weekend but before we left I spotted that some of the cuckoo flower/lady’s smock, I propagated following your instructions last year, are flowering. So delighted. On the positive side of visiting family we’re off to see my mum. She has a gorgeous garden and loves giving away plants so I’ll come home with lots of random cuttings to try and find space for. Free plants are the best!