Compost fodder, plant support, greenhouse shading, mulching material, soil enricher, winter fuel, garden screen, wildlife haven… there’s no end to the potential of the versatile willow. Our first stormy autumn night didn’t disappoint: warm, lashing rain, high, cottage-shaking winds and two mini power cuts – then a proper time-for-bed blackout. My head torch-illuminated check outdoors […]

Our greenhouses are transformative, regenerative and infinitely renewable. Imagine what could happen – for people, nature and planet – if we truly embraced that potential. What if we started thinking outside of our greenhouses – the gardening equivalent of thinking outside the box? What if we could muster our collective, sun-fuelled growing power to help […]

In a dangerously overheating world, it’s more important than ever to keep it cool in our gardens and greenhouses. Twenty years ago, my garden was on fire – or, more accurately, my garden-to-be was on fire. When I became keeper of this then bracken-riddled bank, I was on a new and exciting learning curve. I never imagined […]

Pernicious weed? No: beneficial insect magnet, wildlife buffet, nutrient-rich feed, compost fodder… this superpowered plant is one to welcome into your garden and greenhouse. Be sure to have some thick, sting-proof gloves at the ready – because I’m going to get you all fired up to grow arguably the most useful of all garden plants. […]

Even for an experienced composter, unearthing an old heap can offer a salutary refresher course in the need to treat ‘compostable’ claims with caution. I never imagined I would see this pair of Y-fronts again. They should be long gone by now, the threadbare organic cotton rotted away, disintegrated beyond recognition into crumbs of dark, […]

Are you impatient for the phase-out of peat, or anxious about its implications for your garden and greenhouse? With the right advice, we can all look forward to a peat-free future. Peat-based compost – along with the ecological destruction that follows in its wake – is in the departure lounge. There is no turning back. […]

Support, sustenance, shading, shelter… the humble native hazel is a sustainable, renewable powerhouse. Some plants possess superpowers. Corylus avellana, our native hazel, is one of them. It’s abundant here, growing serendipitously in and around my garden, and in the neighbouring wood. I have never deliberately grown it, and only occasionally relocate a jay-sown shrubling popping up […]

In this increasingly stressed and stressful world, we need to nurture the healing balm of gardening in the slow lane. A year ago, I decided it was time to go slower in my garden. I vowed to favour unhurried over haste, swap frantic for sedate, and make slow gardening the nemesis of fast. It might […]

Of all the gardening gifts that go on giving, there’s a clear – and solar-powered – winner. Many of us gardeners, myself included, are about to be crushed under a barrowload of gifts we never wanted – much of them little more than ephemeral, opportunistic tat. It’s easy for this season of goodwill to slip […]

It’s just turned December in the UK and until a few days ago there were still butterflies and bumblebees foraging on the winter shrubs. In my garden my resident wasp nest was still very much active, and there were many late summer flowering plants actually still in bloom, like cosmos and coreopsis and roses. Social […]

Plans to redevelop ‘redundant’ commercial greenhouses overlook the huge opportunity to redeploy them: the means to renewable ultra-local horticulture is standing right there. Big greenhouses mean bigger opportunities: I don’t know any gardener who wouldn’t upsize their undercover growing space if they could. In a greenhouse, bigger means more of everything: space, potential, food, flowers, […]