I reckon it is time to throw away the rule book and take a fresh look at dry tolerant landscapes. Opposites like ‘sweet and sour’ might work well together but can’t be both at once. When it comes to gardens that are lush and dry perhaps what seems like a contradiction doesn’t have to be […]
Welcome to a new world! Every big garden should be made of little landscapes. Get past the obvious and it is the small details that reveal the world as a beautiful and amazing place. In a world where whatever shouts loudest gets heard it is a pleasure to look past the obvious into the world […]
Who doesn’t like a little summer sunshine? Well when it gets to 40 deg C I can put my hand up and say you can have too much of a good thing. This summer has been extreme. Repeated 40 deg plus days and extreme sunlight is tough on people and tough on plants. Some plants […]
I just thought I’d share a couple of photographs. If there is one phrase to remember it is this one – ‘Little and Often’. As the photographs suggest it is much easier to weed when things are small. Rick, by the way, is 6 foot tall! The plants are both examples of Ligustrum lucidum […]
This day and age there is a real need to get good value out of all the hard, and not so hard, work in a garden! Time is precious and the issue of maintenance is usually fairly high up on the agenda. I am a realist and whether you employ gardening staff or do it […]
The answer to that question has many parts but is in no small way due to my childhood. I grew up on 250 acres of private gardens and parkland in the UK. My Father managed the historic gardens and glass houses on a country estate outside London that in total employed sixteen full time staff […]
The Yawning Tree. If you went down to the yawning tree and turned left you were there, at the beginning of the ‘woods’. As children we had no other word for it, it didn’t need a word it just was. It was overgrown and ‘junglely’, a nature’s paradise. What was once a garden with planted […]
