Go Dutch!
Now is the moment!
Not a day to lose, October is bulb planting time and also November! The choice is extraordinary. You can have the most amazing colours of disco...
The BBOWT Environmental Educational Garden
The task was to bring new life to the BBOWT Environmental Education Centre at Sutton Courteney, on land leased from Didcot Power Station. BBOWT is...
Setting the scene, a stage set
The whole world is a play! When you get an entrance right like any of these, with such a strong sense of invitation, one is drawn in. Even the dark...
Lookout! New website
Here is the wonderful Emma DeBanks! who has pulled it all together and it was quite a pull! Without her, it wouldn’t have been possible. Micky...
No problem!
This wonderful tree nursery in north Germany moves huge trees as if they were saplings. Everything is possible, and you can see from the second...
Water Lilies
Here I am looking small and insignificant in front of one of Monet’s enormous canvases in their gallery in Paris. The two close up photographs show...
Finding English oak planks
In deepest Wiltshire, looking for two top rails for a pair of important oak gates, where the grain hopefully would follow the curve of an old...
A Genius!!
Joanna came to Oxford to give a talk and she was so brilliant, interesting, supremely eloquent, razor sharp and wittier and more elegant than ever!
York stone
Here are three photographs from a fabulous quarry I recently visited near Bradford in West Yorkshire. Wonderful, friendly, warm hearted people made...

Seasonal Posts
Right plant, right place!
This is late May, the shadiest darkest corner of my garden which could be just a tip! Ferns, hellebores, foxgloves and brunnera love damp shady spots. In the urn are the fading leaves of Erythronium ‘Pagoda’.
Apricot Time
An apricot is not an apricot is not an apricot! But a good apricot is heaven! Delicate, subtle, quiet, and understated, to think of dying without having tasted a good apricot! But oh, what grief! to know your good apricot you have to have tasted disappointing...
In Norfolk
Here I am visiting a wholesale nursery in Norfolk where they unusually grow plants in fields, and also on a very large scale beneath the huge East Anglian skies.On a wonderful summers day, there were fields of geraniums, iris, astilbe, salvias, hemerocallis, stachys...
Fabulous roses
“I like my roses to flower into the Autumn, smell fabulous... definitely not red – rather apricots and soft pinks...” So uttered a client 18 years ago when designing his rose parterre garden. Some of these original plants now need replacing, so today I revisited a...
Bearded Iris
Here is a wonderful display of bearded iris at Woottens Plants. A true harbinger of early summer and so glamorous too! Here is Iris ‘Buto’ with the yellow standards of Iris ‘Rajah’ in the background. The flowers are total showstoppers, but not for long so we tend to...
Pelargonium Paradise
The truly glorious pelargonium polytunnel yesterday at one of my favourite plant nurseries, Wootten’s Plants of Wenhaston. Here is Julie with a pot of Pelargonium ‘Pink Capricorn’ ready for their display at the Suffolk County Show this week.Do visit www.woottens.co.uk...
