I am a child of the post-war years of make do and mend. We grew our own fruit and vegetables and gave away our surpluses. Some ended up in the village greengrocer. There were no deep freezes, so we bottled our soft fruit, cherries and plums, and salted away our beans. Potatoes were kept in wooden boxes in a dark shed and root vegetables, such as coarse old carrots and parsnips (which I loathed), were stored in clamps.

My grandfather was Dean of the Royal School of Mines, which had been damaged by bombing in the war. The contractors who repaired it overestimated the quantity of glass they would need and he was able to acquire the leftovers — all building materials were hard to come by — from which he made a small greenhouse. I remember calceolarias in spring (query — why does no one grow them today?), tomatoes in summer, chrysanthemums in autumn and the smell of paraffin stoves to keep out the frost.

We had two gardeners who netted the fruit, mounded up the potatoes, tied in the sweet peas and mowed the lawns with an elderly push-me mower, which (when it wasn’t in need of repair) left beautiful stripes in the grass. They also chopped wood and felled large trees with a huge two-man saw, 10ft long with formidable teeth, which my father eventually gave to a museum of garden tools in Cornwall.

Those two men (Mr Bond the head gardener and his assistant Smith, as we called them) were village men, able and intelligent, but poorly educated. When Smith chalked the names of potatoes on the wooden boxes he reversed the S in 'Majestic', which always made me wonder how he spelt his own name. Both were hard-working, dependable and always willing to talk to Master Charles about the annuals and bulbs that I grew in ‘my’ garden — all for a wage of £6 or £7 a week.

Fast forward to 2026. Today’s gardeners could not be more different. They are well educated and well qualified. They have followed courses and passed exams. They take initiatives, come with good ideas and spend their holidays visiting other people’s gardens. They know their own worth — and they are still underpaid.

Last year, I wrote a piece for Country Life about three young gardeners who were beginning to make a mark in their world. One worked for the National Trust, one for the RHS and the third was already second-in-command at Great Dixter in East Sussex. They were grateful for the privilege of working in beautiful and fascinating gardens with the freedom to help them develop. They all gave thanks for the encouragement they received when training and working within a large organisation. They were happy employees who expected their careers to develop within the structures of their current employers.

Twelve months later, two of them have already left in search of better prospects.

The internal promotion for which they hoped did not materialise soon enough. They were ready for greater responsibility and the opportunity to learn new skills, but it became clear that the only way they would achieve this would be in new jobs.

In this, they resemble the journeymen gardeners of late-Victorian and Edwardian times, who used to move on to gain experience in different gardens, pushing their way up the hierachy in the hope eventually of becoming head gardeners in charge of a large estate or, perhaps, of owning their own nursery. The fact is that the HR department of almost any organisation today cannot cope with ambitious employees who want to better themselves, but feel held back.

Six weeks ago, I attended a study day in Maurice Foster’s famous plantsman’s garden at White House Farm in Kent. There were about 30 of us, including three of the garden’s trustees, extremely knowledgeable and experienced horticulturists. Apart from a few old buffers like me, almost all the participants were young, well-educated and ambitious millennials and zoomers, including some who work for none other than the National Trust, the RHS and Great Dixter. All were happy to fork out for the experience and spend all Sunday talking to Foster, exploring his 15 acres and meeting new plants — and all went away loaded not only with new knowledge, but also with pots and cuttings of plants to propagate for themselves.

The future of horticulture is safe in the hands of these energetic and committed 20-somethings, but what about the old-style gardeners? I have lost contact with Smith, but Mr Bond’s children had an education and job opportunities that their parents lacked. Some of his grandchildren went to university. None of them will ever pursue a career in horticulture, but one of them loves his own garden and told me he remembers that his grandfather showed him how to mound up potatoes and tie in sweet peas.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I'm not much of a winter kitchen gardener. I’ll clear up some untidy areas, rake fallen tree leaves onto beds to mulch and enrich and prune where pruning is needed, but I’m rarely looking for excuses to compact wet soil, acquire damp knees or feel the wind exploring any gaps in the completeness of my clothing. March to November is the time I am naturally drawn to the garden and that means there is rarely a day when I don’t have borage (Borago officinalis) for company; it is one of the few constants of my favoured months and its lifting presence stops just this side of jolly to ensure I never tire of it.

Having intentionally grown borage once, it seems to have moved in for good, popping up as and where it fancies, the earliest self-seeders announcing that spring really is upon us.

For those new to it, borage is easy to grow, germinating readily when sown direct from April until around midsummer. You can even sow earlier, mimicking Nature by scattering a handful of seed directly into the soil in autumn for early flowers in spring. Being native to the Mediterranean region, a sunny, well-drained spot is where borage is happiest, although in my experience it will grow just about anywhere with reasonable light levels that’s not waterlogged. Allow 20in or so between plants and expect it to reach 23in–30in tall. If you have an as-yet-unused corner or a medium pot (multi-purpose peat-free compost is best) at your disposal, borage is just about the perfect low-maintenance plant to bring a little life to it as you decide on your longer-term plans.

Borage grows to a medium-sized plant, with soft, fleshy leaves and flowers that are most commonly blue, although it is also available with white flowers (‘Alba’), and you might find ‘Bill Archer’ with its cream variegated leaves. The star-shaped flowers of each are a delight, having five petals arranged in pointed triangles. Whichever variety you go for will offer a precious destination for bees and other beneficial insects that starts early and carries on through spring, summer and much of autumn. Grow them for a while and you might find some distinctly purple/pink flowers appear among the self-seeders.

Borage is an excellent companion plant, with its ability to draw in pollinators making it especially good next to fruit such as tomatoes, which it also apparently serves to protect from tomato hornworm by confusing it with its scent.

As much as I love borage’s optimistic visual punctuation, I equally look forward to its flavour. The young leaves and flowers carry a gentle, cool, fresh cucumber flavour that is wonderful added to leafy salads and cocktails (in Pimm’s it's a must) or with fruit, especially strawberries. I particularly like the texture and flavour added when serving fish and seafood, too. In Italy, borage leaves are most often cooked and used to fill ravioli and other stuffed pastas.

When the flowers are at their most abundant, I freeze them in ice cubes to add to cocktails and other drinks when the sun appears: to keep the flower in the centre of the cube, add a fresh flower to each compartment of the ice tray, half fill with water, freeze and then top up and freeze again. Don’t worry about picking too many flowers, as their productivity is hard to exhaust even if you love them as much as I do and the more you pick, the more the plant produces. If you are looking to maximise your harvest, it helps to remove any tired flowers to encourage more to follow.

Borage couldn’t be easier to live with. In a couple of decades of growing, I’ve found it entirely pest and disease free, resistant to all but a serious frost and it needs staking only when plants are at their tallest and planted in a particularly windy spot. As I’ve implied, borage is a friend who likes to stay once invited into your garden; you are likely to find it springing up randomly, bringing life and colour unexpectedly, lifting the early season in just the way I’m grateful for. Equally, any plants that appear where I’d rather they didn’t are easily pulled up and cast onto the compost heap.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon. His book 'Abundance: eating and living with the seasons' (Quadrille, £30) is out now.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026 print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It's not only beauty that is in the eye of the beholder. It is, we are assured, also the answer to that perennial query: ‘What’s the difference ’twixt a wildflower and a weed?’ The Oxford English Dictionary is definitive, defining a weed as a ‘wild plant growing where it is not wanted and is in competition with cultivated plants’.

The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), with its lovely golden head, will serve as an example. On the verge, we see it positively as prettifying, but growing on the grassy village cricket pitch, in front of the stumps, it is an obstruction that requires ‘weeding’. That’s that, then. The answer to ‘weed or wildflower?’ done and dusted.

Whether a wild plant is a weed or wildflower is a matter of its location — plus human perception. The moseying dog-walker admires the dandelion on the lane, the groundsman mowing the cricket pitch’s infield regards it as a problem. Ah, the dear old dandelion, put on Earth to rebut the wisdom of lexicographers and to weed out ontological glibness.

To itself, of course, Taraxacum officinale’s status as ‘wildflower’ or ‘weed’ is immaterial. It exists unto itself, what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant — who rather early got the hang of this being and perception stuff in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) — posited as the state of ‘noumena’. Humans can only know things as they appear to us or as ‘phenomena’.

Neither do the 50 or so insects the dandelion supports care a fig about its classification, Kantian or otherwise. The bees of early spring are glad to visit it wherever it appears. They need the dandelion’s sweet pollen, which is as energy-giving as the primaveral sun.

In France, the dandelion, far from being in competition with cultivated plants, is a cultivated plant, a salad. Take note, too, of dandelion’s Latin tag, the officinale meaning that herbalists of the past granted it purpose as a medicinal herb — not a weed, or a wildflower mind you — and would have picked it wherever it popped up. Dandelion, among its medicinal attributes, is a powerful diuretic, hence its French name of pissenlit. Edible plants are plants. The end. Dig into history and the people of the past were clearly crop/weed/wildflower fluid.

Tollund Man, the bog-preserved corpse from the Danish Iron Age, consumed porridge containing cultivated barley and fat-hen (Chenopodium album) for his breakfast before being hanged. If the barley of his last meal was cultivated, the fat-hen may equally have been farmed or foraged.

Highly nutritious, the Iron Agers grew it or allowed it to grow — an eminently sensible approach to food provision: let the edible plant that flourishes flourish, whether wild and sown by breeze or planted by a horny-handed human with a digging stick. Fat-hen was sold by hawkers as a leafy vegetable in Britain as recently as the 18th century, yet today? It is a bane ‘weed’ of agriculture.

What did the Romans ever do for us? We may gawp in awe at Hadrian’s Wall and Bath’s baths, but the empire’s legacy also includes ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria), which was introduced to the isles as a pot herb. The perennial jumped the villa wall to take root elsewhere. As John Gerard noted of ground elder in his Herball (1597), ‘where it hath once taken roote, it will hardly be gotten out again’. Centuries of gardeners wail their woeful accord.

Those gardeners, together with small children, will doubtless be bemused to find that the plants once cultivated but now damned as weeds include the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica). Fairservice, the gardener in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), raised it under glass as an early spring green. Oh, the irony. What we regard as the ‘weeds’ of farm and garden were made more prolific by… farming and gardening.

The turning of soil favoured poppies and the midden — the farm muck heap — was a source of nitrogen beloved by the nettle. There was, however, in the past many a virtuous link between ‘weeds’ and farming, as recorded by the plants’ common names, which are often floral memorials of their ancient utility. Galium aparine, that sticky climber of the hedge, was known as ‘goose-grass’, as it was fed to goslings and Heracleum sphondylium, the airy white umbels of which liven the lane in June, was ‘common hogweed’, as it was free fodder for porcines.

Time has hardened the distinction between wildflower and weed. As agriculture rose and rose, the plants that competed with crops took on the negative nomenclature of ‘weed’, the word itself entering the English language in the 9th century. The division was more than botanical, agricultural, it was political.

Cultivated crops, especially cereals, became regarded as signs of orthodoxy and order, whereas weeds became symbols of anarchy and wildness. It’s there in Shakespeare, always the mirror to the age, when Cordelia says of her father in King Lear, Act IV, Scene 4: 'He was met even now/ As mad as the vex’d sea — singing aloud;/ Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,/ With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo- flowers,/ Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.' Or put plainly, Lear is an insane regent wearing a parodic crown composed of the parasitic weeds choking the grain that feeds his subjects.

By the opposite token, when Gerard Manley Hopkins railed against the Victorian taming of the countryside, his chosen emblem of poetic protest was weed, not ‘wildflower’: 'What would the world be, once bereft/ Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,/ O let them be left, wildness and wet;/ Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.'

When Hopkins wrote Inversnaid (1881), the industrialisation of agriculture was in full march and the weed became more than an issue, it became an enemy. The widespread use of chemical herbicides post-1950 allowed a Final Fix to the problem of ‘weeds’. One contemporary agrichemical company boasts its herbicides ‘fight weeds with a vengeance’. You and I might ponder whether or not flora is wildflower or weed, but ‘weedkillers’ rarely make such distinction.

Weed and wildflower alike are to be suppressed. Hence all those monotone cereal fields across the land. The poppy (Papaver rhoeas) is the blood-red wildflower of Remembrance, yet for the maker of broad-leaved herbicide it is merely a menace to the sustaining corn. Thus is the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), which is the blue of sky, condemned; so, too, the little scarlet pimpernel (Lysimachia arvensis), whose name is its description, pink and shyly peeking, and corn chamomile (Anthemis arvensis), elegantly limbed and sweetly daisy-headed.

Weeds gave colour to the countryside, as well as food and habitat for our native creatures. When the weeds went, so did the wildlife. The grey partridge (Perdix perdix) declined by 92% between 1970 and 2013. The bird’s chicks are crucially dependent on insects whose hosts are arable ‘weeds’.

I am a serial re-creator of early Victorian wheatfields with their riotous wildflower/weed chromatics. I admit, my cereal yield has been a smidgeon less than conventional agriculture, but my arable wild plants have succoured the buzzing, flitting pollinators on which farming depends. The cattle have loved and thrived on the wild flora baled in the straw. I have gained, not lost. It helps to be pretty. Is that not part of the wildflower versus weed division?

I’ve deliberately sown corn chamomile, yet I have never sown broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius), a plant so plain Jane that Mrs Bennet would struggle to find it a suitor. My mistake. Although classified as ‘injurious’ in the 1959 Weeds Act, meaning that the government may enforce its removal due to toxicity/destructiveness, recent research from the Biological Husbandry Unit in New Zealand suggests that small populations of docks in pasture help prevent bloat in livestock, as well as providing mineral-rich nutrition.

The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was more right than he knew when he defined a weed as ‘a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’ — or have been forgotten.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

We have been mired in the building of a glasshouse from gymnasium windows and a random door, thinking it would be cheaper than a greenhouse. True, but for a while we referred to it as ‘the Shell garage’, owing to its resemblance to a petrol station thrown up in the 1930s when motoring was a thrill. Now, it’s the Café de Pellée, a winter palace for our pelargoniums.

We hope conditions are right for the clientele — a white ceiling with roof lights and vents, glazed on three sides, because pelargoniums, as does anything under glass, need copious ventilation. If you start to find whitefly, open windows and doors and spread the pots out or get them outside. Space and shade are paramount. Ed Boers and Laura Whiley, the new proprietors of Fibrex Nurseries in Worcestershire, advocate 40% shade as optimum: this is surprising, but perhaps not when you think of them in the back porch or a Chinese takeaway. Although they seem to thrive on nonchalance, pelargoniums must be kept frost free, and dry in winter. Mr B sometimes simply de-pots and throws them in a heap under the bench until spring.

Yet come spring, pelargoniums are conversely responsive to restless grooming: manicuring of spent flowers and leaves. Luckily, keeping them kempt is both meditative and aromatherapeutic. Mr B loves to tend to the needs of a Jilly Cooper-esque cultivar such as P. ‘Clorinda’, louche and puce, yet abhors my grandmother’s zonal pelargoniums, calling them the ‘Clarice Cliff’ of the greenhouse.

My grandmother’s geraniums were guardsman-scarlet and had leaves that smelled of hot Draylon. They were planted out each summer in a military row, but were, correctly speaking, pelargoniums. Cranesbills and stork’s bills; that is the old confusion.

The geranium or cranesbill is a low northern, hardy, herbaceous perennial: the ubiquitous G. ‘Rozanne’. The pelargonium is different, being tender, generally from South Africa and known as stork’s bills owing to the fruit’s resemblance to a bird’s beak, which is part of their charm. Pelargonium species come, like liquorice, in all sorts, including zonal, ivy and, best of all, scented-leaved species and varieties.

Not being a botanist, the definition of ‘species’ has long perplexed me, but, put simply, species are the original wild forms and generally more robust, particularly when indigenous. Cultivars have been selected (and often transported across oceans) by generations of humanity, and hybrids are the result of both naturally occurring and deliberate crossbreeding.

Pelargoniums are not indigenous, but they offer extended flowering and scent from their numerous cultivars. Yet species pelargoniums are where it all began, combining subtle beauty with leaves and sometimes flowers that smell of the veldt. ‘Bonjour!’ to Pelargonium triste, the first species to reach Europe from the Cape; part of the plant library of John Tradescant by 1632.

The specific epithet derived from the Latin for sad or gloomy. It is pale, shy, scented, dormant in summer, but, on February evenings, Pelargonium triste unfolds five petals of tallow dashed with darkest plum; uncooked spiced pastries in look and smell. These damson splashes are more intense on her near cousin P. lobatum, whose evening perfume is sherbet fountains. P. lobatum’s offspring (after a coupling with P. fulgidum, which has lipstick scarlet flowers) is P. ‘Ardens’, my favourite winter flower fairy. She wears a Fortuny hat of velutinous madder smudged darkest crimson, but she has no scent.

All the above are tuberous — known colloquially as ‘gouty’ — pelargoniums, on account of their swollen basal nodes, and are difficult to propagate. This makes them all the more desirable. The garden designer Helen Dillon suggests cutting up the tuber with a bit of stem and burying the whole thing completely in light compost, praying for a plant in three months: ‘At no stage disturb the pots to see what’s happening.’

However, regular pelargoniums strike from the smallest cutting, providing presents for friends. You might like to give them P. sidoides, whose beaky purple flowers emerge from grey cashmere stems, felty, but sticky with a gum that smells sour from April until December.

They all deplore the stagnant and the damp, but P. sidoides likes Martini-dry conditions. P. odoratissimum, on the other hand, a prostrate shrublet whose candied apple scent emanates from small white flowers, revels in shaded places in the Cape woodland.

My great love of the moment — but this will change — likes just such an umbrageous corner. P. tomentosum, meaning downy, not tormented, has mossy peppermint-coloured and peppermint-scented leaves, as soft as mouse fur; tactile heaven for small children and obsessive adults. These species are worth all the attention they seek.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'Put the brown end in the soil, the green end above it, and you’re in with a much better chance,’ said the late Yorkshire gardener Geoffrey Smith. There is no arguing with that. The trouble is that even when following these basic guidelines there are pitfalls ahead, the most crucial of which is planting depth.

It’s many years ago now that I was reprimanded by the then curator of Kew Gardens, who was watching me plant a rhododendron. ‘Too deep, Alan, too deep.’ I learned then the perils of deep planting, and now that I garden on acid soil and I am actually establishing the rhododendrons and azaleas that were but a dream in my days of gardening on chalk, his words ring in my ear.

Rhodies, as we affectionately call them, are surface rooters; bury their rootballs too deeply and they suffocate and decline to flower. I’ve learned the wisdom of planting them so that the rootball of container-grown plants sits about an inch above the surrounding soil level. This does exacerbate the drying out of the rootball in sunny weather, but mulching the soil around the plant with chipped bark will help to reduce evaporation and encourage the exploration of those upper roots. Regular watering in times of drought — especially with newly planted rhodies and azaleas — will ensure rapid establishment.

During the hot, dry period in May of this year, on soil that is acidic and sandy, I was a slave to the hosepipe as far as my new charges were concerned. They were very quick to let me know they were short of water, as the foliage would wilt dramatically. After a good soaking, the recovery was equally dramatic: the plants picked up and bristled with health after only a few hours.

The importance of planting depth is every bit as critical for the large specimen trees that now seem to be the choice of folk who acquire a new estate and want instant effect. That option is available, of course, but at a price. Trees 10ft or more high and wide, often with a price tag in the tens of thousands, will be purchased by the dozen in the hope of creating a landscape that looks mature in a matter of weeks.

Touring one such estate a month ago, in the company of Kew’s former head of the arboretum, Tony Kirkham, we sighed over tree after tree that was struggling to survive only a few years after planting. Some were already dead, towering specimens devoid of leaf and brittle of wood; swarthy skeletons against a forget-me-not-blue sky. The cause of the problem in each and every case was deep planting.

In the same way that established trees are susceptible to changes in the water table, so trees that have been container-grown or containerised later in life are equally sensitive to a change in the level of planting. When committed to their new earth, the surface of the rootball should sit level with the surface, not 7in–11in deeper as was the case with so many of the sad specimens we saw. One can bemoan the waste of money on a tree that cost several thousand pounds, but, more than that, the loss of a formerly healthy specimen is agonising for a gardener to behold.

Why are trees planted too deeply? Probably in the belief that being tall they need greater anchorage, which deeper planting will provide. Stability is far better afforded by guy ropes that can be provided in the first year or two of establishment and removed once the tree has anchored itself. The problem is not confined to large specimens. Last week, I bought two pot-grown Japanese maples and planted them in tubs. I already have a couple that were established a few months ago. I had no reason to believe that the newcomers would not do the same, but they sulked. Then the likely reason dawned on me and I scraped away at the compost at the foot of the stem on one of them. Three inches down, I found the first root.

As rhododendrons and azaleas do, Japanese maples resent deep planting. The top of the roots that emanate from the base of the stem should be just visible on the surface of the compost, then they will romp away.

The base of the trunk or stem on any tree is recognisable, as it is generally swollen immediately above the emerging roots — the brown bit that Mr Smith told us needs to go in the soil. Let that swollen stem base be your guide and your means of ensuring the survival of both the tree and your sanity.

'Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them' by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35).

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I love the Chelsea Flower Show and this year’s was a corker. I first went in 1974. It was free to members of the RHS (we were known as Fellows then) and I don’t remember any of the jostling crowds that people complain about now. Nor was it so micromanaged: journalists today are urged not to refer to the Chelsea Flower Show, but to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. I am happy to confirm, therefore, that it is micromanaged by the RHS and not by Chelsea F. C.

There are, indeed, many different Chelseas, which means that there is something for every-one. First, there are the gardens that get all the media attention. Their purpose is to promote their sponsors and to further the careers of their designers. Television programmers love them, but they offer little to real gardeners. Second, there are the innumerable stalls along the Eastern Avenue, whose relevance to gardening is sometimes hard to deduce, although almost all are manned by pleasant people selling beautiful things that you end up buying because you had not realised how much you needed them.

Then there are the plants, because it is in the Great Pavilion that you find the best of all possible Chelseas. I made a beeline for the new roses, especially ‘Sir David Beckham’ from David Austin. I recounted the story of its life, from seedling to commercial launch, in Country Life last year. It’s unusual among Austin roses — quite like a Floribunda, with a hint of the Hybrid Musks, although its incurved petals form the shape of a Champagne goblet and also reminded me of ‘Mme Pierre Oger’, a fine Bourbon rose from the 1870s. The flowers are scented, medium-sized, mother-of-pearl in colour, fading quickly to pure white and held in large clusters. The slender pedicels sometimes bend a bit sideways, which I think will make a fine effect in the garden, although it is hard to know how it will perform as a cut rose.

It will make a good modern substitute for ever-popular ‘Iceberg’, first introduced in 1958 and now rather too susceptible to blackspot in our damp, cool climate. If the new rose fares as well as I hope, Sir David may eventually find that he is remembered less as a skilful footballer, but more as a fragrant English rose.

‘Sir David Beckham’ was Austin’s only new rose at Chelsea and I rather miss the prolific days of the 1980s when David Austin had established his house style — strongly scented, repeat-flowering roses with an old-fashioned shape. His business was expanding fast and we filled our gardens with his wonderful introductions: nine were launched in 1982, 14 in 1983, and 12 in 1984. The company believes its roses are constantly improving, so I heartily wish it would introduce many more.

Harkness Roses introduced no fewer than five new roses at Chelsea (and one disturbingly pink garden gnome), including a fine twin-tone bush rose ‘Youth Without Limits’ in support of the charity that runs the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

I will certainly buy its new ‘Special Granddaughter’, a splendid super-pink ground-cover rose with a vigour and sheer prettiness that show up the shortcomings of old favourites, such as ‘The Fairy’. Harkness also introduced two new Persica hybrids — Philip Harkness has been working with Rosa persica for many years and his father, Jack, pioneered Persica-breeding 50 years ago with double-flowered ‘Tigris’. Mr Harkness’s ‘Chelsea Sunset’ has really large, semi-double flowers with a thumping red splodge at the centre of the flower, an excellent follow-on from last year’s ‘Memories and Moments’. Both should make hearty garden plants.

Yet there is more to Chelsea than roses. The Flora of South Africa exhibit brought a spectacular display of native plants and all on a princely scale — fynbos proteas stacked up, row upon row, to a great height, contrasting with a little rock garden planted entirely with forms of Drakensberg rhodohypoxis. I gasped at its boldness and brilliance, certain that it was the most inspired and inspiring exhibit in the show. The judges agreed.

Burncoose Nurseries can be relied on for excellent unusual plants: I greatly admired its new pink Cornus kousa ‘Scarlet Fire’ and covet its rare Debregeasia edulis ‘Elite’. Also impressive were cosmos from National Collection holder Jonathan Sheppard in Lincolnshire, clivias from Hoyland in Yorkshire and Anemone coronaria forms from Little Cornish Glasshouse.

Kevock Garden Plants, the Edinburgh nursery that trains and employs disabled persons, had a thoughtful design of spring-flowering herbaceous plants. Raymond Evison brought three splendid new clematis cultivars from Guernsey: ‘Queen’s Nurse’, ‘Eliza’ and ‘Ithemba’. His 50 years of devoted hybridising have transformed the way we grow clematis.

Finally, Blue Diamond’s massive exhibit showed the new Hydrangea paniculata cultivar Groundbreaker Ruby, whose flowers turn from white to crimson. It’s a good plant, but which novelty plant was best of all? The judges plumped for a purple-leaved hosta called ‘Red Ninja’, but I fell for a runner-up, Hydrangea ‘Velvet Night Red Lace’, with dark-red leaves, almost black, that set off the rich pink lace-cap flowers. Soon, I hope, we shall all be growing it.

Charles Quest-Ritson edited the RHS Encyclopedia of Roses. His book Climbing Roses of the World (2003) describes more than 1,600 climbers and ramblers.

When applying for planning permission for more solar panels here last year, the eco-adviser commented that my suggestion of a native hedgerow screen around them would not especially up the ‘biodiversity net gain’ because we would be keeping it at about my height (5ft 7in).

I was not sure I followed the logic: stock-proof hedges, after all, are kept at about this height and are famously biodiverse and mine would be wild and willowy. My interest was piqued enough, however, to sleuth some labour-saving alternatives that would form a magnetic ribbon of pollinator lures and a nesting heaven, yet never cast a shadow on one precious iota of sun-given power.

A solar array is expensive and expansive, but, luckily, we have a small square field we can use. Formerly littered with modern agricultural buildings, it has been cleared and compacted into a hard wasteland, rubble-ridden acres that have developed their own eco-system of poor grass, grasshoppers and voles. We have been ‘rounding’ them at the edges with hedgerow and copse planting, but more would be needed.

My thoughts turned to quick-growing annuals — good for birds. Perhaps I should go for game crop, that mixture of sunflowers, millet, quinoa, niger seed — exotically named Guizotia abyssinica — oats and teasel (a very west London menu), which you see in pheasant country. Mr B stipulated ‘no maize’, to avoid an onslaught of rats, badgers and deer, but I have always been rather fascinated by game crops. The planting of woods and copses with a shrubby understorey created the pentimento of woods and fields we know and love. Game and hunting have had a huge hand in what we think of as ‘wild’ countryside, with cover varied in height and density, as opposed to monumental monotonous agri-farming. Yet annuals would require too much work and the look would be too outlandish and incongruous here in the wet Cheddar lands.

Quick-growing perennials were my next thought. Miscanthus sinensis, for instance, which is tolerant of many hard conditions and great for wildlife to nest and hide in, offering perennial cover. Willows and cornus for coppicing would suck up any standing water, but this look was too managed and hard work.

We turned back to the hedgerow idea and searched for different ingredients for low-level, wildlife-friendly, fruitful strips of semi-permaculture. Hedgy things woven together with fruit-bearing Rosaceae; brambles, berries, dog-like roses and perhaps some damsons and quinces, bramleys even; an edible hedgible. The body of this would need to be shrubby multi-stems — perhaps a slow-growing holly, such as Ilex aquifolium ‘J.C. van Tol’. Common lilac in hedgerows gets too tall, but the Persian lilac is much smaller. Syringa meyeri ‘Palibin’, S. pubescens subsp. microphylla ‘Superba’ and S. x josiflexa ‘Bellicent’, for example.

Then species roses in abundance, adding thorniness and hips for the birds, from the apple-scented eglantine Rosa rubiginosa to Ayrshire roses, even the odd cultivar such as repeat-flowering Friendship of Strangers and the aptly named low-level Grouse. The adorable, scented, yellow currant ‘Gwen’s Buffalo’ would stay the right size. I could add currants (‘Rovada’ and ‘White Versailles’, royal and ancient) plus the recommended robust blackcurrants ‘Ben Connan’, ‘Ben Hope’ and ’Ben Sarek’, all bred for disease resistance, compact habit and heavy cropping with minimal intervention. Gooseberries, which I love to make into the simplest of fools, make brilliant nesting cover — Ribes uvacrispa ‘Invicta’ is all it purports to be.

For weaving and binding this basket, I would add honeysuckle — straight Lonicera periclymenum — on the shady side (with the currants, which sulk in the sun) and Rubus, the bramble family, too, from the enchanting white-flowered R. ‘Benenden’ to blackberry ‘Black Butte’ and the Japanese wineberry, R. phoenicolasius. The Japanese thought led me back to quinces — white-flowered ‘Jet Trail’, the perfect addition to the apple and blackberry pie. The very idea of wild raspberries means the likes of ‘Autumn Bliss’ and ‘Glen Ample’ must go into the mix, again on the shady side. Many of these are better cooked and excellent for sauces and souffles.

The hedge was becoming a Queen of Puddings, a veritable pie, which could have its uses in all sorts of places — not only the solar screen. Yet the adage about too many cooks is true, too, of ingredients and I will need to edit mine: nobody wants their screening to look like an abandoned municipal car park. As ever, the rule is simplicity — to choose species ideally and reduce the number of varieties; boldness in everything.

Close your eyes and conjure up an image of what you imagine to be the perfect English flower show. The day is fine and fair, a thing of blue skies and birdsong (forgive my lapse into P. G. Wodehouse prose). There are marquees bursting with fragrant blooms and children dancing around a maypole; there is tea and cake aplenty on the grassy meadow where the egg-and-spoon race is in full swing.

One tent, set apart from the rest, houses an array of silver cups and salvers to be awarded at the end of the day for potatoes or sweet peas, roses or the straightest runner bean. Through the translucent canvas of a large marquee, the sunbeams glint upon trestle tables devoted to exhibits from children groaning under the weight of miniature gardens and tiny flower arrangements, as another boasts serried ranks of jam-oozing Victoria sponges and cream-topped sherry trifles.

Children from local schools tip out bags of luscious compost and weigh the potatoes that have been nurtured within their confines to see who has grown the heaviest crop, as others, more sparingly clad, demonstrate the skills and artistry they have absorbed at the local ballet school.

Among this happy throng of mums and dads, grandparents and offspring of all ages meanders a member of the Royal Family, smiling and saying ‘hello', offering encouragement and admiring the display gardens constructed for the day in the hope of capturing the interest of a future client and winning a prize to boot.

Well, this dream flower show is, in fact, a reality. It is the Royal Windsor Flower Show, organised by the Royal Windsor Rose and Horticultural Society and held, each June — for one day only — on the lawns around the York Club in Windsor Great Park. This year it will take place on June 6 and, if previous years are anything to go by, it will be a day of joyful celebration accompanied by glorious weather. (Not guaranteed, but fervently hoped for.)

The King is the society's Royal Patron and I count myself lucky to be its honorary president. It is my favourite horticultural show of the year. Why? Because it embodies all those things that one remembers from childhood: families coming together and celebrating gardens and gardening, teas on the lawn, talks in a tent, good humour, good food and an overwhelming sense of joie de vivre — a French term, but one that perfectly describes an intrinsically English event.

You can buy your ticket in advance. (Tickets are available at the gate on the day, but numbers are restricted, so play safe and book early.) London theatre tickets nowadays can cost up to £300. For that you'll get about three hours of enjoyment. At the Royal Windsor Flower Show, you'll be entertained from 10am until 6pm. The cost? For an ‘Early Bird' adult ticket it's £17. Children: £4.50. A snip.

This year's theme is ‘Rooted in Nature' — inspired by The King's book Harmony. It ‘celebrates the balance between people, plants and the planet, reminding us that the true sustainability begins with connection — the soil beneath our feet, the communities we nurture and the living world that sustains us'.

Not that such messages are ever promulgated with a heavy hand at this most glorious of flower shows. It remains, in essence, a joyful celebration — and a place to spend rather more than you had bargained for buying plants from some of the country's leading nurserymen, or from the stand of The Royal Gardens Windsor, whose offerings all come with a very fetching label bearing a crest with which to impress your neighbours.

Last year, The King made an appearance, touring the show and talking to both exhibitors and visitors to everyone's surprise and delight. This year, The Duchess of Edinburgh has agreed to design a garden. Now that will be interesting…

Numbers are restricted, so everyone can enjoy themselves without elbowing their way through the madding crowd. It is a day in the year to which I look forward with joyful anticipation. Britain at its best. Gardeners at their best. Small it may be, but when it comes to charm, good humour and spirit, I rank the Royal Windsor Flower Show as my all-time favourite.

More details and tickets for The Royal Windsor Flower Show are available via their website.

'Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them' by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35).

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Country Life ‘Garden Lover’s Library’, designed by George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture, is at stand PW215 at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, May 18–23.

To celebrate, you can buy a year-long subscription for £150 and save more than 40% on the cover price. International offers also available. Until May 31.

The first 200 subscribers at Chelsea will receive a bottle of The Grange Classic Sparkling NV, worth £39. Rated 94 points by Decanter magazine, this premium sparkling wine from Hampshire was described in Country Life as ‘the connoisseur’s choice’. Offer available with subscriptions for UK delivery only.

For months, I have been staring out of the window at a new flowerbed wondering what to plant in it. Although it is south-facing, there are some complications: a sunken terrace to the north, slightly sloping ground and, most importantly, a lot of rain in winter (I live in Somerset). The border is hardly a grand projet, but it has reduced me to a state of petrification.

In search of inspiration, I turned to AI for help. The design apps one can peer at over a paywall seem geared towards American plants, planting zones and tastes (which are not mine) and you would have to have a considerable design and horticultural knowhow to get anything above the generic out of them.

Instead, I went to the standard accessible chat tools, putting in as many specifications (weather, orientation, situation — a frost pocket — soil condition) as I could think of into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to see what they could come up with. Having uploaded photographs of said flowerbed, as if I were joining a dating site, I asked them all to give me planting plans and some sort of visual rendition.

Although they were entertaining to use (Claude was especially polite and encouraging), I had to feed in endless tweaks and corrections — ‘add more spring bulbs/autumn colour/wildlife-friendly plants’, ‘consider the shade cast by the tall plants’, ‘that plant is too tender to survive’ and so on — which gave the lie to there being any underlying horticultural intelligence at play.

To give them their due, they did apologise if I spotted something amiss and adjusted their plan accordingly. All this refining took me quite a lot of time and thought, however.

It was when it came to suggesting the plants that matters came to a head. In response to my request for a yellow/pink/orange palette, nearly all came up with the same plants. Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’, gaura and salvias appeared frequently with wildly varying recommendations on how many I needed. If I had followed some of the advice, the bed would have ended up as packed as a Chelsea show garden from day one: good for immediate effect, but not realistic. It was up to me to question how much plants would spread and how the bed would look in five years’ time.

When I pushed the bots to be more imaginative, they did suggest some interesting varieties, but not all were suitable (again, more time was required double-checking viability). I kept thinking I could have saved myself a lot of time by consulting books in the first place.

Some sites did dive more deeply, coming up with step-by-step action plans, a list of nearby nurseries and even what to divide in, say, three years’ time. Most disappointing, however, was that not one site could really understand the photographs I had uploaded. As a result, their visual realisations were at best — and here I am being extremely generous — pretty, but vague. At worst, they presented me with a grotesque mixture of Frankenstein plants that no nursery has ever nurtured. I exaggerate not.

The designer Lottie Delamain, whose new book Gardens That Can Change the World is to be published soon, lives conveniently nearby and, although my garden is hardly going to echo her examples, she kindly came to look at my results. ‘It’s not very nuanced,’ she pronounced, immediately observing that all the programmes had come up with the same palette of plants because, clearly, they’re still working from quite a small pool of information. ‘The big thing is that they are simply not understanding that you’re in the bottom of a valley, which you immediately see when you walk in.’

Unforgivably, they had failed to spot the most obvious issues. ‘A designer would clock that all the Mediterranean plants on their lists are going to have very wet feet in winter’ — and consequently rot and die. Nor had any of them taken note of the wider ecological benefits of a good planting plan. ‘They’re not talking about creating structural layers for different habitat types.’ It was an elegant reminder of the irreplaceable human ability to read a site — not as a list of conditions, but as a story: where the wind comes from, where the water gathers, which view needs softening and which should be revealed.

Last time I spoke to the designer Andy Sturgeon, he had been full of doom and gloom about AI taking over and how he would be out of a job. I gave him a call to see if he had enrolled on a plumbing course and found him considerably more cheerful.

‘Clients are simply not interested in using some AI bot to turn out a garden,' he said. 'They don’t want that, which is a good thing.’

Having the deep knowledge of how plants work together beautifully in a particular place is what has led Mr Sturgeon to three Best in Shows at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and a successful career as one of the country’s top designers.

He does, however, find himself using AI as an ‘ideas generator’. It can be quite useful: ‘When you look at a blank page and think “what am I going to put here?”, every plant name immediately disappears from your head. You could say, for example, “give me a list of shade-tolerant plants” simply to get you started.’

At the rate of development of machine learning, it is not inconceivable that, one day, AI will be able to take everything seen and unseen in the garden into account. For now, however, I think I need the four-dimensional skills and forethought of the garden designer, who is mindful of weather, aspect, soil, seasons, nutritional needs and complementary strengths in choosing every plant to put in the ground.

Gardening still needs someone who understands that even the most formal of gardens is a living thing, which will change with time, and, most importantly, someone with those indefinable, unlearnable qualities of taste and vision.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on April 22, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Many years ago, I was sitting next to a handsome, ambitious sort at a Boxing Day lunch. He turned to me with a charming smile and asked what my best Christmas present had been. A collection of large-scale OS maps, I said, beaming. His face fell; we didn’t hit it off. Goodness knows what he would have made of my best present this past year, a book called Slugs: Friend or Foe? by Hayley Jones.

I have often been plagued by guilt about these most monstrous of garden pests. Dr Jones advocates a zen-like, therapeutic approach: we have nothing to fear but fear itself, she insists. She encourages us to get to know, understand and sympathise with what is possibly the greatest garden demon.

Demons are disgusting looking and, there is no denying it, so are slugs. They developed from their less reviled relatives, snails, of the phylum Mollusca and the family gastropod, those who walk on their stomachs and operate at night to keep ‘moist’. Slugs, having shed their shells to squeeze themselves into damper reaches, took on something of the dark.

Their slime has phenomenal lubricant qualities, deterring predators with its foul taste and gumming up their mouth parts. Slugs are made up of strangely named elements; tubercles, mantles, saddles, breathing pore and tail. Not only do they walk on their stomachs, but their anus is by the mouth, where lies the ravenous radula, or tongue.

Dr Jones’s most convincing argument in favour of the slug is that only seven of the 45 species found in farms and gardens do any damage at all and 17 are our friends. Indeed, half the species we see are cleaner-uppers, scientifically known as ‘detritovores’ — they recycle dead matter, even consuming carrion waste and faeces by means of that cheese-grater radula. Many live on fungus. There are others whose diet still remains a mystery. On the upside, slugs are the favourite meal of birds, insects and mammals, holding a vital place in the garden ecosystem.

In an effort to cultivate affection, I dreamt up a bougie paint-colour chart based on their attributes: Breathing-pore Pink; Foot-fringe Orange; Dusky Subfusc; Pale Sole; Mucus Yellow. It’s not enough, however, to counter the rage on finding the tender dahlia shoots have been shredded.

To every slug there is a season and spring and autumn are their moments. Once it gets hot, gardens are safer. Now is the time to set up our barricades; beer traps and coffee grounds, copper tape and garlic in solution — all help to make you feel good. Like me, Dr Jones is unsure of the efficacy of any of the multifarious disruptors regularly suggested in gardening columns. She is certain of one thing, however: ‘always water in the morning’, because they are night creatures.

It also helps to direct sow as late as you can: the key egg-laying periods are March–April and September–October, which is when we need to employ all the humane methods available to lure the neonates away from our treasures. Grow sacrificial plants; encourage predators; let chickens in the garden; border the garden with wilder patches, a pond, untidy hedges and long grass. Wet places bring in the mega predators — toads, frogs and hedgehogs. Brown rats, badgers, shrews and moles do a good job, too. Humans are good at collecting slugs in buckets. Best of all are slow worms. Who guessed they hoovered up slugs with relish?

Probably the most abiding predators, however, are members of the beetle family, including those elusive, almost vanished, popstars of the night, glow-worms. Their larvae feed on slugs and snails, injecting a paralysing digestive juice through their bite. Ground beetles, especially the violet ground beetle, can put a stop to any slug’s revolting mucus production with a rapid nip to the back of the head.

Equally helpful are millipedes and earwigs, so it is important to keep all these garden workers happy. Birds, too, owls, fieldfares, rooks and blackbirds — we have a fine feathered militia here, which is crucial. It is all about food chains.

Devastation of a newly planted row of cabbage seedlings is hard to take, however, and, if you can be faffed with nematodes (at considerable cost), that is the way to go for serious growers. A few ‘irregular holes’ in your hostas? I would pour garlic-flavoured cream on your enemies.

Isabel Bannerman is, with her husband Julian, a leading garden designer — see their website to find out more about their projects.

This feature originally appeared in the issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When parishioners of the Revd George Engleheart found, pinned to the church door, a notice announcing: ‘No service today, working with daffodils’, it was no practical joke. Engleheart was recognised for his brilliant work breeding Narcissus — he created 720 different types — and is credited with setting out the path that led towards the development of the modern daffodil, of which there are now about 27,000 named kinds.

As did many other gentleman clergymen of the 18th and 19th centuries, he devoted his spare time to horticulture — as well as, subsequently, archaeology. His methods of breeding were not systematic — he didn’t keep detailed records — but his enthusiasm led to spectacular results in flower size and vigour.

Engleheart (1851–1936) was the one of the first to breed from Poeticus, resulting in flowers with striking orange/red cups (trumpets). ‘Will Scarlett’ is one, its large orange trumpet surrounded by a pretty loose ruff of white perianth segments (petals), another feature of Engleheart’s work. In 1898, he sold three bulbs for £100 (in 19th-century money).

In 1900, he was awarded the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour for his work. The Veitch Memorial Medal followed in 1926. ‘Mr Engleheart has enriched gardens with many lovely flowers with charming names,’ wrote the great E. A. Bowles in A Handbook of Narcissus (1934). According to Bowles, its creator ‘would not have believed a prophet’ who told him that his small stock bed ‘would in so short a time have provided the old and new worlds with millions of bulbs of this popular flower’.

Engleheart began experimenting with daffodils when living in Appleshaw, Hampshire, but it wasn’t until he and his wife, Mary, bought the 15th-century home Little Clarendon in 1901 — just over the border in Wiltshire — that things became serious. The 27-acre grounds were given over to numbered daffodil beds, but it all ended in 1923 when eelworm and fly infested the bulbs.

From then on, he devoted himself to archaeology, investigating the Romano-British sites in north-west Hampshire where he rediscovered the lost mosaic of Dionysus at Thruxton, which was given to the British Museum.

He also discovered a hoard of vessels from AD 350, including dishes with Christian symbols that provided definitive proof of the speed with which Christianity spread through the Roman Empire after Constantine’s conversion in AD 310.

This feature originally appeared in the April 1 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I still cannot use my thumbs when potting up a rooted cutting or potting on a plant. I use my fingers. They are better at gauging the pressure needed to firm the compost, be it peat-free (lightness of touch is important) or soil-based (a little firmer).

It is not something I learned from a book. This is a gardening skill based on feel and that can only be learned first hand (no pun intended), being shown the technique by someone who learnt it from someone else and then passed it on.

I was instructed on how to take a cutting, how to encourage it to form roots, how to plant a tree, sow a seed and myriad other growing techniques at the age of 15 when I went to earn my living in a nursery. I attended day-release classes and read books, but the key practical skills I needed as a gardener were learnt on the earth and at the potting bench in the company of experienced hands who, in their turn, had learned from those skilled gardeners who had gone before.

Watch a skilled grower and you can see evidence of a kind of ‘slap-dash love’, as Laurie Lee called it when referring to his mother’s way of gardening. It is an ease with plants; a way of handling them that comes with confidence and experience, of trial and error refined over the centuries. Such horny-handed sons and daughters of the soil are possessed of valuable skills that, if not handed down, will perish with them.

It is this premise upon which the new initiative Hortistry is founded. Hortistry was born out of a conversation between The King, Jekka McVicar and Susie Bacon at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Under its aegis a group of prominent practical horticulturists, gardeners, growers — call them what you will — has banded together to pass on their abilities and knowledge to the next generation of professional gardeners. McVicar the herb grower, Matt Pottage of the Royal Parks (ex-RHS Wisley), Brian Humphrey (one of the finest plant propagators in the land), Sheila Das (National Trust) and Tony Kirkham (retired head of the arboretum at Kew Gardens) are a few of the many accomplished and highly respected gardening gods and goddesses who are demonstrating their hard-won skills at practical workshops.

It is an exciting prospect. This month will see the first two masterclasses, each for about 40 attendees, who will have pre-registered their interest. One is at Beth Chatto’s Essex garden, the other at McVicar’s herb nursery near Bristol. Budding and grafting, seed sowing, taking cuttings — all at the very heart of plant propagation and successful cultivation — are being taught to a group of folk who will become the next generation of skilled growers.

More masterclasses will also be scheduled over the coming months, resulting in hard- won abilities being transferred to a whole new generation who understand the wisdom and the benefits of learning from those who have practised their craft over a lifetime of gardening.

Why do we undervalue such essential abilities? Why do we fail to understand the thrill and satisfaction of raising a plant from a speck of dust or a green leaf? We underestimate at our peril the worth of those who have the know-how, the ‘magic’ needed to ensure that the environmental concerns with which we burden the next generation can be addressed and ameliorated.

Some make their feelings known by going on marches and complaining to their MP. I believe that a far more pragmatic approach is by developing skills that will make a positive and practical difference to the land beneath our feet, and ultimately the wider landscape, as did the great gardeners who went before us and bequeathed to us these invaluable capabilities.

The founding of Hortistry will surely please The King. Anyone who has seen his excellent film Finding Harmony — A King’s Vision will understand that here is a man not simply paying lip service in terms of our duty to the land, but who actively encourages the practical application of knowledge and skills in addressing the problems that face our planet. Hortistry is doing that at grass-roots level.

As someone who has spent their life tending the earth, planting and sowing and endeavouring to transmit a love of and belief in the things that grow and on which we and all forms of life depend, I find the emergence of Hortistry wonderfully reassuring. It is all too easy to be overwhelmed by the problems facing our fragile landscape. This initiative is a tangible way of making a positive impact. All power to their gardening elbow.

This feature originally appeared in the April 15 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Double flowers are bad news for the survival of the species. Most of them are sterile, because their stamens have foolishly been turned into extra petals. Nevertheless, they turn up from time to time among the wild populations of many plants.

If you think that a gorgeous Hybrid Tea or a perfect carnation is the last word in elegance, it is because one of its wild ancestors had a few extra petals, then our own ancestors thought it was pretty or useful and decided to preserve it. The rest is down to generations of industrious plant-breeders scratching around for a few grains of pollen to develop yet better plants for our enjoyment.

Double primroses are a case in point. Gerard’s Herball (1597) mentions several aberrant primulas, including a double-flowered cowslip ‘so commonly knowne that it needeth no description’ and ‘our garden double Prim-rose’, which he considered the ‘greatest beauty’ of all. John Parkinson, writing some 30 years later, says that ‘there are many prettie varieties’, including ‘the field Primrose, very thicke and double, and of the same sweete sent [sic] as the singles’.

One reason for the popularity of double primroses is that they are old-fashioned garden plants; their charm evokes the cottage gardens of olde England. All these double-flowered primulas arose as genetic mutations and quickly became popular plants among discriminating collectors. Double reds turned up later in the 17th century and, by 1800, several double purples and mauves were known. William Robinson wrote in 1883 that ‘no sweeter or prettier flowers ever warmed into beauty under a northern sun than their richly and delicately-tinted little rosettes’.

Perhaps the best known of Victorian doubles was ‘Marie Crousse’, still occasionally seen today, which is bright cerise with a few white flecks in its petals. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Aberdeen nurserymen James Cocker & Son began to breed double-flowered polyanthus — polyanthus is the name given to hybrids between cowslips and primroses. Cocker’s introductions carried the logo ‘Bon Accord’, which is the motto of the family’s native city. The Cockers were able to breed and name about 100 new cultivars, but few have survived through to modern times. They tend to have rather a short central stem, which means that a plant in flower often resembles a primrose more than a polyanthus.

The problem of breeding double primroses was made easier by the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel’s experiments in plant hybridisation. At some point, scientists realised that a recessive gene was responsible for the production of double flowers. The only way to make progress was to cross two plants that were known to carry this gene. One quarter of the resultant seedlings would be double-flowered and two-thirds of the remaining plants would also have the potential to breed double-flowered seedlings, but obscured by the dominant gene for single flowers. That discovery has been the basis of all subsequent development or almost all, because some double primroses carry fewer petals in the autumn and may occasionally produce pollen and be capable of setting seed.

Crucial to the establishment of modern double primroses has been the work of a nursery called Barnhaven, which was founded in Oregon, USA, nearly 100 years ago, then moved first to the Lake District and finally to Brittany in France. Barnhaven is the leading breeder of specialist primroses and polyanthus, including hose-in-hose cultivars, jack-in-the greens, gold-laced cowslips — and doubles. It has succeeded in identifying a wide range of single-flowered varieties that carry the ‘double gene’. These are hand-pollinated and their seed is sold with the warning that only a quarter of the seedlings are likely to be doubles. Nevertheless, the range of the nursery’s colours is remarkable and many amateurs speak enthusiastically of its seedlings.

There was a revival of interest in double primroses in the 1970s and 1980s, but only a few new cultivars were introduced. Commercial growers found them too labour-intensive in terms of feeding, watering and dividing. Enthusiasts scour the lists of traditional nurserymen and pounce on anything they can find. A few are listed in the RHS Plant Finder: look out for pinky-orange-yellow ‘Ken Dearman’, violet-blue ‘Blue Sapphire’, rich-red ‘Corporal Baxter’ and the spectacular ‘Miss Indigo’, a Barnhaven seedling with dark-blue flowers that have irregular white edges.

Nowadays, double primroses are micropropagated — these are the ones you see in garden centres, marketed as smart bedding plants. The leading introducer of new doubles is David Kerley, a professional plant breeder from Cambridgeshire. He is highly regarded for the garden-worthiness of his plants — he trials them very carefully — and also for the introduction of new colours and combinations. Kerley’s primroses carry his Belarina trademark, followed by their colour. Belarina Pink Champagne and Belarina Tangerine Twist are among his best known, but many varieties — there are more than a dozen in commerce now — are bicolored, with a delicious combination of shades in every petal.

Most of the double primulas grown today are sophisticated forms of our common primrose, but a few are more closely related to cowslips. ‘Katy McSparron’ is said to be a cross between a cowslip and a polyantha, but most people consider it merely a double cowslip. It is packed with petals and easy to grow — and the flowers have a good cowslip scent, too. There is also an excellent double-flowered form of the old gold-laced cowslip called ‘Elizabeth Killelay’. It is not thickly double — if you peer into the flowers, you can see the mahogany-coloured petals also have a yellow base — but the golden edging is a wonderful contrast for the dark rows of outer petals.

Despite their exquisite shapes and colours, there is as yet only one National Collection of double primroses. It stretches to some 90 different cultivars, curated by Caroline Stone at her Glebe Garden in north Cornwall since 2014. She is an avid researcher and enthusiastic collector, determined to hunt down and conserve every double primrose that might otherwise be lost to cultivation. She worries that many modern varieties have already disappeared from sight: ‘Torchlight’, for example, was introduced by Hopleys of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire in about 1980 and even given an RHS Award of Garden Merit, but nonetheless seems to be extinct.

She also has successes: Parkinson’s original ‘field Primrose, very thicke and double’ no longer exists, but Stone has no fewer than five double forms of our native wild primrose, each of which has a different arrangement of its petals. Double primroses should be as easy to grow as any other primrose or polyantha. At the end of the 19th century, William Robinson recommended them for mossy banks, alongside uncomplicated shade-lovers such as dog’s-tooth violets, lily-of-the-valley and cyclamen, but anywhere where they are protected from the full-on heat and drought of summer is usually acceptable.

All double primroses, cowslips and polyanthus benefit from regular lifting, division and replanting in fresh soil to maintain their vigour. Some need splitting more frequently than others. The general rule is to split the clumps once a year, a job best done in autumn when there is plenty of rain and the soil is still warm enough to encourage the plant to root well. Some nurserymen who want to build up stocks for sale split them up immediately after flowering and then again in autumn.

All gardeners, however, find that some are easier to cultivate than others. The paradox is that the ‘difficult’ ones that malinger must once have been vigorous enough to be propagated in the first place.

Gardening fashions come and go — and sometimes it is difficult to know exactly how and why. One that bugs me at the moment is the dead hedge.

Those that I have seen are laid between two rows of uprights, typically fence posts, bashed into the ground in pairs, about a yard apart. Some of them also have chicken wire to keep the filling in place, although it looks rather ugly in the way that chicken wire always does.

You pile the space between them with your garden prunings, laid lengthwise to follow the direction of the fence. Some of the branches may stick out a bit, but you can tell yourself that they are for birds to perch on.

You build up the ‘hedges’, as and when you have the right sort of woody stuff to add to the heap, to a height of 6ft or 7ft (but, actually, they look a bit spooky once you reach about 4ft). The branches settle down over the months ahead and so you add more branches on top. In wet weather, it soon becomes a barrier of rotting, decaying wood. Lovely.

Now let us apply the William Morris test — do their proud owners know that dead hedges are useful or believe them to be beautiful? We can get rid of the ‘beautiful’ question at once because I have never seen a pretty one. Their aesthetic value is about on a par with a compost heap. They might make their owners feel good, but they aren’t going to win the Turner Prize, although I suppose it is possible that one has already done so.

It follows that the only possible excuse for dead hedges lies in their usefulness. Who finds them useful and preaches their virtues? People say they are good for wildlife and sustainable because they reuse prunings and clippings. There are other ways of dealing with all that surplus wood. The oldest practice, not always acceptable nowadays, is to pile it up, make a splendid winter bonfire and put oversize potatoes in the ashes to cook through and thrill the young.

When you go back, the next day, to the site of the bonfire, you find a heap of ashes and wonder how exactly you are supposed to use it in the garden. You will also find a circle of half-burnt branches that need to be gathered up and set alight again. However, most of us grow out of our infantile pyromania by the time we leave our teens and, besides, potatoes are much better baked in the bottom of the Aga.

The proper use for woody cut-offs, meaning everything from fallen branches and hedge trimmings to rose prunings and discarded Christmas trees, is to put them through a chipper. All is then reduced to smaller pieces — you can control the size — to make a springy surface for woodland paths or a fine heap to mulch down, feed your ornamental trees and shrubs and keep weeds at bay.

Unlike dead hedges, woody chips do look rather attractive, wherever they are used. If you leave them to rot down for a while, the bacteria on the surface get on with their recycling work so excitedly that the heaps warm up and actually start smoking. Ergo, baking potatoes is still an option. However, it is better to water the heap to cool it off and encourage the woodchips to rot down.

The branches you put in a dead hedge take much longer, if ever, to turn into a mulch, but they are just as flammable as piles of woodchips. Therein lies my principal objection to them — in dry summers, they are a fire risk. Ask a dead-hedge owner how they will prevent theirs from exploding into flames and they will reply: ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ Fag ends are dumped everywhere. Years ago, a stranger passing along a public footpath on my land casually chucked a lighted cigarette onto a pile of field-hedge trimmings. I pleaded with the fire brigade to arrive before the flames reached our electricity substation — which they did (the firemen, not the flames). The mere memory is enough to convince me that dead hedges are not only ugly and pointless, but potentially lethal, too. Avoid!

Charles Quest-Ritson’s book The Olive Tree (Ediciones El Viso, £50) is out now.

This feature originally appeared in the March 11 of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Rhurarb is a very English taste. All its wonderful uses in tarts, pies, crumbles and, especially, rhubarb fool (a British invention) have developed in splendid isolation from mainline cooking in France or Italy. Mention our love of rhubarb to an Italian and you will be told that they use it only as a laxative. Germans will warn you that its high content of oxalic acid is bad for your bones because it depletes your calcium. Actually, this is true only of the leaves — there is relatively little acid in the stalks — but it explains why many of us were brought up to believe that the leaves were poisonous.

All the books and articles you read about rhubarb say that it comes from Russia (hundreds of years ago) or China (thousands of years ago) where it was valued for its medicinal uses. That may be true, but it didn’t take off as something to eat for pleasure until about 1800. Before then, the references to eating rhubarb are few. Hannah Glasse gives a recipe for rhubarb tarts in 1742: ‘Take stalks of English rhubarb, that grow in the gardens, peel and cut it the size of gooseberries; sweeten it, and make them as you do gooseberry tarts… These tarts may be thought very odd, but they are very fine ones and have a pretty flavour.’

The availability of cheap sugar was a crucial factor in developing the acceptability of rhubarb as a food, although Mistress Margaret Dods included a recipe for rhubarb soup in The Cook and Housewife’s Manual in 1826. ‘Put them to a couple of quarts of good veal or beef gravy,’ she advised. It is said, however, that the popularity of rhubarb began in 1817 after a gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London accidentally covered some rhubarb plants with soil in the middle of winter. When the stems eventually pushed through in spring, the sections below the surface were found to be sweeter and more tender than usual.

Blanching is an old technique among kitchen gardeners. It is used for asparagus, seakale, celery and (in France) for dandelions, to promote soft and tender growth early in the season. You put a big container upside down over the plants to exclude the light and the plants respond with pale, extenuated growth that is softer and usually more delicious. Handsome terracotta rhubarb forcers were used in Victorian times and modern copies sometimes turn up as ‘blanching pots’ in garden centres, but forcing is not the same thing as blanching. Blanching means blocking out the light; most gardeners find that putting an upturned dustbin over the plants is enough to draw out the soft, pink growth to advance their crop.

The pink colouring of forced rhubarb stems is another one of its attractions. However, colour alone is not a guide to quality; some cultivars are pinker than others, but, as with many fruits, we instinctively choose the redder forms. True forcing also requires heat, which can be achieved by bringing a pot of rhubarb into a glasshouse, covering it to exclude the light and allowing the heat of the late-winter sun to encourage earlier growth.

It was a small step from this discovery to the development, later in the 19th century, of a whole industry devoted to forcing rhubarb in heated, darkened sheds. The centre of this specialised form of cultivation was the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ between Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford in West Yorkshire. It is said that, at its peak, 200 tons were carried to the London markets every day by the Rhubarb Express. The tradition continues, boosted by the EU’s grant in 2010 of PDO status (Protected Designation of Origin) to Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb. The long history of Yorkshire rhubarb is celebrated at the Wakefield Annual Rhubarb Festival in February. The defined production area now runs to about nine square miles between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell, a much smaller area than in the industry’s glory days, but it supports the work of about a dozen professional growers.

Much is written about the cultivars that Yorkshire’s rhubarb growers consider best. These tend to be chosen because they can be persuaded into early growth and produce stems that beguile the eye of shoppers — hence the beautiful pink bunches you see in markets from late December onwards. Some even harvest the stems by candlelight to ensure that no daylight interferes with the process. ‘Timperley Early’, ‘Champagne’ and ‘Reed’s Early Superb’ are among the most popular for forcing, but growers usually follow up with mid- or late-season varieties that respond well to forcing in spring and early summer.

Gardeners can learn from the professionals. It helps to remember that rhubarb is a herbaceous perennial that dies down in autumn. It stores its energy in a starchy underground tuber, known as its ‘crown’, which benefits from a couple of months of cold winter temperatures before starting into growth again. The crown is the base from which the plant’s leaves emerge in spring. Some of the starch is converted to sugar, a natural process that explains why the earliest stalks are the sweetest.

Growth is rather slow until warmer weather arrives, which is why we blanch it or force it. By the midsummer, unforced rhubarb is more likely to be tough, sour and stringy.

Most gardeners who grow rhubarb try their hand at forcing or blanching some of it early in the year. You can also do this in later months because the plant continues to produce leaves all through summer and their stems, if the light is blocked out, will grow long and soft. However, this does weaken the plant, so it is best to let the plants have a year off afterwards to recover their strength.

It is also best to let young plants establish during their first year without pulling any stems. They respond well to a nitrogen feed in late spring or summer — well-rotted manure is ideal — but in many gardens they survive on minimum attention.

The truth is that rhubarb is very easy to grow. Almost everyone has at least one clump in the garden — and usually they do not know its name. The leaves are large and handsome (slugs love them) and the flower, if you let it run to seed, is a stately white panicle growing up to 6ft. It would be a wonderful accent plant in a border if ever we stopped thinking of it as edible.

The flowers are self-fertile, but they hybridise readily. All the rhubarb we grow in our gardens was originally developed by selecting the best open-pollinated seedlings. There is, therefore, a wide choice available from nurserymen with little guidance as to what to choose and why. The great organic gardener Lawrence D. Hills recommended ‘Glaskin’s Perpetual’ because it had a low level of oxalic acid, which meant it could be pulled (rhubarb stalks should always be slightly twisted then pulled off, not cut) over a much longer period of the growing season.

There are two National Collections of rhubarb: the National Trust has 130 cultivars at Clumber in Nottinghamshire and the RHS grows 103 at its Bridgewater garden near Manchester, but the numbers are expanding with new introductions and the rediscovery of old ones. Much of the RHS’s produce is passed to the garden’s restaurant, but both collections also act as a resource for conservationists in search of local varieties. It is to be hoped that more cultivars will find their way into nurseries and garden centres. ‘Baker’s All Season’ is one variety recommended by Caroline Williamson, who heads up the Bridgewater team that maintains the collection. ‘It produces new stems even in autumn and winter’, she explains.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

To my surprise — because I am not that big on technology — I am finding artificial intelligence incredibly helpful when it comes to managing our modest bit of land. Claude, my chosen AI factotum, has already assisted me with — among other things — calculating the volume of gravel needed for the new drive, the best hedging option for the home field and how to espalier our young quince trees. The only drawback is that Claude makes me anxious. It flies in the face of my Protestant work ethic (I was raised to believe that anything worth having must involve a struggle), I fear it will affect my cognitive abilities and I loathe the idea of becoming even slightly reliant on a machine.

When, almost four decades ago, I started hobby (that is, on less than 1,000 acres) farming in Australia, my primary reference source was a Reader’s Digest book from 1981 called Back to Basics: How to learn and enjoy traditional American skills. Sometimes, less is more. The internet may offer almost unlimited information, but that book’s 464 pages are packed with practical, hands-on advice. There are chapters on everything from raising cattle to preserving produce, from pest control to growing vegetables. Its authors were also remarkably forward looking and covered such subjects as building with rammed earth (now very trendy) and how to harness solar power.

Intellectual types used to sneer at Reader’s Digest, but I am not ashamed to admit that I have rather a lot of the books, a good two dozen alone on gardens and gardening. The oldest of these, the three-volume Complete Library of the Garden bound with wooden covers, is as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1963. However, I probably refer most often, being of a rather lazy disposition, to The Time-Saving Garden, which delivers everything its title promises. Running my eyes over our library shelves, I can also see plenty of Reader’s Digest field guides, travel guides and cookery books.

Other subjects and interests are represented, too, including Who’s Famous in Your Family? (in our case, no one), Mysteries of the Unexplained (14 pages on spontaneous human combustion alone), Great Disasters (the Wrath of Nevado del Ruiz, A Demon Named Agnes, et al), Illustrated Reverse Dictionary: Find the words on the tip of your tongue (remarkably useful at my age), What to Do in an Emergency (how to escape from a burning sleeping bag and other useful tips) and a 1986 Driver’s Atlas, which I transferred from car to car until I finally caved in and started using GPS.

It has a wonderful section on identifying any unusual noises (‘loud knocking noises, light tinkling noises, mysterious tapping noises, ominous screeching noises…’) that your vehicle may make.

I never subscribed to the actual magazine itself, but my father, who, despite, or perhaps because of, a double first from Oxford, was extremely gullible, rang me in a state of excitement one day in the early 1980s to tell me that he had won the £100,000 Reader’s Digest sweepstake. Although annoyed later to discover that it was, in his words, ‘an appalling swizz’, he became one of their most devoted readers. Thank heavens he died before its decline and fall.

I suppose that is the real point. The only constant in life is, as Heraclitus pointed out, change. I may worry about using Claude, but Claude won’t be around forever. In the meantime, it might as well suggest ways to increase honey production from our beehives.

New gardens offer new planting opportunities: a chance to try things that always struggled in a previous location, but which might enjoy the change of scene every bit as much as the gardener. They also offer a clean slate; an opportunity to leave behind plants that have always disappointed. The tricky bit is deciding into which category a plant may fall.

In our last garden on chalky earth, witch hazels, eucryphias and anything remotely intolerant of alkaline conditions either steadfastly refused to put on more than an inch or two of new growth each year or simply threw in the trowel early on in their lives. Anything as devotedly acid-loving as rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias I grew in tubs of ericaceous compost and collected rainwater to minister to their needs, but somehow they never seemed at home at the foot of the Downs.

MORE TO READ: Alan Titchmarsh's house for sale

Now, on acidic sandy earth, I have a chance to grow such calcifuges in the garden soil. It is a welcome shot in the arm and will steer me in the direction of the gardener’s most important dictum, ‘right plant, right place’.

I consider myself lucky that in my mid seventies I can still feel a childlike thrill at the prospect of putting together an entirely different plant collection. It is refreshing. It is invigorating. It is likely to be expensive — but I shall adhere firmly to my belief that smaller plants (within reason) planted in good, organically enriched soil, establish themselves more readily and often outstrip the larger beasts that one is tempted to buy with a view to instant effect.

This holds good with trees and shrubs, but with perennials one is sometimes disappointed with the size of those little plants in 9cm (4½in) pots that seem to have withered through the winter. Two-litre pots offer larger, better-established clumps, but the costs involved in planting a border then begin to rise. It is the first of many conundrums.

I will try eucryphias here, and magnolias. There is already one large hamamelis in the one-acre wood and I shall give it company — safe in the knowledge that the leafmould-enriched acidic earth will suit the newcomers, be they yellow, orange or ruby-red flowered.

I will take chances with a few temperamental types: Embothrium, for instance — the Chilean fire bush — with its whiskery flame-red flowers. I’ll be poring over the online catalogue of Burncoose Nurseries, attached to the garden of Caerhays in Cornwall, the screen pages of which will offer me manifold temptations. (I will remember I am in Surrey and not wafted by the gulf stream, but that won’t stop me from taking a few chances.)

For 30 years, I’ve had a large half pot planted up with that choice Canadian bloodroot that we must now call Sanguinaria canadensis f. multiplex ‘Plena’. How it has survived with very irregular repotting I cannot imagine, but when I ‘release it into the wild’ — actually planting it out into the earth — I will feel as if I am setting free a captive lion. Its flowers, carried on stems barely 4in high, are pure white and about 1¼in across, like tiny chrysanthemums. They don’t last long. From them I learnt the meaning of the word ‘fugacious’ — a description applied to them many years ago in a book listing the choicest of plants. The flowers are followed by large-fingered leaves, so at least I will not lose sight of its location.

Plants that I will not be introducing? Well, there’s no point in bothering with hydrangeas. The clue is in the name — they are greedy for water and the sandy soil here will result in a crisping up of leaves when this wettest of winters is but a memory.

Pampas grass — certainly not. They’ve always struck me as being a collection of feather dusters stuck into an umbrella stand. Gladioli I have never warmed to — except those more elegant magenta varieties that grow in Cornish hedgerows, the variants of Gladiolus byzantinus.

The narrow border that runs along the edge of the terrace behind the new house has already been planted up by the developer with alternate green and variegated pittosporum. Thirty-seven of them. I have given quite a few away already, but have told myself that they did at least offer winter form and structure. Perhaps a few will remain.

I’ve put in seven Thuja occidentalis ‘Smaragd’ to offer me vertical sentinels and will brood further as to what will go between them. Then there is the Photinia ‘Red Robin’ in the front garden. Where’s my axe…?

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Of all the vegetables, I think it is leeks (Allium porrum) that I eat in most increasing quantities every year. I think this might be after discovering how good they are when sliced lengthways almost to the base, wrapped in foil with a little olive oil and garlic and baked until tender. It is, therefore, with renewed enthusiasm that I dedicate myself to growing them this year.

Leeks are relatively easy to grow well, although they are particular and the quality of your harvest owes much to the small details. Sow in modules undercover from February, planting out in June or July when 8in or so tall: carefully tease out of the module, trim the roots to 2in, make a hole 6in deep with a pencil and lower the leek gently into it. Allow 8in or so between plants and water well.

Contrary to every instinct developed over years of planting out other seedlings, don’t backfill the hole with soil, but leave the leeks loose. As they grow, they thicken to fill the hole and expand more besides. With some varieties — try ‘Chef’s White’ and the appropriately named ‘Winter Giant’ — you can even sow direct from early spring, taking the thinnings as baby leeks and leaving the rest to mature.

Leeks flourish in a moisture-retentive soil in full sun; keep them weed free, water every few days during dry spells and — if you can be bothered — earth up as they develop for a greater ratio of white to green leaves.

I tend to grow the same varieties each year — those I know are full of flavour and give me a naturally staggered harvest. My early varieties are ‘Chef’s White’ and ‘Monstruoso de Carentan’, with ‘Winter Giant’, ‘Bleu de Solaise’ and ‘Musselburgh’ ready later in the season.

The habit of growing baby leeks came from impatience and endures due to their succulent deliciousness: I sow them from April, 1in apart with 4in between rows in a bed with a fine tilth, in successional batches three weeks apart for a steady harvest. Although all varieties work perfectly well, ’King Richard’ is a good, very early variety that also makes for superb baby leeks. Depending on variety, leeks can be ready to harvest from September, although most are happy to stand through winter, with baby leeks ready in summer when pencil-thick and resembling spring onions.

Rust — appearing as orange/brown blotches — is tedious, although largely aesthetic, rather than substantial in its effects. I use a seaweed or comfrey feed every fortnight that helps minimise its likelihood, but crop rotation is the most effective preventative. In the relatively rare occasion of a more serious infection, dig up all affected plants and burn them. If leek moth is a problem, cover your developing plants in fleece.

Although grown almost exclusively as an annual, leeks are hardy biennials and, if you allow a few to grow on, the reward will be their beautiful flower-heads and an abundance of pollinators and other insects drawn to their flame. Pinch off a few of those mini-florets, and scatter through salads or in a mayonnaise.

I also grow Babington’s leek (Allium ampeloprasum var. babingtonii). It flourishes in the cold months, making it an elegant, structural part of the cold-weather garden, as well as a welcome late-winter/early-spring harvest. Sweeter than familiar leeks, Babington’s leeks carry a gentle garlic flavour and are really good either griddled whole until softened and charred, or, as above, wrapped in foil, with garlic and a little olive oil and baked until tender. To harvest, cut long stems to about 1½in from the base.

As with other leeks, any you leave unpicked will develop long, arcing stems topped with glorious seedheads, perhaps 6in or so across. As well as attracting insects, the florets and immature seeds are delicious strewn across everything from pizzas to salads. Start from a young potted plant or from bulbils, which can either be sown in one-litre pots for planting out later, allowing 20in or so between plants, or — a little riskily — sown direct.

If you are lucky enough to know someone who grows Babington’s leeks, bribe them to allow you to lift, divide and replant, making off with some of your own: this is also the way to expand your own colony when established. Babington’s leeks are pretty resilient and unfussy about their location: avoid extremes of drainage and pH and they should thrive with little attention.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon. His book 'Abundance: Eating and living with the seasons' (Quadrille, £30) is out now.

In the swelter of last summer, a coolly white iris called ‘Immortality’ bloomed until the end of October. This was a rhizomatous, bearded or ‘Germanica’-type iris, a group of sunseekers providing generous dobs of colour from the iridescence of the rainbow to smudgy embers.

The Sibericas are more shade-accepting, less gaudy and a tiny bit uptight in form. Both groups flower in summer, but have useful sword-shaped leaves throughout the year that offer, in painterly terms, a vertical thrusting mark against sleepy mounds of perennials.

In theory, irises can be picked from November (Algerian and Lazistan iris) until late summer. Where I get muddled is with bulbous irises, which flower from now until midsummer.

Bulbous irises come in three groups, of which Iris reticulata is the most familiar. These bulbs wear a netted tunic or reticule — like a string bag around the bulbous larder that sustains them in the gasping summers of Asia Minor. Their enamelled blooms, a hand in height, consort with solitary bees in spring.

All iris flowers employ a miraculous symmetry, formed in threes — standards, falls and the strap petals — to seduce pollinators and gardeners. ‘Harmony’ and ‘Cantab’ are mostly blue, but ‘Clairette’ and ‘Blue Note’ have dazzling indigo falls, flaked white. ‘Katharine Hodgkin’ — azure dashes on lemon, like Monet’s kitchen — is the most reliable for spangling through dead winter beds. Mr B thinks their strangeness is best appreciated grown on the kitchen table.

The second group — similar, but more rarified — is the Juno species, whose heartland is Afghanistan. Flowering in April, they like a loamy, neutral, well-drained situation. The most straightforward of these to grow seems to be Iris bucharica, a glistening, white triangulated flower with striking yellow falls on a knee-high stem. Twice as tall, but less outstanding are the pale-blue flowers of I. magnifica. They form good-sized clumps, according to bulb guru Christine Skelmersdale.

The third group of bulbous irises is confusingly named English, Spanish and Dutch. The latter were bred, by the Dutch, from the soi-disant English and the genuinely Spanish Iris xiphioides in the 20th century. The first Dutch, a cultivar named ‘Wedgwood’, was followed by blends of bronze, cinnamon, yellow, azure and milky white — less Staffordshire, more polychrome Delft. Manipulated to flower all year round, they became the florist’s iris, familiar on the garage forecourt, which makes them feel slightly unethical for today’s gardeners.

However, as garden flowers, they can be encouraged to return perennially. We experiment with Dutch iris and tulips in plastic pots sunk into large terracotta pots, which are lifted for drying. Try them in raised beds as you would asparagus, at a finger’s depth, or at the base of a sunny wall.

The rhapsody of bohemian named varieties — ‘Picasso’, ‘Gypsy Beauty’, ‘Paris Violet’ and ‘Tiger Mix’ — take up little room, their grassy foliage disappearing as with daffodils. Loving their dabs of pure pigment, Monet grew irises at Giverny in France, in thin beds, never over-shadowed, but with columbines, tulips and forget-me-nots.

Our only native English irises are the water-side ‘flag’ (Iris pseudacorus) and the Gladwyn (I. foetidissima). The bulbous so-called ‘English’ irises — I. latifolia (I. xiphioides), I. anglica and I. xiphium — are not remotely from these isles, but from the Pyrenees. Baffling, but they were first named botanically when ‘discovered’ near the Bristol gorge in the late 16th century. Much later, botanists concluded they were Spanish, brought perhaps by Spanish sailors, young muleteers from the ‘high peaks hoar’, as Hilaire Belloc wrote of the Pyrenees in his poem Tarantella.

Sturdy leaves push up before the snow melts and, in July, their tall flowers embroider the dusty meadow grass, a reminder that nature does perennials-with-grass with such élan. They will naturalise here, given a moist neutral soil, but are difficult to find. Anna Pavord says in Bulb that by 1808 there were 47 varieties listed by one Haarlem nursery, but only six were in the RHS Plant Finder. We planted them in the orchard at Trematon in Cornwall — ‘King of the Blues’ and ‘Mont Blanc’, from Parker’s Dutch bulbs. We wish to do the same here, but cannot find them.

Parker’s offers instead a ‘modern selection’ (‘King Mauve’, ‘Mickey Gold’, ‘Miss Saigon’), which they say ‘surpasses’ the old with better blooms and hardy longevity. It cannot confirm until July whether ‘King of the Blues’ and ‘Mont Blanc’, will feature in the autumn catalogue.

Here’s hoping that, if they do, every one of you will ring and ask for them.

Isabel Bannerman is, with her husband Julian, a leading garden designer.

What is that wonderful scent in the winter garden — so sweet, so strong and so hidden from sight? Well, it could be a viburnum, or one of those new mahonias, or even the shrubby honeysuckle Lonicera x purpusii. Nowadays, however, it is equally as likely to come from a plant of Daphne bholua, an essential staple of gardens in winter.

Daphne bholua is a recent addition to our gardens. Although first introduced from Nepal in the 1930s, it was not widely taken up by the nursery trade until the 1980s, when some of the best seedlings were given individual cultivar names. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that it has transformed our winter gardens. The first flowers may appear as early as November and the last well into March, sometime even April.

Daphne bholua had a reputation at first for not being reliably hardy, but, with thought for a position where it will be comfortable, it will prosper in almost any garden. It is one of those plants that has benefited not only from climate change, but also from the selection of forms that are naturally hardier. This reflects its mountain origins: in the wild, it is deciduous and hardier at higher altitudes, but evergreen and less hardy if collected from lower down the mountainside. Many modern selections are both hardy and evergreen, although, like most evergreen shrubs, it sheds some of its leaves in spring.

Sir Peter Smithers grew Daphne bholua so successfully in his super-temperate garden on Lake Lugano in the Swiss Alps that it seeded itself all too freely. He wondered whether, in years to come, it might be so prolific as to be designated a noxious weed. Arabella Lennox-Boyd brought seed back from a visit to Sir Peter and raised a great number of seedlings that now populate the woodland at her famous garden at Gresgarth Hall in Lancashire.

Almost all the plants of Daphne bholua in England today are descended from plants collected in the mountains of central Nepal, where they flourish in clearings in oak forests between 6,000ft and 10,000ft above sea level. The Nepalese have various medical uses for the shrub, but they also use it for making traditional lokta paper. However, the species has a much wider natural distribution and we will see a greater variation within the forms we find in our nurseries when more are introduced from such areas as Tibet, Myanmar and Vietnam.

Daphne bholua is widely reported to be happier on neutral or alkaline soils. That has not been my experience. I have grown it happily in chalk woodland, on greensand and on sandy clay — both acid in reaction. The truth is that it grows well on almost any soil that is never waterlogged in winter or likely to dry out in summer. Shelter from cold, dry wind is also important. Pinch out the young growths from time to time if you wish; this makes for a bushier plant. Daphnes do not need pruning, unless they have grown large enough to be a nuisance. Avoid hard pruning them, but, if you do so and the plant survives, it will produce useful suckers that you can cut off and grow on somewhere else — a useful trick because most are grown on their own roots.

Which are the best cultivars? Twenty years ago, I planted four in my winter garden: ‘Darjeeling’, ‘Gurkha’, ‘Jacqueline Postill’ and ‘Peter Smithers’. All flourished, but, five years later, I had no doubt that the best, all things considered, was ‘Jacqueline Postill’. That said, the differences between them are small — largely a question of the vigour of the plant and the colour of its flowers. All have an open shape with flexible stems and grow to about 8ft.

The RHS has given its Award of Garden Merit to two very fine forms that are readily available. The first is ‘Ghurka’, collected at 10,500ft and said to be particularly tolerant of low temperatures. Its dark, mauve-pink buds open to palest-pink flowers. The other is ‘Jacqueline Postill’, a seedling of ‘Ghurka’, with similar flowers, but perhaps slightly more of them, and rather more evergreen leaves that show them off.

Other good cultivars of Daphne bholua include: ‘Darjeeling’, an early flowerer, starting in November; ‘Limpsfield’, reliably evergreen; ‘Peter Smithers’, the best of Sir Peter’s collections in Nepal; and ‘Mary Rose’, with darker flowers. Karen Junker’s nursery in Somerset has recently introduced several new cultivars, too.

‘Jacqueline Postill’ is the most widely grown cultivar, but we can expect new forms in the years ahead that are even better — larger flowers, darker colours, denser growth (to produce even more flowers) and increased hardiness would all be regarded as improvements. Now, some breeders have also begun to cross it with other species, some with longer corollas or deeper colours. We can expect a flurry of new varieties over the next 10 years.

However, Daphne bholua is not the only species to flower in winter and fill the air with its penetrating sweet scent. D. mezereum, an English native, although not widespread, is tough, hardy and easy to grow. I can guarantee its hardiness because I have seen it flowering at 3,500ft in the Alps — first on the edge of pine-woods near Château d’Oex in Switzerland and then up the Roya valley in the Maritime Alps.

Daphne mezereum makes a sturdy shrub, typically 3ft–4ft high, which flowers on last year’s wood from mid February onwards. The flowers are a distinct deep pink, with a purplish tinge, and cling tightly to the stems, just below the apical buds that start into leaf at the same time as the flowers open. There is a pretty contrast between the pale, green, lanceolate leaves and the strong colour of the flowers encircling the stems. Their scent is very sweet and strong. It is a typical cottage-garden plant: I once saw it planted as a short hedge all along the front of a cottage garden in Wiltshire. The flowers are followed by round fruits, each with one seed in it — a ‘drupe’, say the botanists. They are quickly picked off by birds when they turn from green to bright red at the beginning of June.

There is also a white-flowered form known as Daphne mezereum f. alba, which is slightly more upright in habit, occasionally reaching as much as 5ft in height. Its fruits are bright yellow and no less attractive to birds. You need to collect seeds of both forms at the end of May when they are still green and sow them (best in a pot) immediately. I find I get 100% germination and that each form comes true from seed, probably because they are self-fertile. The seedlings are easy to grow on and should eventually be planted out in their permanent positions when they are about 4in in height — best done in May.

The only downside to most daphnes is that they are short lived, growing to their full height and flowering profusely — then suddenly dying, seemingly for no reason apart from their age. Daphne mezereum typically lives for 8–10 years and D. bholua up to 12 years. The wise gardener will always have spare seedlings to take their place. D. mezereum always produces a good crop of seeds from which to grow replacements and birds can be counted on to disperse them.

D. bholua also produces seeds — fewer, perhaps, but quite enough to grow on a crop from which to choose. If you look underneath an established plant of D. bholua, you will probably find quite a number of seedlings, ready to take over when their parent plant dies. The seedlings will be variable, but all will make good garden plants — there is no such thing as a disappointing daphne.

Why do they have such a strong, sweet scent if they flower at a time when there are so few insects to pollinate them? The answer is that the climate where Daphne bholua occurs in the wild is milder and there are always insects to do duty. It is, however, self-fertile, as is D. mezereum. Neither of them needs a pollinator to set good seed.

Why, therefore, do they both let out such a powerful scent, the sort that attracts insects from afar? Nobody knows. There is no end to the mysteries surrounding daphnes. Nor of their beauty.

To cut or not to cut — that is the real gardener’s question. My duelling natures battle out this problem every winter when the seed catalogues hit the doormat with a whoosh. With a small city garden, sunny spots are in high demand and every flower counts. The purist in me knows that a few dozen snipped for a bouquet could clear me out entirely, reducing a seasonal display to crumbs. The hedonist, on the other hand, knows that there is nothing on earth more luxuriant than doing just that. What is a flower lover to do, short of throwing it all away to find a walled garden to heap with peonies and hollyhocks?

I turn, of course, to someone wiser.

On a sunny morning back in September, when the garden roses were in their blousy, second flush, but the hydrangea was just starting to speckle pink with age, I met flower-grower Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Co. on her farm in Hampshire for a day of revelling in the late summer’s bounty. She and her son Alistair were celebrating the 30th anniversary of the business, hosting a bevy of flower-lovers to tour the farm and feast on a luscious lunch from Tart London. The Real Flower Co. is a forerunner of the modern English cut flower movement, prioritising fragrant, old-fashioned varieties using ecological growing methods — and while Rosebie’s business has bloomed into something of an empire, with a robust business of bouquets by post, multiple farms and London shops, her roots as a grower started simply and her wisdom could inspire even my small-scale garden to produce more.

As we walked through the flower fields, the sun, ever a fickle friend, gave way to showers, and calls for brollies and spare mackintoshes rang out over the rosehips. Those with too-stylish footwear were resoundingly punished, but glasses of English sparkling wine from neighbouring vineyard Raimes put everything back to rights. The farm was verdant and tousled with flowers, a working endeavour rather than simple photo backdrop, with tender annuals cheek-by-jowl with perennials; flowering shrubs alongside herbs; and foliage in polytunnels. The key to a well-rounded, generous selection of cut flowers is a wide range of types of plants — not simply swathes of big bodacious blooms.

These sodden winter days I’m planning the small, sunny south-facing garden outside our new home in the wilds of West London, and while my walled garden visions will have to wait, I’m more determined than ever to just cut some flowers already. I’ll be following Rosebie’s lead and making my approach a many-pronged one. I already have huge, well-established sage and rosemary bushes in need of a good prune, and they make for excellent, fragrant foliage in bouquets. Cut flowers typically worship the sun, so I will focus on those exposed spots in our otherwise neglected garden, adding in much-needed compost to the London clay soil to improve drainage.

There will be a lusty order from Trevor White Roses while it’s still bareroot season, focusing mainly on climbers to make vertical gains on the garden’s brick walls. The repeat-flowering varieties will give months of blooms, and Rosebie started the Real Flower Co growing exclusively roses, so they are known to be a gateway drug. I will proceed with reckless abandon.

I have already sifted through Chilterns Seed’s catalogue and circled the easiest-to-grow, annual cut flowers that go from seed to bloom in a single season. Cosmos 'Purity’ ticks all my boxes — an elegant, old-fashioned shape, tall enough to hold its own in the garden, but so graceful when displayed in a vase. Ammi majus is brilliant in both a border (its lace-like flower heads look very appealing threaded through permanent planting) and a glass vessel. When it comes to fragrance, nothing beats the feathery, pink Dianthus plumarius ‘Rainbow Loveliness’. Pop it in a pot in a sunny spot, and a single stem on your nightstand to perfume the whole bedroom. And for the truly lazy, there are nasturtiums whose little kernels can just be pushed directly into the earth and forgotten about. You will be unfairly rewarded with cascades of jewel-toned gems until the first frost. I particularly fancy the climbing sort, such as Tropaeolum majus 'Milkmaid'. A warning: they will heave themselves over a fence like our neighbour's cat if given half a chance.

Dahlias are a must if you have the sun and I surely won’t be able to resist a few tubers. (Seattle! Santa Claus! Who comes up with these names?) Then there are the lilies and bulbs I’ve dug from our old garden, too, without mentioning the daphne I’m after, and oh, should we get a Philadelphus? It is a dangerous, delicious thing to imagine a cutting garden in winter — similar to going food shopping while ravenous. You might as well just add another packet of seeds to your virtual shopping basket and figure it out later. This year the vases, fingers crossed, will be full.

'Patience,’ said granny, ‘is a virtue.’ The trouble is that such a virtue is in short supply in today’s world of instant gratification, even in the garden. Observe the look on the face of that soul to whom you explained that it will be three years before they can cut asparagus from those newly planted crowns. Or the crestfallen expression of the garden designer’s client who is assured that a tree no taller than they are will establish itself much faster — and more happily — than one which is 10ft or 20ft tall. As for sowing seeds…

A gardening friend who is the same age as me (mid seventies) has been described by those who know him as ‘a man in a hurry’. Having just taken on a new 1½-acre garden myself, I understand that feeling, but I want to do things properly. We moved in during early December — leaves had fallen, trees and shrubs and perennials (if there are any) are dormant. I am, as yet, not fully aware of the potential of my new charges, although keen to get cracking.

This is rhododendron country and my acre of woodland, dense with hybrids that were planted in the first half of the 20th century, is overgrown and overshadowed. Scots pines, oaks and tall, spindly birch trees tower over 15ft-high pieris and 10ft camellias. There are several arbutus trees languishing in the shade cast by the oaks and pine — their branches 20ft tall, but sinuous, thinly clad in foliage and questing high and wide into the air like the tentacles of a distressed octopus. They could be cut back, but that will not improve their overall habit. Should I keep one or two and fell the rest to allow room for youngsters?

Many of the rhododendrons have turned into trees — bare at the base with a scant and lofty canopy competing with other overgrown shrubs (thorny berberis are definitely for the chop) — but, until spring comes, I have no idea if many of them are capable of flowering.

Some will have to go, but which? Others could simply be cut back. I need to make space for new varieties, which fills me with excitement, having gardened on chalk for the past 40-odd years. You see my problem; the anticipation is palpable, but wholesale clearance would deprive me of some potentially beautiful and reinvigorated specimens. Selective culling is the answer, but, until April, May and June, I will not get a feel for which plants have the potential to rejuvenate when some of the geriatric birches are felled and the crowns of the oaks are lifted a little to allow in more light. Therein lies the conundrum: when to crack on and when to leave well alone — for just a little longer.

Mercifully, there are areas where I can get stuck in — making new beds around the terracing at the rear of the house. Oh, the joy of pushing a spade into sandy earth when I have been used to chalk, clay and flint. Ground that would once have taken me two hours to turn over can be cultivated in a fraction of that time, although I am conscious of the need for masses of organic soil enrichment to hang on to moisture come the warmer, drier weather.

New gardens possess so many challenges. I am monitoring the path of the sun — at its lowest at this time of year — so that plants which require sun or shade can be catered for. I have found the best place for a greenhouse and acquired the planning permission I need in this conservation area. (Living in terrain that is designated a National Landscape has to be a plus, but it brings with it a number of planning restrictions, which I know are in everybody’s interests).

The style of garden here — around a modern, long, low dwelling with white-rendered walls and black-framed windows and doors — requires a different approach to that surrounding the mellow brick Georgian farmhouse we left behind. It would be churlish (and rather unadventurous) to re-create the garden I planted there over the space of 23 years in this new setting. My elaborate terracotta urns and pots are less suited to this scenario, but my lead tubs pick up the colour of the slate on the roof and look sleek and in tune with the pale ceramic terracing.

Wish me luck in my new venture. I’ll try to be patient — and I’ll keep you posted.

Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them by Alan Titchmarsh (Ebury, £35) is out now.

This feature originally appeared in the April 30, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'We want to make a sensory garden.’ I’ve lost count of the times I have been asked to advise on such a request. I try to be patient, to smile and present what I hope is an accommodating expression.

The thing is that every garden is a sensory garden; it simply requires awareness in terms of observation, tactility and well-developed olfactory, nasal and aural sensibilities in order to be appreciated to the full. Who would not want a garden that looked beautiful and offered fragrance, flavours and floral variety in terms of touch, taste and smell? These things are all present in a well-tempered garden, but how often do we overlook the joy of sound, apart from birdsong?

True enough, the avian population is the prime source of our aural pleasure: the twittering of sparrows in our huge bay tree always makes me smile. They foregather in late afternoon to regale each other with the events of their day, or so I imagine. Why else would they chatter for so long, unless they had enjoyed an eventful few hours foraging hither and yon?

I love the elaborate high-pitched complexity of the wren’s vocalising deep within the box and the yew, the fussy blethering of the bluetit and the eventide coloratura of the blackbird perched upon our chimney. When the air is still at the end of a summer’s day, no pleasure can compare with sitting on a garden bench, glass in hand, listening to that elaborate a cappella. Does he make up a new song every evening? Who is it for? Is it territorial or simply a way of expressing joy? Who knows for sure?

Edward Thomas summed up that often unexpected feeling of oneness with Nature in Adelstrop, about the station where the steam train drew up ‘unwontedly’. ‘Someone cleared his throat’ and, as the train sighed and steamed alongside the platform, Thomas was entranced:

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

That poem, written in 1915 and reflecting on a day he experienced in June 1914, is a reminder of the power not only of one of our greatest poets, but also of the rich and varied sounds of the countryside — and the garden.

A gently trickling stream is relaxing, provided the flow is gentle and not a raging torrent, although even swift-moving water, tumbling and splashing over boulders, is wonderfully effective at masking the sound of traffic. (I am told there are waterfall tuners in Japan whose sole aim is to encourage a watercourse to create a pleasing sound and eliminate any suggestion of a horse relieving itself. Nice to know...)

The sound of the breeze rustling the leaves of trees assures us that not all winds are gales that need to be named with irritating regularity. Words such as ‘susurration’ and ‘psithurism’ (the ‘p’ is silent), from the Greek psithuras — whispering — remind us that a gentle zephyr can be a friendly companion on an otherwise sultry day.

Rosamunde Pilcher, who wrote The Shell Seekers, is fond of wind ‘soughing in the branches of the trees’. It’s not a word you hear much nowadays, soughing, but that gentle moaning of branches at the mercy of a strong breeze is likely to awaken in us more unease than the gentle susurration of bamboo foliage when caught by a sudden gust.

Listen out for the thrush cracking open a snail shell using a paving stone or boulder as an anvil and rest assured that there will be one less mollusc foraging among your hostas tonight.

True enough, not all garden sounds are pleasing: the roaring leaf blower, the rasping chainsaw, the clattering hedge trimmer, the whining strimmer or the deafening engine of the rotary mower can send you into an apoplectic rage as they rend the air. Then there is the creaking gate: handy at letting you know that someone is on their way up the garden path, but still profoundly irritating. Do locate that oil can...

None of these sounds is as likely to soothe as the swish of a sharp scythe through the long summer grass. Neither will the hiss of a pressure washer ever give you as much pleasure as the rhythmic sound of a broom clearing the terrace of fallen leaves. It is the gentle and the comforting sounds in the garden that please us the most. Do not underestimate their ability to settle the nerves and calm the soul.

'Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them' by Alan Titchmarsh (Ebury, £35) is out now

This feature originally appeared in the January 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Chaenomeles are beautiful and rewarding garden shrubs — hardy everywhere and not fussy about soil or position. They have only two drawbacks: one is their thorns and the other is their name. We used to call them Japonicas or Japanese quinces — and some of us still do, because no one knows how to pronounce chaenomeles.

You realise that a genus such as chaenomeles is looking up when new, improved selections start appearing in garden centres. So many have hit the market in recent years that the RHS started a four-year trial of them in 2022 and the results should be available next year on the society’s website. The trial is important because it represents the largest collection of Chaenomeles ever assembled in Britain. The RHS judges have been evaluating every cultivar for the quality and quantity of its flowers, their colour and size; the length of its flowering period; the foliage, growth habit and vigour; and the size of the fruit, its colour and persistence.

Chaenomeles are close relations of the true quince, which is now in a separate genus of its own — Cydonia oblonga. They are mainly grown for their flowers, which come in a wide range of bright colours. Their value lies in their habit of flowering early in the year on naked branches, before the leaves open out. They are the sort of tough shrubs that you can plant almost anywhere and forget about.

That said, they prefer a sunny position where they will ripen their wood and produce more flowers next year than they would in shade. They are often grown against a south-facing wall, where they will start into flower even earlier than in the garden. Yes, they have thorns, but gardeners are used to handling much more thorny plants than chaenomeles and some of the latest American introductions are actually thornless.

There are three species of Chaenomeles: C. cathayensis, which is rare in gardens, has pale-pink flowers, but is not the most exciting in the genus as a whole. All the action lies with C. japonica, C. speciosa and their hybrids. C. japonica is short, often no more than 2ft high, and its orange-red flowers make a cheerful show from March to May.

C. speciosa is taller, reaching up to 10ft high, with red flowers from February to April. Both species have been cultivated for centuries in Japan and given rise to plants with varying shapes and colours. Some of the best cultivars are vigorous hybrids between the two species and known as C. x superba.

Chaenomeles have another attraction — their fruit, which resemble small apples with very short stalks that keep them tightly attached to the branches. The fruit is fairly astringent when raw — not recommended — but widely used for making jams and jellies. Most people find the distinctive taste delicious and, in places such as Poland and the Baltic states, varieties have been selected for the quantity and quality of their fruit.

The fruit of Chaenomeles cathayensis is largest, but C. japonica and C. speciosa also produce enough for most people to notice them when they ripen and change their colour from green or brown to yellow. They have a distinctive fragrance when ready for picking.

The fruits of chaenomeles contain copious quantities of seeds — a seedling once turned up in one of my field hedges — and many different forms and colours have emerged since they were first introduced to England late in the 18th century. These include extra petals, variegated leaves, crooked stems, upright forms and flowers of exceptional size. The colour of their flowers now ranges from deepest red through every shade of orange, peach and pink, to lime green, cream and pure white; others sport a mixture of colours, too.

Some of the plants in the RHS trials are so new that they are not yet commercially available. Two to look out for in future are the super-vigorous Kai-Un with large, deepest-pink flowers and Lemon Sorbet with cupped, double flowers in shades of cream and green. ‘Atrococcinea’ is also promising, not only for the abundance of its red flowers in March, but also for its fine clean leaves in summer.

Among the new cultivars from Japan, some are colour sports and have a tendency to revert to the original shade, which is always exciting, whereas ‘Toyo-nishiki’, which has been available now for some years, has pale pink and white all together on its branches at the same time.

Most promising among recent introductions from the US is a series with marketing names such as Chaenomeles ‘Double Take’ and ‘Storm’. They have been selected for their lack of thorns, their 2in double flowers, and their long season in bloom. ‘Scarlet Storm’ is a glorious example, and has the advantage — or disadvantage — that it does not set fruit. All its energy goes into growing and flowering.

Chaenomeles are one of those shrubs, like camellias, that are traditionally said to flower in early spring, but which really have a much longer period in bloom. The first flowers on ‘Contorta’ and ‘Suifu-nishiki’ are usually out soon after Christmas and, in some years, as early as November, but ‘Syowa-nishiki’ is notably late flowering. Many varieties continue to produce a few flowers at least until July.

If, on the other hand, you want your plants to bear lots of fruit, orange-flowered ‘Cido’, greeny-yellow ‘Lemon and Lime’ and double orange-red blooms of ‘Clementine’ are all dependable fruiters. Some varieties — ‘Sargentii’ is a good example — keep their fruit on the plant well into the new year.

As with all shrubs, pruning is an option, but not an obligation. However, if chaenomeles are grown against a wall, you should let them build up a framework of branches, then spur back the branchlets after flowering and cut back anything that projects too far forward. If you feel adventurous, try grafting some of the contorted cultivars, such as ‘Contorta’ or ‘Tortuosa’ (a good, early-flowering orange variety) on 6ft standard stems of the common quince Cydonia oblonga. ‘Contorta’ is rarely seen and won Plant Heritage’s Threatened Plant of the Year competition in 2023.

Some people say that chaenomeles don’t look good in mixed borders, but I think their early flowering makes them useful adjuncts to summer-flowering shrubs, including roses. ‘Cido’, ‘Orange Beauty’ and ‘Rising Sun’ — all forms of Chaenomeles japonica — make good ground cover at the front of a border and taller plants can be underplanted with almost anything you wish. Once established, chaenomeles seem to live forever — a specimen at Caerhays Castle in Cornwall is said to be more than 100 years old.

However, chaenomeles have a special usefulness to people who garden on alkaline soils. When Japanese azaleas were introduced into England 100 years ago, our ancestors on acid oils were able to create brilliantly colourful displays in May.

Gardeners today have discovered that, in areas where chalk or limestone make the cultivation of azaleas impossible, chaenomeles are the perfect substitute. A hillside covered in neat bushes of chaenomeles makes a spectacular sight in March and April. The first I saw, in Italy many years ago, was so impressive that I vowed to copy it in the chalky download of my own garden. That reminds me — I must get on and do so.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I know it’s still cold and the ground may be hard as a hammer, but the days are getting longer and, when the clouds part, there’s just a sense that spring might not be many weeks away. Even as I still cling to the log burner and mulled cider appears in the evening once in a while, my notebook is starting to fill with scribbles of what I’ll be adding to the garden for the season to come.

Although I won’t yet share what I’m growing for the first time this year — they might turn out to be disappointing — I’d like to recommend three of my favourite unusual edibles of which I’ll be adding more.

First up, Turkish rocket (Bunias orientalis), which also goes by the less appealing name of warty cabbage. Don’t let that put you off this wonderful hardy perennial. Visually, it resembles a more brassicaish version of a dandelion, with its long blade-shaped leaves having a similar flavour to the familiar rocket. Turkish rocket’s flowerheads and flowers are great to eat, too, with all parts carrying that punchy, mustard-greens flavour; the young tender leaves are superb raw, with the larger leaves, the flowerheads and stems best steamed or stir fried.

Sow seeds in early spring, in modules undercover, pot on once and then plant out in May. It is often easier to source young plants and, once they are established, they are easy to divide (spring is best): they establish well. Turkish rocket tends to get to about 1½ft across, so bear that in mind with spacing. Full or part shade is ideal, as is any non-extreme soil. As with many leafy perennial vegetables, Turkish rocket gets growing early in the year, offering a harvest of young succulent leaves often before spring has really got into its step, with the flower stems and flowerheads following as the weather warms. In my experience, it is fairly free of pests, although slugs can be a nuisance to planted-out seedlings, so take whatever measures you like best.

Next, I suggest you try Apios americana — I’ve no idea why it is not more widely grown. This tuberous, climbing hardy perennial is also known as the ground nut and the potato bean and, as well as being delicious, it is quite beautiful. Growing enthusiastically up anything it can grip, the leafy tendrils can easily reach 6ft by midsummer, with burgundy/chocolate flowers dotted across the plant.

Oval tubers, usually 1½in to 2¾in long, develop on stringy roots beneath the soil and, when lifted from late autumn and cooked — as you might potatoes — taste like nutty new potatoes with a texture quite like yams. Any tubers you leave — or lift to replant the following year — provide the engine room for harvests to come. Apios is also a nitrogen fixer, taking nitrogen out of the air and making it available to the soil via its roots, enriching the bed as it grows. Anything you grow adjacent or in the same patch gets a nicely fertilised bed. Apios tubers, in effect, feed us twice. As far as I am aware, there are no named varieties and it’s usual to start with tubers, largely available in the colder months. A moist, well-drained soil is preferred and some shade is tolerated.

My last tip is the Siberian chive. I grow a wide range of chives, from familiar purple-flowering chives (Allium schoenoprasum) to the white-flowering (A. schoenoprasum f. albiflorum albiflorum), garlic chives (A. tuberosum) and the newest on my patch, the Siberian chive (A. nutans). It is this latter variety that has really earned its place over the past few years and I’m going to expand its territory.

Siberian chives are bulbous perennials that grow to about 1½ft tall, forming appealing clumps as they establish, with striking mauve flowerheads about 2½in round, made up of numerous star-shaped flowers. These are particularly attractive to pollinators and other beneficial insects, including honeybees, bumblebees, leaf-cutter and mason bees. The leaves, flowers and seeds are delicious, with the flat, narrow, leaves carrying a mild onion/garlic flavour, the flowers a little more intense in flavour and the seeds — ready in autumn — similar to onion seeds in appearance and flavour. Use the leaves as you would common chives and do try the flowers scattered through leafy salads or as a finishing herb — the seeds are especially good with potatoes, eggs and in breads such as focaccia.

As are the majority of chives, Siberian chives are tolerant of most soils and situations, but prefer sun and a moist, well-drained, rich soil. Allow 1ft or so between plants. If you are after more leaves, cut back after flowering. Seed is rarely available, so start with a plant or two, from which you can propagate by division in spring or autumn.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon. His book Abundance: eating and living with the seasons (Quadrille, £30) is out now.

'Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown’ — or so the carol tells us. The ivy, too, surely deserves a coronet, not least as recompense for the disparagement it must bear at the hands of gardeners and tree lovers, for there are many misconceptions associated with its rampant habit and its ability to grow anywhere and everywhere. This winter, perhaps you could evince some sympathy for the plight of Hedera helix (known in the USA as English ivy) and give credit where credit is due.

For a start, ivy is no parasite. It uses trees (and any vertical structure) to clamber upwards by clinging on with tenacious aerial roots. These do not penetrate the bark of their host, neither do they extract any form of nutrition. The tree, the building or the telegraph pole is nothing more than a ladder, enabling the ivy to venture upwards to as much as 100ft in search of the light. To be fair, it manages to survive pretty well in the shade, forming a thick rug of lobed foliage that is excellent at trapping fallen autumn leaves and saving the gardener the chore of raking them up or rending the air with the drone of a leaf blower.

Only when the mature ivy stems become arborescent (woody) and more bushy are they in danger of threatening the life of the tree with their additional weight and windage, as well as their tendency to rob light from their host. Confined to the main trunk and branches, ivy does little harm and much good — offering sustenance and shelter to about 50 different species of wildlife.

Birds enjoy the protection and shelter it provides. As well as the aforementioned food store of insects, thrushes and wood pigeons in particular will feast on the succulent black berries in winter, helping the spread of the plant by distributing the seeds to pastures new. Smaller birds such as wrens will snuggle down and roost in its thick rug.

For me, the cheeriest thing of all, as far as natural history is concerned, is that although the holly blue butterfly lays its spring clutch of eggs where you would expect, on holly — preferring female plants where both leaves and berries are munched by the caterpillars — the summer brood is raised on ivy. The butterfly clearly has the sense not to put all her eggs in one botanical basket.

Mind you, she will have competition from a wide selection of moths. The nectar of the ivy flowers is valued, too, by bees. Indeed, the ivy bee (Colletes hederae) is totally dependent upon the ivy flowers for sustenance and its breeding pattern is adjusted according to their flowering time.

The gardener has a wide choice when it comes to varieties of ivy. There are about 400 different cultivars with leaves that show variation in both shape and colour — multi-lobed or fingered, simple-shaped or elaborately feathered, and with variegations that encompass every shade of yellow and green through to pure white. Size, too, is variable, from the smallest at less than an inch in diameter to the larger, slightly convex blades of Persian ivy, Hedera colchica, at anything up to 6in wide and 10in long. The variety ‘Sulphur Heart’ is especially popular, with its central splash combining yellow and pale green nestled among the rich, deep green of the body of the leaf.

As trailing plants for containers, as ground cover under trees and shrubs and as woodland carpets, ivies deserve to be revered by the gardener, not least for their ability to thrive almost anywhere and to cling onto their leaves all year round. Rip a bit off, stick it in earth or compost and it will romp away. Yes, keep it clear of the crown of a tree where it can eventually topple its weakened host, but appreciate it for its virtues, as did the ancients, who saw its evergreen leaves as a symbol of love and friendship.

Bacchus wore a wreath of ivy; it reputedly guarded against a chap becoming drunk (no guarantees offered); and a bunch of it frequently adorned a pole outside a local hostelry. The old universities of America (where ivy occurs only as an import, being native to Europe and Asia) were often clad in a cloak of ivy — hence the expression ‘Ivy League’ being applied to that country’s most revered educational institutions. And the carol? The holly represents Jesus Christ and the ivy the Virgin Mary, ever faithful — and evergreen — in her fidelity to God.

This feature originally appeared in the December 24, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Alan Titchmarsh: My garden is as pretty as I've ever known it, thanks to an idea I've rediscovered after 50 years

Alan Titchmarsh spent years not planting annuals, but he hasn't looked back since he started planting them once more.

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

'I bought it without telling Victoria. She didn’t want another project... I sat her down, gave her a vodka and tonic and told her what I’d done'

In October, Sir David Beckham guest edited Country Life — and as part of it, he invited Alan Titchmarsh to come and see his Cotswolds home and garden.

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

'A stately pile in my part of Hampshire has been on the market for years — but one buyer didn't even make it to the door before getting back in his helicopter'

As the old year went out and the new year came in, Alan Titchmarsh focused on the one thing that enhances a garden but can't be planted: peace and quiet.

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

How Harper Beckham created the perfect gardener's birthday present for her father's 50th — with a little help from David Austin Roses

Sir David Beckham's daughter commissioned a new rose for her father to mark his 50th birthday this year — a process which is enormously involved, as Charles Quest-Ritson explained.

By Charles Quest Ritson — read the full story.

'The whole house shook. Everything was white. For four months, it felt as if we were on Mars'

Back in June, Non Morris visited the gorgeous house and gardens at The Holt in Hampshire, and told its fascinating — and unsual — story.

By Non Morris — read the full story.

I've tried every slug control known to man, and these are the only things that have ever worked for me

Alan Titchmarsh is as charming, warming and friendly a man as anyone you'll ever meet. Unless, of course, you're a slug... in which case you'll awaken his ruthless side..

By Alan Titchmarsh — read the full story.

One of the truly great gardens of the world is at risk of having its vistas and tranquility blighted forever

Julie Harding reported on the threat to Rousham, the birthplace of the English landscape-garden movement.

By Julie Harding — read the full story.

'I blitzed it. Nothing survived. If you have one bit of surviving bindweed, you will have it forever’: A peek in to the ruthless world of the gravel garden

Sometimes you have to start from scratch to get what you're after, as Non Morris discovered when she spoke to some of Britain's most successful gravel gardeners.

By Non Morris — read the full story.

How Beth Tarling put together her dream terracotta pot collection

'I followed a lorry for miles just so I could ask the driver if I could buy his pot,' Beth Tarling told our Gardens Editor Tiffany Daneff back in February.

By Tiffany Daneff — read the full story.

The garden created by a forgotten genius of the 1920s, rescued from 'a sorry state of neglect to a level of quality it has not known for over 50 years'

'Garden restorations often reveal unexpected stories and surprises,' wrote George Plumptre in this piece from July. It was certainly the case at Knowle House, but this East Sussex garden has emerged in fine style.

By George Plumptre — read the full story.

This Christmas, Country Life is raising a glass to the unsung heroes who work all year round to make our seasonal celebrations special. All their stories will be collected together on our Christmas section.

Today, it's the turn of plantsman and nursery owner John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries.

Give someone a hellebore for Christmas and you are offering both hope and consolation through the dark days of winter. ‘Hellebores are one of the first intimations of spring,’ says renowned plantsman John Massey. ‘They will carry on all the way through to March.’

Mr Massey’s hellebore garden hybrids have been bred over 35 years at his Ashwood Nurseries near Kinver in the West Midlands and are known as simply the best in the world. ‘They come in every colour apart from true blue,’ he explains.

Shouldn’t one give the white, so-called Christmas rose? ‘That’s Helleborus niger and is possibly the most difficult to grow outside,’ he warns. ‘Modern varieties have been forced to flower early and tend to be grown as a throw-away plant just for Christmas.’ Better, he suggests, to give Helleborus orientalis, known as the Lenten rose, which comes in many colours, as well as spotted and blotched.

A good present would be a container planted with three flowering-sized varieties, which might include ‘Anna’s Red’ (named after garden writer Anna Pavord), ‘Penny’s Pink’ and ‘Frostkiss’, with its especially lovely marbled foliage. ‘It’s a good starter collection and can be positioned to be seen from the house. It will go on for years in the container and later go into the garden. You can take the heads off and float them in a wide bowl on the lunch table, too.’

From Christmas onwards, visitors can view a display of hellebores in Ashwood’s top green-house, together with other winter-flowering plants, such as cyclamen and witch hazel. His favourite hellebore? ‘It’s got to be the Picotee garden hybrid, pinkish markings on the outside of a white flower: very elegant indeed.’

John Massey's Christmas: ‘Taking the dogs for a walk. The two border collies are my family. My garden backs onto the Staffs-Worcs canal and there is hardly anyone about on Christmas Day so we have it to ourselves.’

John Massey’s eight-acre garden opens every Saturday for charity — www.ashwoodnurseries.com

Flowers at Christmas get so little attention that I cannot help but feel sorry for them. Most often they’re relegated to an afterthought, a mixed bunch tossed in the trolley in the chaos of the 11th-hour shop. And people who do try often end up with the seasonally-bankrupt bunch — glitter flecked branches, red roses, maybe a token sprig of holly. At worst, there are no flowers at all and the table is nothing but a vast expanse of unfunny Christmas cracker jokes, cold chipolatas and empty bottles of fizz.

We can and must do better by our tables, for the sake of beauty, magic and holiday cheer. There are so few truly special occasions left anymore that it is really worth it to make a proper effort at Christmas. A ‘polish-the-silver, iron-the-napkins, frantically-pick-wax-off-your- best-tablecloth’ effort.

First off, I beg you to eschew soulless, season-less flowers and instead flood your table with candlelight. Short of burning down the house, it is not possible to overdo it with candles, especially in the beautiful darkness that hovers either side of the solstice. From there, you have options. Add some mossy, antique ironstone bowls filled with intoxicating paperwhite bulbs, wreathed in a halo of lichen covered twigs. Or hellebores nodding their gentle heads in collections of cut glass sherry glasses. How about the warm softly spiced scent of bay leaves clustered in garlands down the center of the table. Regal amaryllis, holding court on their long strong stems, flushing pink or red, with picotee edges catching in the candlelight have their place, too. Take your pick. And with just a modicum of forethought, minimal spend and absolutely no talent required.

Cut flowers in winter are a thorny prospect, as most of what is on offer is a conventional array of hothouse stems grown continents away, doused in god-knows-what to maintain a veneer of artificial perfection — not to mention the airmiles accrued. Not exactly special. Instead I highly recommend leaning into the season, even if that means a simple bunch of holly, heavy with berries, or a tendrils of ivy looping along your table. A walk through the hedgerow (or your friendly local carpark) will yield bounties untold. A few long wisps of lithe, arching cedar in a vase is utterly graceful in a way that straight-stemmed roses from South America could never even touch. Crabapples on the branch come pre-bobbled, and festively red too. Swathes of fluffy vines of old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba) couldn’t be more Father Christmas-approved in name, and they look smashing down a table. Bare hazel branches drip with catkins in December, so why not add piles of shiny old-fashioned tinsel to a big arrangement in a Champagne bucket? Hey, we don’t have to be classy all the time.

If you have your heart set on blooms with a capital ‘B’, bundles of British-grown narcissus can be bought for a fraction of the price as imported stems and they smell a hundred times more fragrant. Amaryllis can be bought or grown, and hellebores, cyclamen, pansies and hyacinths can go from pot to vase in a flash. The key to successful arrangements is in the choosing of materials and vase; beautiful, seasonal blooms look chic plunked into a jam jar, whereas overly stiff and fussy imported flowers require heaps more effort to look half as good. When in doubt, asymmetry is a quick trick to making a vase feel effortless, so trim a mix of lengths, a few short, a few long, and let Nature do the rest. Start with any foliage you may be using to create a framework, then add in focal flowers to add interest and fullness. Some soft gestural flourishes could be added last to add movement and levity. The same basic rules of flower arranging apply at Christmas as throughout the year: sharp clean cuts at steep angles help hydrate stems; scrupulously clean vases and water, free from any leaves or debris below the waterline, will keep bacteria at bay.

Some of my favourite ways of incorporating flowers at Christmas are through potted plants from local nurseries, florists, and even the supermarket in a pinch. What looks like a basic plastic pot of £3 hyacinths undergoes a sort of alchemy when replanted in old terracotta or a chipped antique terrine, tucked through with moss and small twigs for support.

I chuck my hyacinths in the garden after blooming and they come back year after year in the spring. While forced bulbs like paperwhites will only bloom for one Christmas, hyacinths and amaryllis can live on for future flowers, lowering their environmental impact further still. Forcing bulbs oneself, rather than buying pre-potted bulbs, is a game of luck and skill when it comes to timing — with hyacinths notoriously taking upwards of three months. The worst outcome, if you can call it that, is that the plant flowers in January, which honestly is when your spirit, if not your table, might need them most.

‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength… New strong / Rain-bearing night-winds come,’ wrote Philip Larkin in a poem about autumn. ‘Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air, / Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men / Through mists at morning.’

Larkin alone might have managed to make the appearance of a council worker — recently viral on video because he continued his leaf blowing in a gale — sound elegiac. We ‘vague broomed’ gardeners prefer to watch another year going quietly, holding a rake and pushing a wheelbarrow. This way we smell the earth at its warmest, wet and fertile. In this household, there are arguments about the extent of the mowing, but no question over the non-necessity of a leaf blower.

Common sense suggests that when authorities began to speak of leaves as ‘litter’ something went awry. The pleasures of leaf-raking are not merely nostalgic, they are practical, meditative and kinder to our neighbours, to creatures great and small. There is a job to be done. The National Trust is worried about ‘blockages’ and county councils must answer for flooded roads.

However, the RHS cautions that the pollution, disruption and noise of the power tool comes at a heavy price and should be avoided in private gardens. The standard engine of the leaf blower (and mowers) is the two-stroke, which is notoriously inefficient and filthy. As much as one-third of the oil and diesel remains unburned, blasted out into the air.

It is doubly unfortunate, therefore, that they tend to be used most in urban areas near schools and playgrounds. Although electric motors are replacing them, they will still noisily be scattering dust, plastic wrappers and goodness knows what all around us.

Gardeners need to consider daily how we tread, how generations have trod. As the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem says ‘…the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod’. Not only shod, but frequently shut up in a box on wheels, utterly divorced from the untold numbers of organisms that make up the earth beneath us. Earth is one-tenth organic matter, one-fifth macro fauna (think nematodes and worms) and the rest an invisible number of protozoa, bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi — one billion organisms to the teaspoon. There is suddenly a lot to read about soil and much to hope for its regeneration: I am gripped by the strange world of nitrogen-fixing and heavy-metal metabolising microbes.

Autumn is the time when this multifarious subterranean team takes on stores for the winter and next year’s growing season. Down below, life persists, prepares and protects. Leaves on the ground can reduce the surface compaction of soil caused by heavy rain. Be leaf lazy: leaves on the lawn or cluttering your beds and corners will be bedded down into the earth naturally by worms where they make humus, an ingredient that’s critical to soil health. It holds water and air together in pockets created by worm movement and generations of hyphae — the tiny looping threads and branching filaments of vegetative growths of fungi and related organisms that push through, making microscopic boreholes in soil. These mycelia are the biological link between root and soil, taking sugars from plants and delivering essentials such as phosphates up to them. Even when they die, they do good, leaving only a soufflé of air and water in the soil.

There is something timeless and miraculous in observing leaves and seeds being drawn down into a lawn by worms. The long, hard black beans of the catalpa trees down the drive here are randomly upended, then shortened and, finally, they simply disappear into the green sward, leaving me spell-bound. I imagine the lusty worm tugging on this girder-like pod with such determination from below. So much goes on in slow motion all around and beneath us. As you rake and stand, you might get to see it, even sense the telegraphic messages. Afterwards, you can lie in a hot bath and feel a lot better on several levels.

It is November 1964. Mr Mackenzie, in his black waistcoat, baggy black trousers, white shirt with tie, his head topped with the battered brown trilby he always wore come rain or shine, wiped the dewdrop off the end of his nose with the back of his horny hand and proceeded to dig up the maiden apple from the short row of fruit trees in his nursery.

He pushed his spade — the silvery blade of which was worn to razor sharpness — into the damp, dark earth and prised out the roots, handing the four-branched sapling to me, the teenager who thought that a single apple tree of the variety ‘Ellison’s Orange’ was a good way to start an orchard.

Not that we had space for one. It would be the sole representative of its race in our small Yorkshire back garden, but I cherished it — when I remembered — over the years and it provided, if not a self-sufficiency of apples, then a modest contribution to the fruit bowl as reward for the years of desultory care that passed for cultivation.

Up until the 1960s, when a garden was to be established, bare-root trees were the norm: dug up in autumn from serried rows in nurseries and fields and shipped with precious little of their native earth clinging to their few sparse hessian-wrapped roots. The thick ones would be cut back and the thinner ones reduced in length when the trees were transplanted and given encouragement in the form of generous helpings of well-rotted muck or garden compost.

Then came the advent of container-grown stock that could be bought and planted at any time of year, regardless of the season because the undisturbed rootball would ensure shock-free establishment in a new location. Funny how no one had thought of it before. Oh, doubtless the Romans and the Greeks did, but it never caught on here until it came across the pond from the USA.

Until the mid 1960s, all deciduous trees, shrubs and roses were dug up and transplanted ‘bare-root’ when dormant between the months of November and March — the earlier the better to allow their new roots to establish in the damp earth before the spring growth spurt. As a result, I always think of November as the start of the gardening year, rather than the last knockings of the old one.

We can still buy bare-root trees and roses today and the one advantage they have over container-grown stock is their value for money. Plants raised in pots (those first ones in the US were grown in large tin cans that had once held plum tomatoes before the ubiquitous plastic pot rendered this early example of re-purposing redundant) require more care and attention in terms of watering and feeding than do plants grown in open ground. This economy of labour and materials is passed on to the consumer.

Not that bare-root planting is without its pitfalls. Too often gardeners are impatient: they want a tree that looks mature as soon as possible and, consequently, they will buy as large a specimen as they can afford. However, it stands to reason that the larger the tree, the more sustenance it needs to draw up from its roots. If the root system has been reduced in size — as it must be when a tree is transplanted from open ground — then a large tree with many branches to support will struggle to establish itself and may take many years to get over the shock. Even container-grown semi-mature trees are no pushover when it comes to establishment in the vicissitudes of a British spring with its intriguingly christened winds and frequent droughts.

One November 20 years ago, I planted a British native broadleaved wood. The majority of the trees were under 12in tall. We planted them in tree shelters to give them a head start and protection from deer and rabbits. We also planted four 6ft-high oaks. Ten years on, the oak saplings we had planted in the tubular shelters overtook the six-footers. A lesson learned. Like old-age pensioners, older trees take longer to settle in after moving house.

As a general rule, I prefer to plant trees no taller than I am (5ft 8in, as you ask). Anything up to that height stands a chance of establishing itself much more rapidly than a towering giant. With a modicum of organic enrichment at the roots, a stake to offer stability when the winds blow and an eye kept to ensure that the earth does not dry out, bare-root trees are still a valuable and economic addition to any garden. Mr Mackenzie would have known that.

Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them by Alan Titchmarsh (Ebury Spotlight, £35) is out now

It’s fair to say that 2025 has not been a vintage year for outdoor-grown sweet peas. The hot dry days of an uncharacteristic May (followed, in our case, by frost during Chelsea Flower Show week) were not good for the young sweet peas looking for cool, moist days to climb up their supports before flowering. In their own gardens, our visitors have been dismayed to find short stems and weak plants. The question is, are sweet peas going to lose their crown as the queen of flowers with warming temperatures in the UK?

Fortunately, there is a back-up plan to help you grow the best sweet peas next year and that is to consider sowing them this autumn. The plants will be much stronger by the time they are planted out and able to take on a much wider range of temperatures. This is a technique that we have used at Easton Walled Gardens in Lincolnshire for many years. In 2001, when I started restoring this 12-acre garden, there was only chaos. Diggers, excavators, bonfires and crumbling walls felt overwhelming at times, so I created a small cutting garden (now part of The Pickery) and grew a few sweet peas with other annuals on the site of some demolished greenhouses.

At the same time, I was researching the history of this 465-year-old garden and discovered that sweet peas had been grown here after the Second World War for the flower markets of Nottingham. They had been thriving in the Edwardian garden when the future President Franklin D. Roosevelt had visited and described what he saw as: ‘A dream of Nirvana… almost too good to be true.’

It was a promising start, so, after improving the soil (crucial to the success of good sweet peas) we grew our first round of autumn-sown sweet peas and found that they flowered a little earlier and with bigger flowers than their spring-sown siblings. For young plants sown in mid October, our first flowers appeared at the beginning of June. Nevertheless, it was a full month before they looked bushy enough to advertise our annual Sweet Pea Season. They were grown under unheated glass or in a cold frame before being planted out in the spring as the first weeds germinated in the garden. This has set the scene for the next 20 years of sweet-pea growing.

Our aim is to show amateur gardeners how to get the best crop from their plants. Cut-flower growers and exhibitors will want to get their sweet peas into flower much earlier in the year, usually in polytunnels. Varieties of early or even winter-flowering ones are preferable and there has been a lot of interest in using these commercial varieties in the garden. For expert advice, I turned to Phil Johnson of English Sweet Peas in Maldon, Essex, who now holds the National Collection.

Mr Johnson, who bought the seed stock from Roger Parsons in April this year, together with the National Collection, is still in touch with the great man of sweet peas through his daughter Fran Armitage, who works alongside him. This year, the team exhibited at Chelsea for the first time and was awarded a Gold medal and some invaluable publicity for the flowers. The collection includes about 1,400 varieties and is growing every year as both Mr Parsons, in his retirement, and Mr Johnson are keen sweet-pea breeders.

Fortunately, we agreed on all the main essentials of autumn-sown sweet peas (don’t bring indoors after germination, remember they are hardy, not half-hardy and treat them mean to keep them keen). What this translates to is that it is all about growing roots over winter, not top growth. To achieve this, you will need to keep them cool, once the germination has taken place. Young sweet peas will tolerate freezing temperatures. We are in a cold valley, so we put horticultural fleece over our plants if the temperatures fall below -5˚C, but otherwise they tough it out in a sheltered spot.

For the earliest of sweet peas, grow the Winter Sunshine or Solstice range in an unheated glasshouse or polytunnel and you will see blooms on the plants by the first half of April. For amateur growers, Mr Johnson suggested sowing three or four 15-litre tubs undercover in October. Spencer varieties will flower by the end of May outside, but, as they need 12 hours of daylight to flower, you won’t gain much of an advantage by keeping them undercover. Outside, try the old-fashioned or grandiflora varieties, such as ‘Captain of the Blues’ or ‘Black Knight’: they flower a little earlier than their Spencer cousins. For outdoor pots, I like ‘America’, which is quite short and flowers early.

Easton Walled Gardens, Lincolnshire, offers a range of 40 sweet-pea varieties trialled and grown in the gardens. English Sweet Peas, Essex, offers 250 varieties, all grown on site.

We moved to our Wiltshire cottage two years ago this November and, at the time, the front garden was overgrown with shrubs. However, among them I counted — with glee — 15 mature roses.

Come spring, my joy was dashed because each rose, now flowering, was a different colour. And they didn’t have much scent. It wasn’t the romantic and charming garden I had envisioned. So, I started on a brutal editing process, trying to find some peace and elegance amid the overgrown cottage garden chaos.

Only three of the roses survived the cull: The Lark Ascending, Thomas à Becket and Lichfield Angel (incidentally, all David Austin breeds). All have beautiful, showy flowers, are scented and bloom repeatedly, more than earning their keep. However, I also wanted to add my own into the mix and so began the terribly difficult task of choosing a rose.

I waited until the following autumn and the return of bare root season; the period between November and March when nurseries sell plants — mainly shrubs and trees — that have been grown in open ground rather than in containers. It’s best practice to plant dormant trees, shrubs and roses as bare root specimens because the manner in which they’ve been grown makes them more resilient. Container-grown plants are the pampered younger siblings of this world, protected from harsh weather and molycoddled in compost.

Open ground-grown plants also have much more room in which to develop their roots. In fact, gardeners are increasingly seeking out bare root perennials, too. Aside from the fact that they’re longer lasting, they’re also lighter and arrive with a lot less packaging (say goodbye to vast amounts of plastic that you have to guiltfully dispose of into landfill).

The roots are the first thing you will notice when you buy a bare-root rose because they are not delivered to you in soil or in a pot, but, well, bare… a lightweight plant that is half brown root system and half green canes. A bud union — or graft joint — will be visible. This is the point at which the rose has been grafted onto the root stock which makes it adaptable to different conditions and less prone to disease.

When you’re holding this unassuming and knotty brown thing in your hands, it’s hard to imagine that in six months it could be double the size and covered in clusters of flowers. Give the plant a once over before you do anything with it because healthy roots are imperative to a success.

I went into the process of choosing my roses with a checklist of requirements. I wanted something that would flower more than once a year, and something that would survive full sun exposure and blossom in our lovely, loamy soil (although roses are happy in most conditions except deep shade or anywhere too damp). I walked through the front green space multiple times a day, in different lights, and worked out what I could see from my washing up spot in the kitchen. I also desperately wanted a climber because much to my disappointment (again) the cherry tree I’d stared at for months through winter, patiently waiting for it to blossom, was, in fact, dead. It would, however, make the perfect climbing rose support.

As well as climbers, roses come as ramblers, shrubs, trees and as sprawling ground cover. They can even be planted as hedges — Rosa canina is good for this. The majority of garden roses in production today are hybrid varieties, bred for their scent, colour, growth-rate and flower shape. According to Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, roses are thought to be more than 30 million years old and there are a staggering 30,000 varieties and 300 accepted species. Only about 20 of the latter are the ancestors of all modern cultivated roses. (‘Species’ refers to the plants that occur naturally in the wild; varieties are the descendants of those plants that have been bred and cultivated to have certain characteristics.)

As a garden designer, I am lucky to visit clients with lengthy rose arbours, well established climbers sneaking up the side of houses, roses burgeoning in herbaceous borders and wild roses in blousy meadow settings. Roses can and should be grown for cut flowers — at his home, in Somerset, landscape designer Dan Pearson has Munstead Wood, Gertrude Jekyll, Mortimer Sackler, Jubilee Celebration and Sceptre’d Isle in his cutting garden.

In the end, I chose a strong and bushy climber called Mme. Alfred Carrière. The Madame has dark and glossy green foliage, and loose, creamy petals with just a whisper of pink. It smells sweet and fruity, flowering first in June or July and repeating late into the season. She came from David Austin, which is where I regularly buy roses from for clients. Had I been on the hunt for an older breed of rose, I would’ve looked to family-run and Norfolk-based Trevor White — fellow Country Life-contributer Isabel Bannerman is a customer. Other good companies include Ashridge Nurseries and Peter Beale. When shopping around, the most important thing to do is to look for plants that have been grown in the UK and in peat-free soil.

My rose arrived in November 2024 and I kept it in a cool and dark room until I could plant it. When that time came, I first soaked the roots in a bucket of water for two hours, an essential step that rehydrates everything following an extended period of time above ground and in transit. Next, I dug a large hole, a few inches from the base of my cherry tree in soil that wasn’t too soggy (if it’s recently rained, wait) and loosened everything at the bottom, before adding in compost and then the rose (the bud union should be about two inches below the surface). Finally, I watered it, and then waited, and then watered it again all summer long, and waited, gently coaxing it towards the tree that I hope it will one day envelop.

Next time around, I will be more organised and feed it homemade comfrey tea, though any organic rose food will do. I’m hopeful that, in 2026, Madame will flower for the first time, but roses can take a moment to get going, so I recommend patience.

As regular readers will be aware, I am a huge fan of perennial edibles. So often, their leaves, fruit, flowers, buds or roots are not only as delicious as annuals, but they’re easier to come by, thanks to the plant being typically more resilient to the vagaries of the British climate and its pests and diseases.

That said, flavour is the king: perennial or not, you’ll not find me recommending anything that’s less than a culinary pleasure. Tree leaves, for instance, might best demonstrate where the crucial line between edible and palatable is drawn. I wouldn’t bother with most and although beech and maple are two of the many whose leaves can be eaten — and are pretty good if you catch them young — there are only a few trees I would especially encourage you towards considering for your precious garden space.

Mulberries (Morus) come in red, white and black varieties and, although leaves from all are edible — and never less than very good in my experience — it is the white mulberry (Morus alba) and its hybrids — such as ‘Carmen’ — that are the best. There are small variations in flavour between cultivars, but it is the texture of white varieties that gives them the edge.

Mulberries come into leaf later than most trees, famously giving the gardener the nod that the frosts are probably over, so expect to pick leaves from late May until the first few frosts cause the leaves to drop. I’ve long nibbled the occasional leaf when in the garden, but, having discovered that the leaves can be used as you might vine leaves — as wraps for dolmades and other kitchen delights — I’ve harvested many more through the season: they are now as common in my kitchen as is chard in the summer months.

A few years ago, I planted a toon (Toona sinensis) in the garden and was slightly bemused by the way its leaves evolved — in a reversal of the behaviour you’d expect in an ailing plant — from a lively salmon-pink colour in spring, turning cream-yellow before becoming a bold green for summer. The flavour of the leaves is a particular one of vegetable stock, including the classic garlic and onion combination, and, as well as being superb cooked, the young leaves are excellent punctuators in a leafy salad. You can also dry them to use as stock powder, which is apparently very good, but I have yet to try it. Add them to your harvests and be in the company of many cultures — including that of China — where they are widely eaten.

Other than the time — my mother reminds me — that I ate a few beech leaves as a six year old, the first tree leaves I tried were from the row of small-leaved limes (Tilia cordata) that I planted at the smallholding where I used to live. Sweet, succulent and nutty, they were easy to like and have had me going back for more every spring. All lime leaves are edible and similar in flavour, but it is the youngest leaves of the small-leaved lime that have the giving texture that makes them so appealing. I use most of those I harvest for mixed-leaf salads, as their presence next to other leaves really shows them at the best.

I grow these three in my garden and use only small quantities, harvested repeatedly through the season, so I am not depleting the trees as they grow, but I am considering coppicing or pollarding a white mulberry and a toon at about 3ft high to provide a more substantial harvest of young leaves each year; both are vigorous growers and can perfectly well stand this annual treatment. Happily, there are plenty of lime trees in my town — and likely near where you live — to be able to turn to a little foraging if your garden isn’t suitable for a tree, as they are typically large when mature.

As well as the pleasure of the trees and their delicious leaves — and fruit in the case of the mulberry — it is worth mentioning that many tree leaves are highly nutritious. Typically rich in vitamins and important trace elements such as calcium, zinc, vitamin C and iron, some — notably mulberries — are especially high in protein, being more protein-rich even than spinach.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon. His book, 'Abundance: eating and living with the seasons' is out now (Quadrille, £30).

This interview is part of a series on David Beckham's countryside champions, as featured in the October 22, 2025 edition of Country Life. Read part 1 with stockman Trevor Kirk, part 2 with milliner Barnaby Horn, part 3 with gardener Poppy Okotcha and part 4 with Ramandeep Nijjar, a young naturalist.

My family wore wool at a time when everyone else had cast it off in favour of manmade fabrics. My father, John, who died when I was 15, adored the great outdoors and could often be found, with golden retriever Oscar in tow, striding across the flat expanse of sand near our Formby home sporting either a navy V neck or a crew neck as a shield against the bitter winds. My mum, Moira, had a navy jumper, too, and I suppose the look, feel, colour and smell of these old favourites worked their way into my subconscious until the time was right for me to launch my knitwear brand Navygrey.

Before that, I studied History at the University of Oxford, made historical documentaries for television and ran education and social mobility-linked businesses, but, all the time, Navygrey was brewing and I launched it in 2019. The name seemed right. It encompassed the palette of our wardrobes from long ago and the colours of the sky and the coastline where I grew up.

Our 50 styles of jumper are produced mainly in Britain by four knitters and one weaver, who are exceptional at their craft. We use British wool in many of our creations; and, regardless of the different shapes we make, all of our jumpers are built on feeling — the feeling that this is a garment you want to come home to wear, to feel its warmth and its comfort. Our bestsellers are The Relaxed, our first jumper based on my mum’s old lambswool round neck, and The Cardigan, a re-creation of the beige one my grandfather constantly wore in his later years.

Sir David is making craft cool again and he’s also bringing a joyfulness to it. Equally, by working with BOSS and being pictured in the company’s Merino crew-neck and roll-neck jumpers, he’s showing his support for wool, as we’re proud to do, too.

As our jumpers find favour with our customers, I’m still based in a tiny terrace house in south-west London despite longing to live in the countryside. A move will eventually be on the cards and, when I get there, I’ll ensure that my wardrobes are full of classic knits, as my parents’ once were.

Visit the Navygrey website for more information.

This feature originally appeared in the October 22, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You might think it unlikely, but making a garden for someone is thrilling. A telephone call out of the blue, a drive to some distant part of the country, knocking on the door of a strange house and meeting not only a new person, but a new garden. That first meeting bursts with potential — the views, the house, the trees, the flaws, the treasures and also the people. It is a bit like a blind date. We circle around each other, me trying to work out what the site needs and the client wants. How much gardening do they want to do? Will they employ help or do it all themselves? Kitchen garden? Ponds? Orchards? How much do they want to spend?

There follows a flurry of sketching, specifying and tweaking. Landscapers are summoned, prices are gathered, materials are ordered and plants are sourced. The client, the designer, the landscapers and the nurseries are all closely involved in the intricate dance of garden creation. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Scottish country dancing, but it is often like a particularly frantic Orcadian Strip the Willow: relentlessly energetic with a lot of aggressive twirling.

For a few brief months, we are all together working all hours, meeting, exchanging lots of urgent messages and wading around in mud and chaos. Something changes every day: a path is completed, a pond filled, a delivery arrives or a tree is planted. Then, one day, the job is finished. The client is happy, the paving is laid, the gravel raked and every tree, perennial and bulb is safely planted. A hush descends on proceedings and all one can hear is the sound of plants growing and the minutes passing.

Now starts the important bit: no garden can look after itself. We have all seen neglected gardens and they are sad places. There is some thought that gardens left alone will become a wild, romantic spot populated by Nature where every creature lives in perfect harmony — a bit like the scene in Snow White where she is cleaning the house of the seven dwarfs, assisted by cutesy bunnies and simpering squirrels.

It is not as picturesque as that: with remarkable swiftness, Nature will reclaim what is hers and it will no longer be the garden that we built. Instead, it will become a feral thing where the thuggier plants clog dance upon the countenances of the more delicate and all pattern and intention are lost. Somebody — the client or, if funds allow, a professional gardener — needs to take on the responsibility of caring for this new, vulnerable thing or it will vanish. It might seem obvious, but without gardeners, we have no gardens. I have built hundreds over the past 40 years and the hardest thing has always been finding people to look after them.

We do not have enough sensitive and skilled gardeners. This is not a revolutionary statement, as many people have been chuntering about it for years. Horticultural courses have collapsed and schools careers officers do not see the advantages of a life in horticulture. Gardening is still not considered a worthwhile career. Perhaps it is not seen to be exclusive enough. If you need a surgeon or an astrophysicist (or even a plumber or a car mechanic), you will be happy to pay top dollar because you know that they can do something you cannot. With gardeners, people can’t see the skill level. They think gardening is a hobby anyone can do, so it can’t be that hard: ergo, it should be cheap.

This is wrong. The professional gardener can do many things you cannot. A gardener will have studied hard (often in filthy weather). They will have an exhaustive knowledge of not only the habits of fruit, vegetables and flowers, but also a good handle on paving, brickwork, fencing, plumbing, electrics and diplomacy. They will be able to feed you and your family, impress your visitors, provide amusement for your children and shade for summer. They will grow things from seed and cutting, keep your plants alive, your soil healthy and create an environment that will allow birds to adorn your shrubberies and ensure your borders are alive with bees, butterflies and earthworms. Any wise designer will listen to what they have to say and be guided by their knowledge. Good gardeners will improve any design over time.

Design is important — there are hugely talented and exciting designers out there, from the old guard to the young and upcoming — but, no matter how innovative or clever our designs may be, they are only as good as the gardeners who take care of them. Pay your gardeners properly, as, without them, you will have no garden.

This interview is part of a series on David Beckham's countryside champions, as featured in the October 22, 2025 edition of Country Life. Read part 1 with stockman Trevor Kirk, part 2 with milliner Barnaby Horn and part 3 with gardener Poppy Okotcha..

'As a child, I loved to escape the confines of Walsall, where I lived with my family. The Girl Guides, which I joined at five, helped to feed my passion for the great outdoors, as did my parents, who would take me walking, camping and to a raft of National Trust properties.

'At the age of 18, I headed to the University of Reading to study zoology and, in my spare time, I became involved with a number of organisations with countryside links. The countryside brings me happiness and peace, but I’ve long been concerned by the climate crisis and I deal with it by taking action and trying to inspire others to get involved, too. For example, I’m a spokesperson and organiser for UK Youth 4 Nature and, having been a birdwatcher since I was very young, I’m a youth representative for the British Trust for Ornithology for Birmingham/Berkshire.

'I’m also a trustee of the Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust, as well as being an organiser of Generation Nature, a youth-led podcast that encourages people to speak out and share their own stories of Nature, and I was one of the 200 young people who helped to make the 20-minute film Our Beautiful Wild, a Young Voices for Nature project. All these roles stemmed from my time at university, when I co-founded the Hedgehog Society.

'As a result of all my projects, but, unbeknown to me, I was nominated by the university’s Sara Lovejoy for the 2024 Countryfile Young Countryside Champion, which I won. It was a surprise and an honour during a year that also included my placement at Global Rewilding Alliance, a catalyst organisation that brings rewilders together. My experience as an intern there has been truly life-changing. Seeing the work that people are doing all around the world to rewild and protect the planet has given me hope for the future.

'My final year at the University of Reading has just begun and I’m planning to write my dissertation on rewilding. What the future will hold after I graduate I’m not sure, but I know that I will always want to help others connect to the natural world.'

Interview by Julie Harding. SEe more aout Ramandeep's work at the globalrewilding.earth website.

This feature originally appeared in the October 22, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

This interview is part of a series on David Beckham's countryside champions, as featured in the October 22, 2025 edition of Country Life. Read part 1 with stockman Trevor Kirk and part 2 with milliner Barnaby Horn.

'The countryside means home to me. I find peace and inspiration in it. When I was a teenager, my father — who grew up in rural Nigeria — pointed out the problems with mono-culture and industrial farming. He shattered the idyll for me, whereas my mother, a keen gardener, helped me to see the beautiful ways it could be managed.

'In 2019, my partner and I moved to Devon, where he grew up. I have been made to feel exceptionally welcome, but people can be curious and will ask how it is to be mixed race and living rurally. They wonder how it came to be my home. However, through social media, I am able to demonstrate that you can be non-white and living in the countryside and still feel safe and happy.

'Following our move — and by then having trained in ecological horticulture — I co-ran the Grow&Share Collective community garden. People come to learn how to grow organic food and to connect with one another. The countryside can be a very lonely place. I experienced loneliness during my seven-year modelling career before I moved there. I was lucky to tread the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood and Chloé in Paris and work with brilliant creatives, but, when travelling from metropolis to metropolis and being photographed in windowless studios flooded by artificial light, I felt adrift and disconnected from the natural world.

'At 25, I wanted change, hence swapping a canal boat in London for the West Country. Once I’d moved here, I began work on my own overgrown 98ft by 19ft garden, which I partly tamed before planting with vegetables, herbs and perennials.

'I wrote my first book, A Wilder Way: How Gardens Grow Us, there, too. In it, I explore gardening for mental, physical and societal health, from a practical ‘how to’ approach. It also examines our connection with land, food and one another in a time marked by climate change and biodiversity loss.

'I was once photographed by Brooklyn Beckham on a modelling job, but I have never met Sir David. However, I really respect his journey from high-profile footballer to someone who now proudly tends to his vegetable garden. He’s a man with a following that may not have seen gardening or connecting with the land as cool or worthwhile, so he is helping to rebrand all of that in such an important way.'

This feature originally appeared in the October 22, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Early in 2025, Harper Beckham wanted to give a special present to her father to celebrate his 50th birthday. Fourteen-year-old Harper had no hesitation: nothing could be better than a beautiful, white, scented rose, bred by the great David Austin. The new, hitherto unnamed variety was chosen and 10 large flowerpots containing bushes in full bloom were delivered in time for David Beckham’s birthday celebrations on May 2. We do not know exactly how the choice was made, but sports editors point out that white is the colour of the English football shirt.

Every new rose that comes from a well-known breeder such as David Austin has its own story, which begins with the process of choosing its parents. This is a job for cold winter days, when little else can be done in a rose nursery. It is by studying the ancestry of existing roses, and their own performance as parents, that the creation of a new rose is planned. Each parent will have several characteristics, which, it is hoped, will combine to produce offspring that represent an improvement on both of them.

In spring, when the first roses flower in the glasshouses at David Austin Roses, the chosen parents must be prepared for hybridisation. Almost all roses can be used as the pollen- or seed-bearing parent, but nothing is left to chance. The nursery keeps substantial stocks of pollen from the roses that will be used for pollination, so it is available to their expert breeders throughout the season. The seed-bearing parent, however, is a flower borne on a living rosebush that is brought into the glasshouse in readiness for hybridisation.

A bud is chosen, just before it opens out, and its petals and the pollen-bearing stamens are cut off, to avoid any chance of self-pollination. This leaves only the stigma showing — the female part of the flower, the task of which is to accept the pollen of the other chosen parent. In the wild, this is accomplished naturally by insect visitors such as bees, but, under the controlled conditions of deliberate plant-breeding, the pollen of the chosen male parent is applied on the end of a very fine paintbrush. The pollen will travel down the stigma to fertilise the seeds in the ovary. The little green hip — known to botanists as the receptacle — will then swell up over several months as seeds begin to develop inside it.

By early autumn, the rose hip is ripe — large, round, orange in colour and full of hard little seeds. Those seeds are prised out of the hip and stored for at least two months in cool, damp conditions. This is known as stratification, imitating the effect of cold weather to break the built-in dormancy of rose seeds — their natural inability to germinate until conditions are propitious. In late winter, the seeds are sown in trays of compost in a warm glasshouse and, after germinating, the seedlings are pricked out in well-prepared beds, also safely under glass.

The new plants grow quickly, so many will produce their first flowers early in May. This marks the start of the long period of observation that will see all but a handful of the seedlings discarded because they represent no advance on the qualities displayed by existing rose varieties. ‘Each rose starts as a hope,’ enthuses David Austin Jnr. ‘Being part of its journey is always an honour.’

The story of how a variety is created applies to the new rose that will be launched in 2026 at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, bearing the name Sir David Beckham (Ausa34b16). Its origin dates back to spring 2012, when David Austin Roses made the cross that gave birth to the original seedling, no more than 6in high, from which all the many thousands of plants of Sir David Beckham have successively been propagated. Think back to that time — Harper was a baby, less than one year old, and her father was playing an important role in the organisation and launch of the 2012 London Olympics, when British athletes won more medals than in any Games since 1908.

Back then, Austin Snr was in his mid eighties, with more than 50 years’ experience of planning the genealogies of his new roses. The exact parentage of the Beckham rose will remain a trade secret for some years yet, but we can assume it includes at least one well-established Austin rose, to be certain of passing on the distinctive qualities for which the propagator’s English roses are famous, such as shapely blooms and strong scent. We have also been told that its more distant ancestors include a number of exceptional varieties, such as Heritage (Ausblush, introduced in 1984) and Leander (Auslea, dating to 1982), stretching right back to the famous Constance Spry (Ausfirst) rose, first introduced in 1960, which has proved a rich source of shapely, scented beauties for more than 60 years.

As soon as the future Sir David Beckham flowered for the first time, its promise was recognised by Mr Austin and his colleagues. The buds on its little stem were taken for propagation, to see how well the resultant plants performed in years of testing. The criteria that it needed to satisfy included health, shape, scent, vigour and frequency of flowering.

At this stage, in 2012, it was not the only seedling that showed promise. In most years, the team of eight or 10 hybridising experts at David Austin Roses can expect to raise about 350,000 seeds, but only about 150,000 will germinate and grow away with confidence, even in the ideal conditions of the one acre of glasshouses.

From that 150,000, some 5,000 will be marked as worth progressing to the next stage, when they are propagated and monitored for their performance as superior garden roses. Two years’ later, their number will be reduced to about 150 hopefuls, then to perhaps 30 and, finally, to a mere handful from which only the best will be considered worthy of commercial introduction.

The whole process requires 10 to 12 years of continual assessment, whereby the duds are weeded out and the ‘possibles’ are bulked up — propagating large numbers — so that thousands of mature plants are ready for sale to back up the launch. David Austin Roses has nearly 70 acres of land dedicated to these trials, where each year’s crop of hopeful new seedling roses is assessed through to the moment when it is clear which of them, perhaps only one or two of the original 150,000, will definitely be worth taking to market.

The crucial activity throughout these long years of trialling is the process of whittling down the selection. Teams of experts inspect the roses continually, noting when they flower, how generous they are in producing blooms, what sort of shape and vigour the plants and their flowers exhibit, whether they are susceptible to disease (which triggers an instant death sentence) and how they stand up to rain, frost, drought, wind and heat. They also consider their potential as parents in future hybridising programmes, comparing each individual plant with its parents and noting the family traits that seem to be dominant.

This is the journey from which Sir David Beckham has emerged triumphant. The rose has been assessed for the quality of its flowers, its speed of re-flowering, the shape of the bush and, above all, its freedom from disease — good health is the supreme requirement in all new roses nowadays. It is the only new rose that David Austin Roses will launch at next year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show and money from the sale of each plant will go towards The King’s Foundation.

What does it look like? It makes a shapely bush, rounded, but upright, some 3ft or 4ft in height, if not pruned too hard — gentle, shapely pruning is a rule of good cultivation that Austin always championed. It carries great quantities of medium-size, white, semi-double flowers, with a sweet, musky scent. They open out wide from palest apricot buds and have a pretty display of yellow stamens at their centre.

The flowers are borne in a long-lasting cluster of 15–20, but those clusters may be larger when it flowers for the second time in autumn. Pollinators love them. These flowers have an important characteristic that many people do not appreciate — they shed their petals when they start to fade, so they never remain on the bush to turn brown or mushy. The flowers are set off by dark-green leaves and held on a bush that is easy to cultivate.

Connoisseurs say that its dark leaves and the shape of its flowers remind them of Desdemona (Auskindling), another of David Austin’s English Roses, dating back to 2015, but Sir David Beckham has more flowers in its clusters. It can also be distinguished by its more sturdy, upright growth and the way its flowers eventually reflex to reveal the stamens. We know that it has the famous Floribunda — properly a Hybrid Musk — called Iceberg in its ancestry, because this super-floriferous white rose was one of the grandparents of Heritage, back in the 1980s.

Miss Beckham’s rose will prove a popular garden plant, combining the ‘David Austin shape’ with highly prized white colouring. Good white roses are not easy to breed — the colour is genetically recessive to pink, yellow and red — so, for many years, the best white English roses were sports of existing pink ones. Winchester Cathedral (Auscat), for example, was introduced in 1988 as a mutation of the popular pink rose Mary Rose (Ausmary, 1983) and, despite being unstable — it frequently reverts to pink — it has only recently been retired from the list of roses that David Austin Roses offers. The future of white roses, currently so fashionable, now seems assured by the introduction of Sir David Beckham alongside Desdemona.

Although its namesake is widely known, there yet may be rose-lovers all over the world who do not recognise him and will plant Sir David Beckham in their gardens for its sheer beauty and ease of cultivation. Rose gardens, especially those that include heritage roses, are full of varieties that commemorate worthy individuals famous at the time of their introduction. The best-known crimson rose, from the 19th century, is called Général Jacqueminot — but who was he? Most of us have forgotten. The same may even be true one day of Sir David Beckham — ‘who was he?’ is the question people may ask in 200 years’ time. They will know and love the rose that bears his name, but his renown today may have faded. Even his daughter’s part in the story may be forgotten — how she wanted a truly special rose to commemorate his 50th birthday.

This feature originally appeared in the October 22, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Anyone can create a pretty garden, full of flowers and colour, in spring and summer. It’s much more difficult to make a really satisfying display in autumn and winter, but the best of all gardens are those that are wonderful all through the year. You have to be a truly knowledgeable plantsman to create a thing of beauty that never ceases to bring delight — not only to yourself, but to critical visitors at every season. That is precisely what John Massey, VMH, nurseryman, plant breeder and multiple Chelsea Gold medallist has achieved in his own garden, next to his famous Ashwood Nurseries near Kidderminster in Worcestershire. ‘John’s Garden’ is one of the finest private gardens in the UK and, many would say, the best maintained.

Mr Massey’s parents hoped he would train to become a doctor, but, from an early age, plants were his great and only love. His father, a civil engineer, bought Ashwood Nursery in 1967 and Mr Massey started work there the very day after he left school. The business grew steadily and, in 1986, he was able to buy a small house next to the nursery that came with 10 acres of extra land. However, he did not begin to plant a garden there until 1998. It is incredible now to look at some of the enormous trees and realise that they have all been planted since that date. His inspiration came from two famous gardeners who had become friends of his — charismatic Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter in East Sussex and the formidable Princess Greta Sturdza of Le Vasterival in Normandy, France. Both were energetic and knowledgeable plant-lovers, and both were blessed with artistic sensibilities. Their influence is visible everywhere in John’s Garden today.

The soil here is a sandy loam, free draining, but also requiring irrigation in dry weather. Its pH is about six, which means that almost all plants grow well and happily. The main garden is long and narrow, but designed to give an impression of much greater space than its 2½ acres would suggest. Space management is all too often ignored by garden makers, but not in this plantsman’s paradise, where plants are displayed in borders large and small, within a fluid modern design. There is always so much to see in plantsmen’s gardens that, sometimes, they are nerdy and boring, but John’s Garden is bowl-me-over exciting because of the way he positions, cultivates and trains plants to create his artistic effects. There is no pause — not only does he walk through his garden every day of the year, but he also insists that it is possible to have something in flower on every one of those 365 days. What’s more, he insists that every bed or feature within the garden should stop you in your tracks.

Every detail in John’s Garden has been planned and brought to perfection. Large ornamental pots, planters and troughs are everywhere, bursting with plants of good colour and shape, together with architectural urns, seats, sculptures and ornaments. A large ceramic tub near the house is always filled with floating flowers. The nearby ruin garden is pure theatre, replanted twice a year. A selection of plants in pots, up to 25 or even 30 of them, is arranged and re-arranged in an ever-changing display that is reviewed and revised at least once a week. Mr Massey also knows how to intensify the garden by limbing up trees to lift their canopy. This draws the eye to their trunks, creates long views and frees up space for new plantings in new habitats.

The birds do well in John’s Garden. Along one side of the drive, in what might be called the front garden, is a fine collection of rowans, including berry-rich Sorbus pseudohupehensis ‘Pink Pagoda’, dark pink S. pseudovilmorinii ‘Eastern Promise’ and a rare, fastigiate cultivar with scarlet berries called S. Autumn Spire, closely related to our native mountain ash. Here, too, is a selection of crab apples: the best display, says Mr Massey, comes from Malus ‘Comtesse de Paris’, which has yellow fruits, although ‘Indian Summer’ lasts longer, well into the new year. The first winter waxwings do not starve.

Praise is often lavished on old box hedges that are clipped to imitate a cloud formation. Mr Massey shows us how to create this effect on the other side of the drive, by planting a line or two of holly plants on short stems of varying height, and pruning each into a neat lollipop. As they continue to grow and fill out, the individual spheres merge to create the appearance of evergreen cumulus clouds. The berries brighten the surface for many months through autumn and into winter.

Mr Massey’s sense of theatre extends to the leaf-colour of trees in autumn and, as a nursery-man, he knows which are the best cultivars to use. Acer rubrum ‘October Glory’ is spectacular, especially when contrasted with white-trunked birches — the form of Betula utilis subsp. jacquemontii known as ‘Doorenbos’. Named varieties of Liquidambar styraciflua, such as ‘Lane Roberts’ and ‘Worplesdon’, give a rich red display over many weeks. Some autumn colour effects are standalone, drop-dead statements of beauty that need no foil from other plantings. The autumn foliage of the ginkgo trees turns to uniform yellow — a rich pure colour untinged by other tints or shades; the sun seems to glow from every leaf. A fastigiate cultivar called ‘Blagon’ stands close to a ‘witch’s broom’ form of Metasequoia glyptostroboides named ‘Schirrmann’s Nordlicht’. Tall shrubs, including Rhus typhina Tiger Eyes, give a brilliant display of reds and oranges in October, shortly followed by another new cultivar, Radiance.

Autumn leaf-colour is everywhere among the garden’s deciduous shrubs. Cornus sericea ‘Hedgerows Gold’ adds red tints to its yellow variegation and C. alba Baton Rouge and ‘Kesselringii’, grown principally for their winter stems, also turn into wonderful hues. Autumn leaves and seeds are contrasted in the deciduous spindle bushes — heavy-fruiting Euonymus planipes ‘Sancho’ is joined by E. alatus f. ciliatodentatus, the leaves of which turn bright pink, as short-growing E. alatus ‘Compactus’ — so seldom seen in gardens — packs a tussle of scarlet leaves and orange seeds.

Many are the rare and curious plants that visiting plantsmen want to acquire. Berberis sieboldii is a small shrub with reliable autumn colour that few have ever seen before — and the same is true of the rare witch-hazel Hamamelis ‘Yamima’, probably a cross between a H. vernalis hybrid and H. intermedia. Other rare plants include a sweet-scented form of Hydrangea petiolaris found by Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones on Yakushima island in Japan and Aesculus hippocastanum ‘Monstrosa’, the ‘monstrous horse chestnut’, which is no more than 6ft high with curious, fasciated branches.

Underrated plants are only one joy of this extraordinary garden. You could walk round it every day, as Mr Massey does, and always notice something new. All is maintained by his ‘dream team’ of two full-time and three part-time gardeners, whose knowledge has been greatly enriched by working in John’s Garden.

John’s Garden and Ashwood Nursery, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, are both now part of a charitable foundation set up by John Massey. The nursery is open daily, and the garden every Saturday throughout the year, except in January.

You need a hedge for your country garden? Very sensible. Fences might mark your boundary with clarity and offer privacy, should they be solid, but that means they will offer a huge amount of wind resistance. The wind always wins and it also causes turbulence on the leeward side of an impenetrable fence. In the countryside, interwoven fencing is simply too stark and suburban in appearance, whatever colour you paint or stain it.

A hedge, on the other hand, will fit more sympathetically into the landscape. It will filter the wind rather than attempting, unsuccessfully, to stop it in its tracks, thus making for more propitious growing conditions for the plants within the land that it protects. It will offer sustenance and shelter to all kinds of wild-life, from birds and hedgehogs to a multitude of insects, which, we are told, make up 90% of the creatures that share our planet. Hedges are easy on the eye. Yes, if formal, they require clipping once or twice a year, but this encourages them to thicken up and become more dense — not only enhancing the shelter they will provide, but also reducing traffic noise.

That’s sorted then. A hedge, rather than a fence. Now, what plant species will you choose? Privet? Laurel? Yew or, heaven forbid, rampant Leyland cypress? They all have their place — even Leyland cypress when regularly clipped, although it is a martyr to that browning fungus phytophthora.

By far the best hedge for a country garden, surrounding wild areas and meadows, bordering paddocks or woodland, is one made up of British native species chosen for their rapid growth and their ability to withstand the harshest of weather, be it wind, rain, frost or snow.

These are shrubs and small trees that will offer a relaxed kind of beauty, as well as food and shelter in abundance for all forms of wildlife. Their berries will keep the birds sustained in autumn and winter, the crevices in their bark will shelter overwintering insects, the leaves of some species are useful food plants for certain butterflies and, in the leaf litter at their base, the increasingly rare hedgehog will be able to snuggle down for the winter.

Fifteen years ago, when we bought a couple of acres of the neighbouring farmer’s field to create a wildflower meadow, we planted a mixed country hedge that has offered us every bit as much pleasure as the meadow itself. Bright-green shoots and blossom in spring, a verdant backdrop in summer and glorious autumn colour before the leaves of the deciduous species fall.

The hedge is made up of field maple (Acer campestre) with its fingered leaves and winged stems, and dog rose (Rosa canina), with single pink flowers with a central coronet of golden stamens that decorate its thorny stems in a glorious welter of floral confetti. The sweet briar (Rosa rubiginosa) accompanies it with blooms of a deeper hue and foliage that, when crushed, smells of apples. Both produce bright hips as a second course.

The spindle tree (Euonymus europaeus) bears orange fruits surrounded by shocking pink cases — pure Zandra Rhodes — whereas the wayfaring tree (Viburnum lantana) and dogwood (Cornus alba) are real stalwarts, together with hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna). The May tree’s cataracts of creamy blossom signal the true arrival of spring and give us the nod that it’s time to cast a clout — you can now remove your winter vest. The haws are eagerly devoured by overwintering redwings and fieldfares, as well as thrushes and blackbirds.

Ivy (Hedera helix) will begin to climb the hedge and offer a summer egg-laying site to the holly blue butterfly, having laid its spring brood on holly. (I’ve always felt that to be such a neat Christmassy partnership — that the leaves of ivy will feed the caterpillars of the holly blue.) The holly (Ilex aquifolium) is there, too, offering evergreen leaves and winter berries for the birds. Sloes from the blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) are our own reward for including it in the mix and the early blossom — pure white and the size of your middle fingernail — has the appearance of snowy froth in March and April, beating the hawthorn off the starting blocks.

Plant your native hedge in a staggered double row in autumn as bare root plants in well-prepared and well-nourished soil. Our 15-year-old hedge is 10ft tall and 6ft deep — snipped back at the sides, but allowed to do its own thing up top. We love it and so do all the creatures with whom we share our garden.

Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them by Alan Titchmarsh (Ebury, £35) is out now

This feature originally appeared in the October 15, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sometimes, it is difficult to remember how we functioned before the internet took over the way we garden. Google the name of a plant today and, 10 seconds later, you know how to grow it and where to buy it. If you do not know its name? Google a picture and up comes its name in both Latin and English. Life for gardeners today is much easier than it used to be.

I was interested in gardening from a very early age. My pocket money was spent on seeds from Woolworths and the cash that decent uncles sent me for my birthday was splurged on tulip and daffodil bulbs. My parents and grandparents were shrub-gardeners — we had herbaceous borders, an orchard and a kitchen garden from which the gardeners seldom emerged — but ornamental trees and shrubs furnished the five-acre woodland garden where we tended to walk.

By the time I went to prep school, I knew the names of perhaps 100 magnolias, rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias. When I acquired my own first house — a modest three-bedroom cottage with no more than one acre of greensand — I naturally turned to trees and shrubs to furnish the garden.

Garden centres were few and their stock was limited. We looked to traditional nurseries for interesting plants, which meant writing off for their lists and enclosing stamps to cover the postage. Postal orders were required if the nursery catalogue was not merely a list of names and prices, but a source of information, with detailed descriptions, perhaps even photographs, of what it offered. That was how we built up our knowledge; we read the catalogues carefully and sent off orders for plants that were delivered for planting the following autumn.

There were books, of course, and one of the best for shrub-gardeners was a fat, green paper-back called Hilliers’ Manual of Trees & Shrubs. Members of the International Dendrology Society (IDS) carried it everywhere on the society’s excellent tours. Some still do. For keen collectors of trees and shrubs, however, there was nothing to compare with the wisdom and experience expounded in ‘Bean’, a massive masterpiece compiled by William Jackson Bean, curator of Kew, and first published in 1914 as Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles. The eighth and last edition of ‘Bean’ was published in four volumes from 1970 onwards.

There were such long publication gaps between the individual volumes that the first was given to me by my grandmother, the second by my father, the third by my wife and the fourth by my children. All four volumes are heavily annotated with my own marginalia and comments on what I have seen over the decades.

Bean’s masterpiece is exactly the sort of publication that the internet has rendered redundant. However, the wisdom built up by generations of editors over the past 100 years has now been preserved by the IDS, which has acquired the copyright and put the entire work online.

What’s more, the society has embarked on the task of updating every description and adding thousands of new entries for plants that have emerged since the 1970s. This is inevitably slow work and expensive, too, but the solution has been to ask keen and knowledgeable plantsmen to sponsor a genus or a group of plants and then to employ top-notch botanists and horticulturists to pull together all the available research, knowledge and expertise, old and new.

The ebullient editor-in-chief is John Grimshaw, a botanist and horticulturist who combines his work on Trees and Shrubs Online with editing Curtis’s Botanical Magazine for Kew. His deputy, Tom Christian, has travelled the world in pursuit of trees and shrubs and is a long-term guarantee of the continued excellence of the IDS’s work. Updates of nearly 200 genera have already been completed, from Abelia, Abies and Acer through to Zelkova, Zenobia and Ziziphus.

Earlier this year, the IDS uploaded a major revision of Bean’s entry on hydrangeas. Everyone knows about hydrangeas and many of us have grown them in our gardens, but much has happened since the last printed edition of Bean, which devoted no more than 20 pages to this ‘small genus’ in 1983.

The IDS is adamant that its new account of Hydrangea is the most important ever. The PR blurb says — correctly — that it describes ‘73 species, nine lower taxa and over 570 of the most important cultivars, all illustrated by over 1,300 images’. Yet that is an understatement. Have a look and then reflect that the intention is to treat every tree and shrub that is hardy in the British Isles in the same degree of detail. There is nothing to match it on the whole world wide web. And it’s free.

Charles Quest-Ritson’s book The Olive Tree (Ediciones El Viso, £50) is out now

This article first appeared in the October 8 edition of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

Of all the plants generous to Mankind, verbascum is surely one of the foremost. Many of its folkloric names reveal its sundry practical uses throughout the ages; others have a Biblical whiff or are simply bewildering, their basis lost in time. For medieval women who sought to bring colour to their cheeks, verbascum was known as Quaker’s rouge, a rub of its hairy leaves on delicate skin producing the desired flush. Medieval religion dubbed it Adam’s flannel and Moses’s blanket and its tall stalk was Adam’s or Aaron’s rod. Meanwhile, rural folk spoke of hare’s beard, velvet dock, feltwort, shepherd’s club and beggar’s blanket.

The dried stalks were the basis of torches from Roman times and, before cotton came into use, they served as the core for tallow candles, adding hag candlewick, hag’s taper and torch-wort to its folkloric nomenclature. In the American West, to which this plant (native to Europe and the Middle East) was introduced early in the 18th century, those same leaves were known as cowboys’ loo paper. Gardeners, however, simply know it as verbascum or as common, great or greater mullein, from the Anglo-French term for ‘soft’.

More important, however, were the medicinal properties of the plant. Classical-era herbalists Pliny the Elder, Galen and Dioscorides — ‘the father of pharmacognosy’ — identified it as treatment for sundry complaints and their wisdom was acknowledged by John Gerard in his Herball of 1597. Its leaves had ‘a digesting and cleansing quality’, he declared. Boiled and laid on ‘large swellings and inflammations of the eyes’ to cure and ease pain, they were ‘good for them that are broken inwardly’ and would treat ‘the old cough’.

Similarly, treacle dribbled on verbascum leaves or combined in an ointment with ‘old hog’s grease’ cured haemorrhoids, whereas placing its leaves in shoes or inside socks day and night ‘brought down in young maidens their desired sickness’. Fumes from burned leaves breathed in twice a day eased lung congestion and Gerard noted that Kent husbandmen gave leaves to cattle to combat cough, for which quality they were known as bullock’s lungwort.

In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper further propounded the virtues of the plant, adding that the root boiled in red wine was ‘profitable for those that are bursten, and for cramps and convulsions’. A gargle eased toothache, too, and a decoction of flowers in distilled water was ‘said to be the most excellent remedy for gout’. Verbascum juice melted rough warts away and leaves and seed that was boiled in wine would ‘draw forth speedily thorns or splinters gotten into the flesh, ease the pains and heal them also’. A similar treatment would dissolve and heal boils in the groin. Clearly, no medieval doctor could ignore this essential curative and its abilities to tackle a spectrum of physical discomforts are sustained by modern herbalists.

Verbascum has some 300 varieties around the world and horticulture has produced a number of cultivars to make statuesque decorative contributions to our borders, but the original and most familiar is V. thapsus, its name derived either from Thapsos, a Sicilian community, or from Thapsus in ancient Tunisia and classified by Linnaeus in 1753.

A generous rosette of broad hairy leaves of silvery hue appears in its first year, with a stout stem an inch thick and up to 6ft in height, clad in small yellow flowers in the second. Groups of blooms open first from the base and then appear progressively up the stem, each bunch displaying at sunrise and closing in the afternoon, the process lasting from June through to August and offering an ongoing attraction especially to bees and hoverflies. If these or other pollinators fail in their duties, the flowers are self-fertilising anyway.

The plant then starts to wither, but its resolution continues in prolonged and prolific seed production. Researchers in California, US (where the plant is an invasive weed), have calculated that each flower produces a capsule with up to 700 seeds, with the total from a single stem approaching a quarter of a million. In the right conditions, one-third may germinate and most fall close to a parent, ensuring ongoing colonisation.

Verbascum tolerates a variety of locations and Gerard wrote that it seeded freely on ‘the borders of pastures and ploughed fields, or causeways and in other untilled places’. He recorded the plant’s appearance ‘in great plenty’ in Eltham in Kent, Blackheath and Highgate in London and in ‘most countries of England that are of sandy soil’. Seeds from two million years ago found in cliffs at West Runton on the Norfolk coast in a geological layer known as the Cromer Forest Bed testify to its historic native distribution in this lucky land.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

I planted my first quince (Cydonia oblonga) a quarter of a century ago and I wouldn’t be without a tree nearby. There is only a handful of fruit trees I’d grow for their non-edible charms and quince is one.

As with medlars, quince grow in a nicely irregular, lightly twisting manner, full of character and individuality. Their blossom comes in spring, usually soon after the last frost; at first, they appear as tall, soft pink-white spirals, before opening out into loose dog rose-alikes. They have a light Chanel-crossed-with-daffodils fragrance that reaches the nose best when the wind and the sniffer are still and the sun is warm; you can plunge your face into the flowers and smell next to nothing, yet be enveloped in a cloud of scent as you walk away.

Fruit appear quickly and require patience in the grower, as they tend to grow little through the warm months, but as autumn nears they make up for it, becoming plumper seemingly by the day. In the sunniest of climates, quince will ripen fully on the tree. Here in the UK, you pick them early as the season is too short, but this brings its own reward. You’ll notice their skin colour shift from green to a little yellower: leave them on the tree as long as possible to develop, but get them indoors before the frosts arrive. When they are ready to pick, quince will part from the tree with a soft twist. Don’t pull: cut free any stubborn fruit using secateurs. Handle quinces with care — as unforgivingly hard as they seem, they bruise easily.

In the warmth of your home, those fruit will ripen over the coming days and weeks, releasing their sweet, spicy perfume as they do. Once in this state, you can expect them to store for a month or two, perhaps longer if transferred to somewhere cool, such as an unheated garage.

Although they are sweetly scented, quince need the company of booze or heat to give their best. It is quite the transformation: the hard, astringent quince becomes pink, sweet and fragrant and even a little added to an apple crumble uplifts it beautifully.

That is not to say they aren’t worthy of enjoying on their own: poached in lightly sweetened white wine or cider, they are extremely good. Famously wonderful for preserves, including jelly, jam and the Spanish paste membrillo, the preparation hassle was always a drawback, at least until inspirational queen of preserves Pam Corbin (I recommend her Pam the Jam: The Book of Preserves) told me how she prepares them.

Rather than peeling and coring the rock-hard fruit, she simmers them — in just enough water to cover — until the peel splits and the flesh is tender, but holding its shape. Once cooled, she pulls them apart — flesh from skin and stone — to use as she likes. This is how I’ve done it ever since and, honestly, if you’ve ever peeled and prepared a quince in the usual way, you’ll know how much it’s like preparing a baseball.

Quince trees don’t make you work hard for all this pleasure. A deep fertile loam, on the neutral to slightly acidic side, is ideal, where they’ll grow slowly to about 15ft in height and spread. Pruning is limited to the usual dead, diseased or crossing branches. Quince are tip-bearing trees, so keep that in mind if tempted to trim the branches. Quinces are hardy to about -4˚F/-20˚C, and thrive in a sunny spot with a fair degree of shelter, but will tolerate a little imperfection.

Quince leaf blight can speckle the leaves and fruit with dark-brown dots: damage is usually only cosmetic, but, if especially severe, rake up fallen leaves, remove any affected fruit and incinerate. Although I’ve never experienced it, brown rot can be an issue: pick and burn any affected fruit. Quince really benefit from feeding: I give them a monthly feed, sprayed on the leaves through the growing season, and/or a good liquid feed around the roots.

Of the numerous varieties I’ve grown, I’ve never noticed any variation in flavour: ‘Meech’s Prolific’ and ‘Vranja’ ripen a little earlier than some and reliably produce plump fruit in good numbers, as does the newer ‘Leskovac’.

Mark Diacono grows edibles, both usual and unusual, at Otter Farm in Devon. His book Abundance: Eating and Living with the Seasons (Quadrille, £30) is out now

This article first appeared in the October 1 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

2025 was an excellent season for plums — and that includes gages, damsons and mirabelles. Botanists have for a long time insisted that all the different types have developed from only one species, Prunus domestica, a native of Armenia and the neighbouring countries of western Asia — and modern DNA tests confirm this. Plums are large, soft-fleshed and can be treated as cookers or eaters. Gages are small, round and sweet. Damsons are especially hardy and have a spicy, tart flavour, excellent when cooked or jammed. Mirabelles are best thought of as very small gages.

The differences between the groups are the result of centuries of selection in different areas, at different times and for different purposes. They are a monument to our ancestors’ tenacity and good taste over many centuries. Ignore those thick-skinned plums from China that you see in supermarkets and taste of nothing. They are cultivars of Prunus salicina — I have no use for them, either raw or cooked.

Most Brits don’t think beyond ‘Victoria’, an English variety that foreigners regard as insipid. ‘Bland and boring’ was the verdict of our own English super-cook Jane Grigson. ‘Victoria’ is valued because it’s a regular cropper and, usually, abundant. I grow it only because we inherited it with the house. It suffers from bacterial canker, brown rot, plum moth and silver leaf and, if I were sensible, I would cut the tree down, but I can’t do so now because I have run a climbing rose up it.

‘Merryweather Damson’ is by far the best and largest of the damsons. In glut years, we make damson jam and sometimes damson gin, following a recipe for sloe gin, but using the same weight of damsons instead. My daughter makes delicious damson cheese, like the membrillo that Spaniards make from quinces. We were told that ‘Farleigh Damson’ had a better flavour than ‘Merryweather’, but the crops were small and so were the fruit — rather high up on the tree. After a while, we no longer bothered to pick them.

There will be readers of Country Life who value ‘Farleigh Damson’ for its regular, heavy cropping. All I can say is that our experience was different. Skip the other damsons you sometimes see for sale — they are seldom worth growing.

Greengages are a race apart — at peak season they are the sweetest and most delicious of all plums. Their original name is ‘Reine Claude’, in honour of Duchess Claude of Brittany, the long-suffering wife of François I of France. The English name — green-gages — commemorates Sir William Gage, an English Catholic who sent trees back from France to Hengrave, his estate in Suffolk. Almost all gages are delicious except ‘Reine Claude d’Ouillins’, which is valued for its late flowering that means it is less likely to be caught by frost. Its fruits are much larger, but this comes at the expense of taste. Most are sold to commercial jam-makers.

I have several times made jam from greengages and mirabelles, but the fruit is usually too sweet and short on acidity, so their jam is rather bland unless the fruit is picked early. Both are ‘freestone’, so I take out the stones before freezing or jamming them — it’s rather a fiddly job with mirabelles.

The best plum jam comes from quetsches, widely grown in much of Europe for their superb taste — rich, fruity and sharp — and best of all is ‘Quetsche d’Alsace’, unbeatable for its strong flavour. It’s a copious and regular cropper, so our son brings us boxfuls of it from his garden in Normandy at the end of the summer holidays. Some we freeze for tarts and clafoutis through the winter.

Plum trees flower before pears and apples, so they are more susceptible to frost damage. You can mitigate this by choosing late-flowering cultivars such as ‘Blue Tit’ and ‘Pershore Purple’. Most plum trees are self-pollinating, others are partly self-fertile, and a few — very few — are self-incompatible cultivars. Plant several varieties together and you will have no problems.

My experience is that, whatever problems with frost they may or may not encounter, our trees always produce much more than we can cope with. Overcropping also brings broken branches. The perfectionist’s solution is to thin the crop in June, but most of us have more important things to do in early summer.

All plum trees are easy to grow and require little maintenance, but they do need a warm, sunny spot with fertile soil that doesn’t get waterlogged. Ripening is not a worry in the south of England, but plums grow better in Kent than in Cumberland. Northerners might do better to choose hardy, early-fruiting varieties such as ‘Early Rivers’ (also called ‘Early Prolific’) and ‘Opal’. They respond well to manuring, but I do nothing more than throw them a handful of the 20-10-10 fertiliser mix (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) that I also use for the rose beds.

Nurserymen like to graft plum trees on semi-dwarfing rootstocks — ‘Pixy’ is good for fan-training them against a wall, but the rather more vigorous ‘St Julien’ is more widely used in Britain. Rootstocks curb the natural vigour of the trees, but need rich, moist soil to show their capabilities. I have always gardened on thin soils — sand or chalk — so I prefer them on their own roots and find that no restraint is needed. Then they sucker in a useful way; I cut off the suckers and give them away so they grow up to become new trees.

Five of the best

‘Cambridge Gage’

The most delicious of all dessert plums. It needs shelter, warmth and, if possible, a pollinator, but nothing beats the sweet, juicy richness of its flavour. Late to ripen, but freestone

‘Czar’

Forget ‘Victoria’, plump for ‘Czar’. Tough, hardy, early to ripen, self-fertile and a regular, reliable producer. A rich mixture of bitterness and sweetness. Good for jamming

‘Merryweather Damson’

Largest and easiest to handle of all damsons. The amazingly rich flavour comes through when cooked, jammed or steeped in gin

‘Quetsche d’Alsace’

The archetypal European plum, with a strong, rich flavour. Late to ripen, not too juicy, perfect for tarts and jams, but also delicious as a dessert plum when the season is coming to an end

‘Warwickshire Drooper’

Dependable, late-season plum with a semi-weeping habit that makes for easy picking. Large, yellow and sweet—excellent dessert, but also good as a cooker

How does one choose the best variety? Plant several, and forget disease-ridden ‘Victorias’ — try healthy ‘Avalon’ or ‘Haganta’ instead or ‘Jubilaeum’ (sometimes called ‘Jubilee’ in England). I have grown more than 20 cultivars over the years and tasted many more. For eating fresh, I recommend ‘Opal’, ‘Jefferson’, ‘Marjorie’s Seedling’ and almost any gage. Good varieties for cooking, freezing and jamming include ‘Purple Pershore’, ‘Czar’ and ‘Quetsche d’Alsace’.

Remember, however, there is no plum that you cannot eat raw and none that cannot be cooked. As with most tree-fruit, plums become sweeter and less acid as they ripen, so that a ‘cooker’ evolves and eventually becomes an ‘eater’. This is particularly noticeable in a hot summer in southern England, when plums attain the rich flavours you find in French markets.

That said, our island is still full of rare local varieties. The National Collection at Brogdale in Kent has more than 330 different plums to taste — imagine choosing the best by eating one’s way through all of them. One such, known as the Denbigh plum, now has PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) status. It is, however, little known outside the Vale of Clwyd in Wales.

Beware the advice of know-all experts who copy what earlier generations have written. I am a great fan of ‘Pond’s Seedling’, the fruit of which is usually described as dull or poorly flavoured. That is not my experience, but people pass on the judgement without ever tasting them themselves — and, suddenly, the rest of us find that it is no longer sold. I leave ‘Pond’s Seedling’ plums until they are fully ripe, peel them to reveal the fragrant flesh, bring out our Victorian silver fruit knives with mother-of-pearl handles bearing the family crest and eat them as pudding. It is one of the last treats of summer, before the rains of autumn send us scurrying to pick the rest of the crop.

This article first appeared in the September 24 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Pine trees have always confused me.

The confusion dates back to my days as a student at Kew Gardens when, every Friday for three years, we would be faced with 20 plant specimens to identify with their family, genus species and variety. They would be drawn from what must rank as the largest and most comprehensive plant collection in the world, so the canvas was pretty broad. Trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and bulbous plants, from equatorial rainforest to Arctic tundra and mountain scree, were all fair game and, after a year or two, our plant vocabulary was of a breadth and depth that few outside that august institution could match.

RELATED: Alan Titchmarsh is selling his Hampshire home (and the garden that comes with it)

One particular Friday saw most of us stumped, however. Each of the 20 glass specimen vases contained a different species of pine. The dwarf Pinus mugo was an easy one to tick off and the soft and feathery Bhutan pine, P. wallichiana, was a bit of a shoo-in, too, but that left 18 whose identity had to be narrowed down by the number of needles carried in each cluster — two, three or five. Shirley Conran had yet to opine that ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom’, but the sentiment was shared.

Growing up on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire in the 1950s, the modest cluster of gnarled Scots pines, near the 18th-century spa bath of White Wells, was the nearest I ever came to the Caledonian Forest. Having spent the past 45 years on chalk downland, these acid-loving giants have not been my daily companions, but, this year, I have renewed my acquaintance with a group of plants that recolonised our islands 10,500 years ago after the last Ice Age. It has given me tremendous pleasure.

Visits to Scotland always leave me in awe of Pinus sylvestris, the Scots pine, which can live for up to 400 or 500 years, although half that is more the norm. This summer, on a visit to the Côte d’Azur in France, I encountered groves of the umbrella pine, Pinus pinea, which I remember from that venerable specimen at Kew Gardens — now, alas, no more — which was felled in 2022 due to its dangerous state. It was about 250 years old.

As its name implies, the umbrella pine holds its branches in an elegant dome, vibrant green against an azure Côte d’Azur sky. Beneath these Mediterranean coastal trees, the blowsy crimson, pink or white flowers of oleanders — the rose laurel — replaced our native laurel, alongside foaming banks of pale-blue-flowered plumbago, the Cape leadwort. Sipping my morning coffee on the terrace and gazing up at the huge verdant lollipops that framed the view of a glittering Mediterranean sea has left me with a lasting memory of a very special family holiday.

Returning home and visiting my daughters who live in Surrey, I was struck by the beauty of the Scots pines that surround their gardens. Here, the oleanders and plumbago are replaced by rhododendrons and camellias.

Surrey, although probably thought of by those north of Watford as just another of the Home Counties, is the most wooded of all English counties, with tree coverage of 22.4%, much of it ancient woodland. Here, the Scots pines have tall and often torturous trunks that glow amber in the afternoon sunshine. The bark of the pine tree is one of its most attractive attributes, heightened to burnished copper at sunset.

I am glad I have re-acquainted myself with the pines that once frustrated me. It is just as well. Soon, we will be moving from the Hampshire Downland where we have made two homes and gardens over the past four decades to be closer to our daughters just across the border in Surrey. Leaving the garden I have created and tended for 23 years will be a fearsome wrench, but the time is right and the pines are beckoning. We are only ever custodians of our patches of earth and I am happy to hand over my four acres for others to enjoy and to cultivate.

I like to think that I have one more garden in me. Excitement has taken over from the prospect of leaving my favourite patch of earth behind. I have plans to plant more pines — Scots and umbrella — to do my bit to keep Surrey wooded and to remind me of happy times on the moors, at Kew and basking in the Mediterranean sunshine.

Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35)

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

The late Christopher Lloyd clearly felt he had to make a case for the particular kind of meadow that greets you as you arrive at Great Dixter in East Sussex. ‘Your first sight, on entering the front gate, is of two areas of rough grass, on either side of the path to the house… They are not just plots of grass that we gave up mowing for lack of labour, but were intended from the first.’ Every spring for more than 100 years, the turf here has transformed into a glorious, dancing tapestry of delicate flowering bulbs in long grass: pale silvery Crocus tommasinianus, the wild daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus and the chequered snake’s-head fritillary.

These two uplifting strips of jewelled meadow light up with different bulbs in succession until the spikes of starry blue Camassia quamash are accompanied by four kinds of native orchid that simply arrived by themselves. Apart from cutting the grass when everything has set seed — and being sure to take the cut material away — the only other requirement is to ‘keep experimenting with other ingredients, looking for those that will take care of themselves, once given a start’.

William Robinson was advocating a similar low-maintenance way to ‘really enjoy’ the beauty of spring flowering bulbs even earlier. His revolutionary 1870 book The Wild Garden proposed planting bulbs ‘in natural groups or prettily fringed colonies’ in areas of long grass so that ‘everything should be varied, indefinite and changeful’. He established the extraordinary six-acre Great Meadow, the first of its kind, in front of his West Sussex house, Gravetye Manor. Today, under head gardener Tom Coward, the meadow continues to shimmer and dazzle from early spring until midsummer with thousands of bulbs planted by Robinson and thousands more added in the past 15 years by Mr Coward.

As we reconsider our treatment of bulbs as a disposable spectacle, a tangible appetite is emerging for reimagining the traditional, long-lasting jewelled meadow. Angel Collins designs classically beautiful country gardens and understands the need to be practical, too. She has seen her concept of the parterre meadow take off in the past 10 years. ‘I nearly always do them for clients. There is usually an area that needs to be low maintenance and this really is.’

In her own garden, she took a three-quarter acre of former pony paddock and marked out 22 rectangles — four main ones and 18 smaller ones — mowing paths in between. She added cubes of yew for structure and a scattering of flowering shrubs and small trees for height and colour throughout the season. There are multi-stem Amelanchier lamarckii for spring blossom and autumn colour, roses ‘Scharlachglut’ (for scarlet flowers and shiny autumn hips) and ‘Cerise Bouquet’ (with its gracefully arching habit and cherry-crimson flowers) and also Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’, which produces burgundy, magnolia-like flowers from July to August.

Then come the bulbs. Her year begins with Narcissus ‘Thalia’ and ‘Avalanche’ — ‘the lovely neat white ones’ and continues with tulips in rich velvety colours, such as ‘Queen of Night’, ‘Apricot Foxx’, ‘Slawa’ and ‘Mariette’. Lavender-blue Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ and the white ‘Alba’ follow with N. poeticus and alliums. ‘The soil is rich and the grass grows long, so you need tall alliums,’ notes Mrs Collins. ‘Allium cristophii simply won’t work. One of the best is A. nigrum — the robust, flat-bottomed one — it naturalises so well.’ When to cut the grass is key. ‘If you want camassias, you must wait until the beginning of July. I get someone in with a scythe mower and remove and compost the cut grass. It freshens everything up and looks wonderful.’

The writer and garden designer Mary Keen has created a jewelled meadow behind her honey-coloured house in a West Country market town. After years of working at scale around a Georgian rectory, she relished the chance to be exacting about the right bulbs to create a small, but perfectly formed embroidery of spring flowers. ‘I wanted the ghostly white Crocus tommasinianus, but suppliers are always sending something darker that doesn’t naturalise well. I had some from Sissinghurst in Kent in the end because they were digging them up.’ As well as crocus, her initial layer of bulbs included Anemone blanda (‘the blue shades’) and the tall pink Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus, ‘you need the good dark form from Great Dixter’. She was reluctant to use narcissus because their leaves are so messy after flowering, but has ‘gone over to jonquils’ and recommends Narcissus fernandesii var. cordubensis and ‘Kokopelli’, which have almost chive-like foliage and numerous tiny, scented flowers along each stem.

She tries out narcissus in pots to get to know them and plants them out, adding a few fresh bulbs to avoid the ‘bunchy’, post-container effect. Species tulips are suitably delicate. ‘I have Tulipa clusiana, T. humilis and, best of all, T. acuminata’ — which she admires for its fiery shredded petals as the grass grows longer — and later there is Camassia quamash ‘the smaller, darker wild one’, which, at only 12in, is exactly the right size. She advises taking photographs in spring so you can see what to add in autumn: ‘This year, I’m putting more jonquils near the edges.’

In the Netherlands, bulbs that naturalise well are called stinzenplanten after the old country house gardens where spectacular sheets of anemones, crocus and muscari emerge each spring, even if the original house has gone. Dutch bulb suppliers are working hard to tempt us with gorgeous and subtle new versions of these revered favourites and landscape designer, florist and ‘bulbista’ Carien van Boxtel (the expert to whom Sarah Raven turns for bulb advice) is keen to stretch the idea of a jewelled meadow into something more ‘varied indefinite and changeful’ than even Robinson could have imagined.

In 2023, she was commissioned by JUB Holland and Rijnbeek Perennials to design the first sustainable scheme for decades at the famous Keukenhof Garden near Amsterdam in the Netherlands — which otherwise relies on seven million annual tulip bulbs for its spectacular March–May displays. Instead of turf, Ms van Boxtel uses grasses, such as Melica altissima ‘Alba’, with its airy, rice-like flowers, and the light-catching Bowles’s golden grass, as well as ferns and perennials with handsome spring foliage, such as the lacy-leaved Thalictrum ‘Black Stockings’, to create a textured background for a succession of delectable bulbs.

She uses bulbs to paint with colour: crocuses range from ‘Blue Pearl’ with its shiny silver interior to rich-purple ‘Aqua’ to ‘Flower Record’, another rich mauve with prominent orange stamens. ‘After flowering, the leaves of crocus grow like crazy, which is another trick to give a planting scheme a meadowy feel.’ Conversely, she selects grape hyacinths that don’t produce too much ‘annoying’ foliage and form subtle ribbons of deep indigo (Muscari latifolium) faded wine red (M. ‘Grape Hyacinth’) and palest blue (M. armeniacum ‘Valerie Finnis’). Ms van Boxtel’s Bulb Mania plant list is intoxicating. My favourite new discovery is her way of using wonderful new varieties of fritillary: ‘They are so important to add height’. I meet the 3ft-high Fritillaria persica ‘Green Dreams’, which produces loose-hanging bells of a strange, almost dirty pale-green and brown — and I am smitten.

Garden designer Sheila Jack specialises in making contemporary gardens and has created a sophisticated ‘clean and restrained’ bulb meadow in her Wiltshire garden. She uses the bright-green perennial grass Sesleria autumnalis as a matrix into which she plants a limited succession of bulbs and perennials. First come shoals of white Narcissus ‘Thalia’, which flower at the same time as the white-flowered crab apple Malus ‘Evereste’.

These are followed by the stars of the show: magical spires of Camassia leichtlinii ‘Pink Star’. ‘They are properly gorgeous — strong stems and big flowers of the prettiest pale pink with egg-yolk stamens.’ The camassia bulbs came from specialist supplier Hare Spring Cottage Plants in Devon — you have to be quick off the mark to order even a few — and are followed by waves of Iris sibirica, then floating blue heads of Devil’s bit scabious.

Maintenance is ‘minimal compared with the time it takes to remove cut grass from wildflower meadows. I simply give the sesleria a good trim in February to stop it flopping’. The result is a simple, but entrancing meadow that links the more intensely flowery borders near the house to the landscape beyond.

You cannot open a gardening magazine in September without finding advice on which bulbs to buy and how to plant them. Journalists love writing these articles: they’re easy to do and they can be re-hashed every year. Their readers are addled by glamorous catalogues and garden-centre notices that invite them to fill a bag for £5. Aren’t we all? There’s too much choice.

No one ever says anything about what happens to those bulbs five years later. The tulips will probably have died out, the grape hyacinths will have seeded all over the garden and you will never be rid of the Spanish bluebells or the alliums.

The best bulbs, like all the best plants, are those that give maximum pleasure for minimum effort. You plant them and they do their job. They get better year by year, but never take over or demand your intervention. Such bulbs are perfect for gardeners and non-gardeners alike.

Daffodils are a good example. Plant a bulb sometime this month and you can be sure it will produce flowers next spring. Leave it alone and you will have rather more flowers in 2027. By 2030, it will have made a handsome clump. You can feed it if you wish (I use Tomorite after they have flowered) or you can split it up and spread it around in new soil.

Or you can simply ignore it — you will still get a few flowers, year after year. In 1890, my great-grandmother planted daffodils on the edge of her croquet lawn in Ireland; the lawn is now a brambly mess, but the daffodils still flower every spring.

However, spring is also a season for bulb-buying. Two genera to buy next April are crinums and agapanthus. Both performed magnificently this year and both will increase steadily as the years go by. If you don’t already know crinums, I promise that you will be impressed by their enormous stately trumpets.

They are related to daffodils, but their flowers are very much larger and always pink or white (yellow crinums do exist, but you never see them in cultivation). Our garden crinums come from South Africa and grow on the banks of streams: a bucket of water in June or July helps them to flower well.

The two crinums most commonly grown are pink C. x powellii and its white form ‘Alba’, which you sometimes see in Catholic churches at about the time of the Feast of the Assumption. They are supposed to be tender — my father grew the white one in his vine house — but both forms have flourished outside for more than 50 years against a south-facing wall at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire.

The clumps have expanded, but not enough to threaten other plants. Both look fresh and impressive at that point in summer when the roses are between their first and second flowerings. Climate change must surely mean that now they no longer need the protection of walls; I must test them in an open site on the south-facing chalky slopes where I try to garden.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in agapanthus. They actually grow from rhizomes, not bulbs, but they are also South African members of the daffodil family and long regarded as too tender to grow outside in England. However, the Hon Lewis Palmer, who lived near Winchester in Hampshire, grew many generations from seed and, in the 1940s and 1950s, developed a hardy group he called ‘Headbourne Hybrids’. One of his neighbours cultivated them in vast numbers to sell as cut flowers to passengers on the Cunard liners at Southampton. The big ships have passed into history, but his son still grows them.

Hundreds of agapanthus are available nowadays and there isn’t a dud among them, but two things are worth knowing. The first is that they spread steadily: that glimpse of pure blue that thrills you in their first August expands over the years to become a pool of colour deep and wide. The second is that they come easily from seed. You have to be a bit careful to nurture the seedlings, but they start flowering in their third or fourth year and nothing daunts them thereafter.

It is important to make a distinction between steady clumpers, such as daffodils, and uncontrollable tearaways that threaten to take over the garden. Many bulbs will naturalise in woodland, flowering before the trees crowd out the sunlight. Bluebells and snowdrops are welcome examples, but I have a recurrent nightmare in which my garden is completely taken over by that foul-smelling super-invasive wild garlic that some people actually eat. If you want a quiet life, never plant alliums. Stick with the daffs — fill that £5 bag — they always give good value.

Charles Quest-Ritson’s book The Olive Tree (Ediciones El Viso, £50) is out now.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.

I’d very much like to do away with the fuchsias in the garden. Their flowers remind me of the earrings worn by those who all too quickly invite themselves to give you their rendition of Summertime. Were my garden in their native South America, I might think more favourably of those flowers, as they’ve evolved to be highly attractive to the hummingbirds that pollinate them, but here in east Devon, I am hummingbird-less and it’s bees who do the pollinating.

Why do I allow the fuchsias in my garden to live on? Because, despite their visual shortcomings, I am a fool for edible pleasure. The fruit can be really exceptional, with an intense flavour of plum, kiwi, grape and black-currant, with a peculiar — but very pleasant — hint of black pepper. I say ‘can’: the generic fuchsia can be a little bland, but many named varieties have a long deep flavour.

Named varieties of Fuchsia magellanica are what you are looking for. Even I will admit that when examined up close the four long, slender sepals and four shorter petals are quite the ornament, but looking from two steps further back makes me want to dig them up. Happily, it’s only a few weeks from flowers in July to eating usually in late August. These rather lovely-looking fruit are baton-shaped and typically a couple of inches long, ripening from a fresh green to a deep crimson in colour.

Once crimson, it can be hard to judge exactly when the fruit are at their best: keep taste-testing every couple of days until you get a perfect one and that will tell you the exact depth of colour you are looking for.

The flowers’ colour depends on the variety. The familiar bright-red sepals with purple petals are common, whereas other varieties may have white, red of any shade, purple, orange or blue flowers. Of the named varieties I have either grown or tried the fruit of, these are the ones I would recommend.

‘Globosa’ is relatively low growing, getting to about 3ft at most. It also flowers prolifically, fruits heavily and the flavour of those fruits is exceptional. Although it is as hardy as most, it can be susceptible to the top growth dying back in cold spells, but it recovers well.

If you are looking for a variety that is similarly delicious, but taller, try ‘Gracilis’, which will reach about 6ft in height. Larger still, ‘Riccartonii’ can reach 9ft in ideal conditions, is (together with ‘Vielebachen’) an excellent choice for colder areas, as its top growth is hardy down to -15°C and its prolific fruit is superb to eat. Most fuchsias are unlikely to fruit in sufficient qualities to do much with other than enjoy fresh, but if you happen to get a decent harvest, try making a sorbet with them as it will be very good indeed.

Fuchsia’s natural habitat is at woodland edges and in forest clearings, so it thrives in partial shade and sheltered locations, although it will tolerate imperfect conditions without being at its best. A well-drained soil is ideal, but the plant will get by in heavier soil as long as it doesn’t become waterlogged. If you live at the coast, you’ll be pleased to hear fuchsias are happy in maritime conditions.

Avoid frost pockets: top growth and the newest stems are liable to damage in low temperatures, so don’t be surprised if the slide into winter brings a little dieback or if there’s a little spring damage from a late dip in temperature once they’ve started growing. Luckily, they don’t start growing until late in spring, making up for it with vigour.

Fuchsias can be raised from seed: sow undercover in modules in spring, potting up when they are easy to handle. Keep them in a greenhouse or on a window sill for their first year, before planting out after the last frosts. Fuchsias take well to propagation from hardwood cuttings: in late autumn, cut 7in–8in-long stems, ensuring they are brown and woody rather than newer, green lengths. As with seedlings, grow them undercover for their first year.

Another considerable plus to counter-balance their appearance is the fact that I have never known fuchsias suffer any form of pest or disease and when I grew them in a field even the deer didn’t trouble them.

This article first appeared in the September 3 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

British gardeners can take pride in two of our greatest inventions: landscape parks and herbaceous borders. The landscape movement was a development of the old deer parks, but we owe the borders to our mild, damp climate and our love of flowers. The history of herbaceous borders goes back a long way. In the 18th century, Philip Miller clumped different plants together for ornamental effect at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and, by 1800, our ancestors were making mixed borders of shrubs and hardy plants.

It was the writings of William Robinson and, especially, of Gertrude Jekyll, however, that turned herbaceous borders into essential features of any respectable country garden. Jekyll’s books Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) and Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (1919), both of them published by COUNTRY LIFE, were extremely influential 100 years ago and remain both practical and inspirational today.

Jekyll was championed by Graham Stuart Thomas, the leading gardener of the second half of the 20th century. He articulated her principles in his books and applied them to the many gardens he designed for the National Trust. The Trust style of planting was from the start intended to be the exemplar of good taste, although the need for economy — maximum effect for minimum cost — meant that easy-to-grow groundcover plants were often chosen to simplify maintenance.

The classic herbaceous border offers a succession of flowers from June until the first frosts. Perfectionists plan their border month by month. It is possible to make a border that is all blue, pink and white in June, but a mass of hot reds, yellows and oranges in August. Most gardeners maximise colour, valuing it more than shape, form and texture. Other owners look for continuity and prefer to plant each section of a border so that its colours are consistent throughout the season. They seek out plants such as fuchsias and Geranium Rozanne that are always in flower. A typical scheme might run from cool colours to hot in the middle, then back to cool again at the far end. The ideal is a succession of harmonious groupings, each of them different, where shapes and colours combine to come together well. There is no short-age of choice for every conceivable situation.

Single-colour borders are not easy to sustain. Vita Sackville-West’s white garden at Sissinghurst in Kent has inspired thousands of imitations, but white flowers, together with silver and grey foliage, are better as foils to other colours.

Traditional herbaceous borders are dull in winter when all the plants have been cut back and the surface topped with compost or manure. The traditional way to put some life into them is to use clipped evergreens, especially topiary in box and yew. Sometimes yew hedges, not too tall, are planted to run from the back of the border right to the front, thereby restructuring the bed as a series of compartments. Evergreen flowering shrubs are also valued: mixed borders will have Daphne bholua at the back, choisyas and Euphorbia characias in the centre and hebes and lavender towards the front. The influence of designers such as Piet Oudolf in recent years has added some evergreen sedges and grasses. Jekyll herself incorporated ferns.

Some gardeners like to see flowers in every month of the year. It is easy to add plants that flower between November and March. Bergenias and Oriental hellebores are wonderful winter bloomers and their handsome leaves contribute to the composition after they have finished flowering. Spring bulbs, especially tulips and daffodils, can be chosen to flower successively over several months. Many gardeners also take inspiration from summer bedding. Gaps open up, for example, after the spring bulbs have flowered, and the wise gardener will fill them with bedding plants or annuals. It is important to sustain the display.

Biennials are also useful, especially early in the season. Foxgloves, Canterbury bells and sweet williams can then be succeeded by dahlias and chrysanthemums. These glorious late bloomers may need to be lifted and replanted every year, but they make such a show that most gardeners consider them essential constituents of their herbaceous plantings. The same is true of monocotyledons: irises, lilies, galtonias, gladioli, crocosmias and crinums will all add enormously to the display.

The best herbaceous borders are designed not only to show off their flower power, but also to create contrasts or harmonies of shape and colour. Some plants have always been incorporated because, although their flowers are insignificant, their foliage is a fine foil to others. Giant cardoons and Macleaya cordata are always impressive, whereas Alchemilla mollis, which was surprisingly little known until the 1950s when Graham Stuart Thomas championed it, is invaluable. Grey- and silver-leaved plants are useful not only for their own qualities, but also for blending different colours. It is hard to imagine a modern herbaceous border without silvery artemisias, Stachys lanata and Lychnis coronaria.

Most borders are planted against a wall or hedge. Climbing plants, such as roses on a wall, will deepen the display, whereas hedges of hornbeam and beech are especially beautiful when clematis and honeysuckle weave through them. Scarlet Tropaeolum speciosum threading its way through clipped yew hedges is almost a cliché of Scottish and Irish gardens. Remember, however, that hedging plants have roots that extend a long way into the border, which will affect the choice of plants. A path between the hedge and the back of the border is essential for access for hedge cutting and maintenance.

There is no consensus on whether the front of a border should be neatly defined, typically by low box hedges, or edged with an intermediate feature, such as paving slabs, that plants can flop over. Lavender is a good choice because it has every desirable quality — handsome grey leaves, colour and a scent to grab you as you walk along.

The way to learn about making borders is to visit good gardens and study what you see. Christopher Lloyd’s Long Border at Great Dixter in East Sussex has been famous for 50 years. The double border that runs up to Battleston Hill at RHS Wisley in Surrey is better than ever now and you should also see the newly reorganised Oudolf borders. For sheer grandeur, it is hard to beat the double borders at Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, which run due south for 200 yards from the house to the River Ure. Look back up, and see how perfectly they frame the gorgeous 18th-century mansion.

Some borders are designed to be seen from inside the house. The double borders at Bramdean House in Hampshire — England’s finest, pictured at the top of this page — are stupendous when seen from above, not least because they are planted as mirror images of each other. Because they are cut out of the lawns with no hedge to back them, Bramdean’s borders may also be studied not only from the central path, but from the outside.

Large beds devoted to a single genus can be spectacular, but are suitable only for very large gardens. Nevertheless, one can but goggle at the 100-yard border of peonies at Penshurst in Kent and the massive displays of asters at the Picton Garden attached to Old Court Nurseries in Herefordshire. There is much to be learned from walking slowly along these displays, noting the good plants and plantings that catch your eye. Indeed, that is the way to study all the best borders.

Many of the principles laid out by writers from Jekyll to Thomas can be applied to much smaller areas within the garden. Herbaceous borders or plantings do not have to be of any particular shape. The island beds promoted by Alan Bloom at Bressingham in Norfolk have for many years been a major source of ongoing education to gardeners in search of inspiration. Herbaceous borders are also a useful source of flowers and fragrance for the house, although the grandest gardens usually have dedicated cutting gardens, often in the walled garden alongside fruit and vegetables.

Planting a border requires considerable thought and preparation, but its subsequent maintenance is no less demanding. Constant weeding, splitting, mulching, deadheading and staking are needed to keep it in good condition. Borders are most rewarding creations, but expensive in time and money. Their origins, after all, date back to a time of industrial wealth, inexpensive skilled labour and the expectation that gardens should be maintained in great style.

One of the joys of gardening — but especially of borders — is that everything is always work in progress. Borders will never look the same as they do right now. Plants grow and flower at a slightly different season every year, so the combinations that entrance you today may not come together next year in quite the same way. Owners look at their borders and make alterations to the plantings all the time — moving, replanting, removing and adding.

What, then, makes a successful border? One answer is this — good plants, thoughtful planting, harmonies of colour and shape, and succession. And, above all, deep commitment on the part of the owners.

Bordering on brilliance: Where to see the best borders in Britain

• The Long Border at Great Dixter, East Sussex — 01797 253107; www.greatdixter.co.uk
• The peony border at Penshurst Place, Kent — 01892 870307; www.penshurstplace.com
• The massive displays of asters at the Picton Garden attached to Old Court Nurseries, Herefordshire — 01684 540416; www.oldcourtnurseries.co.uk
• The double border that runs up to Battleston Hill and the new Oudolf Landscape at RHS Wisley, Surrey — 01483 224234; www.rhs.org.uk
• The double borders at Newby Hall, North Yorkshire — 01423 322583; www.newbyhall.com
• The mirrored double borders at Bramdean House, Hampshire, which open for the National Garden Scheme on September 14 — www.ngs.org.uk
• The island beds planted by Alan Bloom at the Bressingham Gardens, Norfolk — 01379 686900; www.bressingham.co.uk

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.