Your lavender hedge has been a dream of beauty through the summer, but now, its charm is beginning to fade. The answer to this problem is to give it a haircut. The intention is to deadhead the flowers, working carefully along, removing each faded flower back to the base of its stalk. Secateurs are the tool for this job, as shears will do a pudding-basin job. This isn't the work of a moment and, after a while, your joints will set into apparently permanent numbness, but your reward will be the customary admiring remarks.
* Follow Country Life magazine on Twitter
* Subscribe to Country Life; Country Life on Ipad
-
17 outstanding homes for sale across Britain, from under £250k to £6.5 million, as seen in Country LifeSomething for every budget in this week's round up of homes across the country that have come to market via Country Life.
-
'We started thinking: if we were going to design a bike for Aston Martin, what would it look like? And then we simply couldn’t stop': Aston's new bike has everything you could ever dream of — except a price tagThe new Aston Martin .1R bicycle, a collaboration with manufacturer J.Laverack, leaves Paul Henderson stirred rather than shaken.
