Everything in my garden has, it turns out, survived. The lawn is throwing up patch after patch of green tufts, piece by piece restoring itself. The Hakonechloa has made it - even the furthest, tattiest one still has traces of green leaves amidst the straw-like ravages. Plants I thought had died (I was sure a new Baptisia was a goner but it’s sending out new shoots) have actually just been playing dead. And with the rain, my optimism levels have also inched slowly upwards to the point I’m ready to start thinking about anything other than basic plant survival and the end of the world.

It’s so easy to let ourselves forget, now the rain has come and keeps on coming, the bleakness of all that relentless heat. I’m afraid I am not able to relax and enjoy the sunshine when it comes with boiling hot nights, gardens screeching to a halt for weeks at a time, wildfires blazing across the country and a growing, insistent dread that this is the beginning of the apocalypse. I woke my long-suffering husband one night of the many heatwaves talking about fire in my sleep. The next night, smelling smoke, I fell down the stairs on my way to check we hadn’t left mosquito coils still burning. The kids took the decent fans for their bedrooms and the shops sold out of any respectable ice lolly. Bring on the autumn I say. I am extremely excited to witness the glitter of that first frost, pull on a cosy jumper and get a mulled wine on the go.

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Anyway. While the plants haven’t died, they haven’t exactly thrived, either. Now they are galloping away, trying to catch up with themselves (I haven’t had a single dahlia flower yet), filling themselves to the brim with moisture. Soon the lawn will be growing too fast to keep up with, the ground beneath soggy underfoot, and I’ll complain because my waterproofs don’t work.

But all the predictions point to an even bleaker, dryer, harsher summer of 2027. And I don’t want the garden to merely scrape by until the rains come. I don’t want to spend the summer both depressed and overheated, trudging round in 37C with a dripping hosepipe every afternoon and needing five ice lollies to recover. I want the garden to thrive. I need it to look good, and do well, because frankly my emotional state is very closely linked to what’s going on in those borders. If the world really is coming to an end, I need to look at something pretty while it happens.

And so my plan for the autumn is to give those borders some proper TLC, both to get them ready for the winter and also for the even bigger droughts everyone is warning will hit us next year.

First up is moving the plants. Everything that needed a dripping hosepipe this summer is being moved within watering can distance of the tap. We didn’t have a hosepipe ban this year but next year it is highly likely. I’d really like to get a water butt sorted, and a drip irrigation system, but should such feats prove too ambitious for me, I’ll at least know that I can quickly top up the plants most in need as they will all be close together. That means the geums, hakonechloas and astrantias will be dug up from their overly ambitious borders at the back of the garden and placed much, much closer to the patio.

Next up will be drought proof plants at the end of my garden. The end of my garden gets more sun (we’re north facing), and has the added joy of extraordinarily dry soil thanks to four Leylandiis looming both in my garden and in those of my neighbours. We’re already on a sandy, stony, free draining sort but this renders the end of my garden wildly inhospitable to all but the most arid loving plants. Happily I have been experimenting with such plants for years in my south facing front gravel garden so I have a whole stock of rosemary, lavender and gaura to propagate from. I had assumed Miscanthus would be part of this mix but the ones planted in the front garden struggled. They didn’t die, but they didn’t thrive, either, so I’ll be shifting those, too to the wetter, easier beds closer to the house in the back.

I’ll also be shredding the Christmas trees that have collected behind the compost bins. Embarrassingly, they date back to 2023 - but that means any acidity in them will have disappeared which was clearly the reason I’ve let them lie about for this long. The shreddings will go in the compost bins and also directly on the beds around the plants as a mulch. Speaking of mulch, I’d highly recommend you look up Huw Richards and his Edible Garden substack. His chop and drop experiments have really informed my own gardening game. My compost bins now are really reserved for grass clippings, veg scraps and excess chippings. Everything else (unless it has seeds in) will be chopped and dropped directly on the beds from this moment on. This will not only protect the soil, provide habitat for critters, give food for worms to pull down into the soil and reduce water loss. It will also crucially be less work for me and while it will look a little messy1 at first, by spring, the bulbs will push right through it all and by this time next year it will have pretty much disappeared into the soil.

One thing that has worked tremendously well this year has been succulents as summer bedding. My succulent collection is growing at an alarming rate ever since I realised all you need to do with them is ignore them, and pull off the odd leaf if you’d like a few spares. Over the next month I’ll be repotting all my aeoniums and echeverias and bringing them inside for some much-needed autumn and winter cheer, but come spring, they’ll be filling outdoor pots and even going into the gravel garden to bring their otherworldly charm to the outdoors. They are the absolute queens of drought resistance and can happily survive on virtually no water for weeks at a time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am off to resume my eternal quest for waterproof clothing that actually works. I’ll undoubtedly be back to complain about my existential dread brought on by the rain in a few weeks time.

I’m considering, for the first time, letting my own hosepipe loose on my supposed xeriscape front garden, because while everything is still hanging in there, I don’t think any of us expected drought resistance to be put to quite such a literal test as the one we’re having right now. Should the hosepipes be banned here, most of the plants in my back garden will die.

It’s getting too dry even for the parts of gardening I don’t like. A few weeks ago I had to keep leaping out of the borders in my cottage garden job, having disturbed angry horse flies determined to take a chunk out of me. I came home covered in bites from all sorts of critters - this week, not one. Stinging nettles are wilting. Stubborn sycamore saplings are suddenly easy to yank out of the dusty soil.

Warnings are constant of yet another heatwave. We have fans in every bedroom now. The children have little fans to take to school, or holiday club. I did not have a fan when I was little. Why is it getting hotter mummy? I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to lie. I also don’t want to give them nightmares. My son thinks the planet will be happier if we buy an electric car.

The council were out in force last week, mowing what straw is left of the grass into a fine dust. My own lawn is now a somewhat sickening shade of biscuit. I don’t usually mind a bit of parched lawn. I know it will bounce back in the autumn and I tend to ignore it, prioritising plants that would not otherwise recover. But I am tired of seeing it bleached to nothing. I’m worried that, once people are banned from their sprinklers, they will turn to plastic instead.

In London this weekend, we stayed at a fancy-ish hotel which left notices for us all over the place beseeching us not to damage the environment by having our towels washed. Apparently, it is laundry which is putting the planet in peril. Plastic, in their minds, is absolutely fine. Plastic plants were everywhere, hanging from every ceiling, wall and shoved into planters. They littered the city. We saw plastic palms in beer gardens, plastic flowers hanging from floristry stands. It’s the same at home - my favourite local Thai restaurant chain is stuffed with ridiculous plastic flowers. A new Indian tapas pub beer garden has green plastic plants sticking out of planters. Did nobody else hear that Radiohead song? Are we so willing to play pretend when there could be actual living things that would do us good? Perhaps its easier to look at a sea of fake lushness than see the reality of what the climate we have created is doing to plants that have survived here for centuries - until now.

It must be easier to accept all this if you just don’t notice nature or perhaps, if you actively fear and avoid it. If you never go to a park, let alone a garden. If your food comes in foil trays rather than produce grown from the ground. If you prize spotlessness over muddy fingernails. If you defy the passing of time with injections and treatments to sculpt your body into a strange alien age, rather than celebrate the life you have actually lived. If you live your life through screens and cheer yourself up with bargain basement impulse buys on Temu. If you don’t go for a walk, but spend hours sculpting in the gym, chugging protein nonsense instead of eating food. And that isn’t to pass judgement on anyone who does these things. I just can’t help but feel that they are all part of the same strange addiction - to products designed to isolate us from nature, to see it as something other, something to be feared. These products harm us, harm the world around us, and at the same time numb us to the effects of their damage in one fell swoop.

Twenty years ago, I lived in Japan, in a town called Toyama, teaching English at a now-defunct company called Nova. Postcards for the town depicted snowdrifts taller than houses, with roads literally cut through towering white walls. It didn’t snow like that when I was there. Locals told me it had snowed less and less over the years. The climate has been changing for years and years - but I suppose, it’s only when the wildfires are in your continent, in your country - lapping at the boundaries of city where your friend lives that it starts to feel actually frightening. Am I being dramatic to feel frightened?

We can mulch, and compost, and save our water when it doesn’t stop raining this winter. We can plant different trees, different plants, play around with thyme and clover lawns and grow tropical fruits. But it will never be enough to mitigate what is happening, let alone stop it. This is not the peak of it. The rains and inevitable floods due this winter will not be the peak. There is no sign of this stopping, only of it accelerating. Because we are not stopping. We’re not even trying.

My kids notice if there is litter on the ground. They pick it up, put it in a bin, say it is important to take care of the planet. I tell them that’s right. I don’t know how I will eventually have to explain what a mess the planet is really in.

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Climate change is quite clearly here, but I am no longer sure what to do with this information. If I read the Guardian, I will most likely want to give up now, so catastrophic are the predictions. Of course we need to radically overhaul our fossil fuel use, eradicate plastic use, rid ourselves of pesticide and chemical dependence. But I can’t make that happen all by myself and frankly I am sick and tired of feeling so miserable about it all. After all, are we really doomed or are we just going to feel like we’re on holiday without having to deal with the airport?

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I’ve been spending my lunch breaks catching up on the recordings from the Rewilding conference in Manchester earlier this year. I’ve embedded the link here - they’re free and fantastic. In one talk, James Hitchmough explains that oak, beech and birch are already dying across the south east, unable to cope with our uncomfortable combination of relentlessly hot, dry summers and miserable, rain-soaked winters and spring. The research says they will still be relatively comfortable up north, with Manchester becoming the new London, so all hope isn’t completely dashed. But there is a clear need to figure out what will grow in our new, apocalyptic world.

Some quarters of the horticultural world seem fairly happy to accept what’s happening and focus on so-called ‘futureproof’ plants. If I flick through the Times, I’ll find Tom Stuart Smith praising the virtues of mediterranean plants. Clearly the mudbath I trudged through working December to April this year was not so dramatic down in St Albans. Sure, you can chuck some sand about, but that isn’t going to keep a waterlogged rosemary alive any more than climate denial will keep you feeling cool.

Nobody mentions Birmingham in all this research, so I have no idea what I’m supposed to do other than stock up on ice lollies to enjoy in peace when sports days are cancelled.1 Well, with another heatwave on the way and my freezer positively bursting with ice-cold treats, I’ll tell you about my tiny efforts to avert global catastrophe.

I’m extremely lucky to have a front and a back garden with quite different growing conditions to experiment with and can concur that, as far north as the midlands, those mediterranean, sun-loving, wet/cold hating Lavenders, Rosemaries, Sages and Gauras are indeed extremely happy if you can give them a sun-drenched spot with poor soil which drains easily. But those conditions will not magically appear just because the air is getting hotter. Shade is still shade and there are few things I find more irritating than finding sun-loving perennials collapsed on the ground after reaching desperately for a proper hit of solar energy. Soil does not become free draining just because you put some grit on it.

It must be nice to have a proper shady bog. One with underground springs like the ones at Winterbourne, so you’ll know that no matter what, it will be damp enough to grow a lovely collection of ferns, some candelabra Primulas (impossible even in my back garden), some lush Astilbes. I suspect that, if you have these conditions, you could carry on as usual, but perhaps think about risking a few more tropical bog plants if you’re willing to risk the occasional freak deep freeze.

But for me, my back garden is a mix of clay, sand, part shade and deep shade from giant, ridiculous Leylandii. I’ve lived here for five years and in that time have seen a neighbour’s Birch perish, lost an old Laburnum and the following year another unidentified tree which had been overtaken by ivy, hit the deck. The Leylandii, however, are holding strong, sucking ever more water from the soil in their unstoppable efforts to grow taller than the actual sky. I’m relatively confident that, should the apocalypse come, the Leylandii will see through it all. Please do not in any way take this as a recommendation to plant a Leylandii. We’re all parched enough as it is.

My only recommendation, really, is to shop around. Garden centres are still serving up the same plants that sold well 20 years ago. Many of them are hydroponically raised and mass produced in air conditioned, perfect artificial conditions in factory-style nurseries before being shipped to the UK to die in your garden. Hydrangeas are gorgeous but in a hosepipe ban they would be doomed. Get in your car and visit some independent nurseries - and I’m not talking about your local branch of Dobbie’s. I’m talking about nurseries with horticulturists who propagate themselves, with division, seeds and cuttings, on-site. Who grow in the ground and have had to adapt like the rest of us. In the midlands, that means Ashwood Nurseries, or Claire Austin, or Bluebell Arboretum. If you don’t know where to start, check out the list on the Network of Exhibiting Nurseries.

Look at your neighbours’ gardens. What is doing well? What has perished? In my neighbourhood, it’s out with the Buxus (which is admittedly, another problem entirely) and in with Stipa tenuissima. Red valerian is thriving all over the place. Cotinus thrives, as does yew topiary - a fine replacement for all that caterpillar-munched box.

The next thing to do is trial plants in your garden. Buy small plants, and place them in different positions. It is only by doing this that I’ve really been able to test the limits of my beloved Hakonechloa, which is thriving in part shade close to the house (and the tap) but a withered, much smaller plant at the bottom of the garden in mostly shade, but with very little water. In a hosepipe ban, those far-away grasses will be the first to go. Once you’ve tested, learn. Move the plants to where they will be happiest.

I wish I could offer any more simple solution than this but I really don’t think there is one. Looking forward to balmy Barcelona days is a fool’s errand. We don’t have the air conditioning, the siesta culture or the relaxed temperament to cope - and our winters are likely to get even more wet and miserable as the climate shifts. But reading endless articles of doom and collapsing into despair also is not the answer.

If someone you love is dying, you hold their hand. It won’t stop them dying, but it will comfort both of you. So while gardening, and plant planning, will of course not stop climate change, it will at the very least give you, as a gardener, some comfort. There is a place for experimentation and planning with the knowledge that we have no certainty of what is really coming down the road. There is still a place to make small scale choices in our lives and gardens to support wildlife and biodiversity.

And there is also a place, I believe, to continue fighting, lobbying, writing for governments to make real changes to slow down the pace of climate disaster - even to stop it altogether. It is not over yet.

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Unlike the hot mess inside the house, my sun-bleached front garden is doing much better. You may remember that it is gravel on top of whatever was underneath before the previous residents put gravel on it. A mixture of builders sand, clay and topsoil. Some parts drain quickly, others sit in water when there are heavy downpours, so it has been a trial and error to see what survives not only the scorching summer heatwaves but also the biblical winter downpours. There is no tap in the front garden, and I am lazy. So plants get watered when they first go in the ground - and that’s it.

As it turns out, the plants that survive this are:

• Bearded irises

• Erigeron karvinskianus

• Oenothera lindheimeri

• Verbena bonariensis

• Stipa tenuissima

• Various hardy succulents, largely positioned on little gravel mounds so they never sit in water

• Annual, self-seeded Californian poppies which return each year

• Opium poppies

• Self seeded foxgloves (I’m a bit shocked about this, but while small, they are perfectly formed)

• Echinacea (even in the soggy bit! I have no idea how or why)

• Rudbeckia

• Hardy salvia

• Roman chamomile

• Creeping thyme

• Red Valerian (I didn’t plant this one - it planted itself)

• Armeria maritima

• Hardy geraniums

• Statice - ornamental sea lavender, grown from seed and planted out last year - meant to be an annual but it is proving to be perennial for some reason!

• Asters

• Sisyrinchium striatum

• Phlomis russeliana (it took three years to flower though)

• Species tulips

• Muscari

• Alliums

• Hollyhocks - I have a gorgeous red one flowering now, grown from scattered seed last autumn, and there are more seedling appearing

In the free-draining-only bits

• Lavender

• Rosemary

• Sage

• Oregano

What has not survived/is looking pretty iffy

• Euphorbias - I tried some Wulfenii and a purple variety. The purple one has struggled through but I think would prefer some shade (the ones I planted in my north facing back garden are much, much happier). The Wulfenii has flowered but refused to grow any new leaves. I’m waiting until the end of summer to see if it recovers.

• Sea lavender - I dreamed of the garden becoming a waving see of low-flowering purple flowers but the plants I bought in Norfolk have never come back

• Nepeta - never returned from last year

• Bronze fennel - I’ve tried planting it direct and throwing seeds, to no avail.

Needless to say, the dandelions are still, also, thriving. My plan now (well, not now, but later in the year when there is less risk of immediate death) is to bulk up the grasses, divide the iris tubers and allow more self-seeding. My main priority is hiding the hideous brickwork and all the leggy stems of the verbena and gaura.

But in the short-term, my focus is on making another iced coffee and finally getting on with client emails. May the weather gods be kind to you and your garden.

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If you look at social media accounts of people putting these masterpieces together you’d get the idea its one big laugh. And it is a laugh. It is tremendous fun. You make some great friends, everyone helps each other, you win an award (a gold, in my case), and when the show is open, you spend four days listening to people tell you how lovely your work is. But it is a vast amount of work - planning and physical graft. It is also a financial gamble - I used my savings to fund the whole thing and obviously couldn’t earn money while the show was on. And for me, it was also incredibly intense - to the point of being painful. One year on, while I’m so unbelievably happy for everyone who has built a garden this year, I don’t miss that intensity for one second.

My garden was extremely personal. It was a physical expression of a moment in grief. My dad died a few years ago, and at times, the grief felt so heavy I felt like I was being pulled underground. At the same time, my children were five and two and vividly, literally, bursting with life. The push-pull of utter devastation and the love of this new life was what my design was really about. It was a physical expression of an impossible feeling. I just didn’t realise how vulnerable I would feel building it in such a public place.

When I had my first baby I was a mess. I didn’t feel safe, and didn’t feel sane, and didn’t feel like I wanted to let go of him - ever. I sat on my hands when anyone held him, to resist the urge to snatch him back into my arms. It was a dizzy, intense, horrible sensation and to my shock, it returned that day the show opened, when suddenly hoards of people arrived, absent-mindedly stroking the grass, poking the moss and wiggling their fingers in the bird bath.

Please don’t get me wrong. Most people were incredibly kind,and complimentary, and generous. But after a run-in with a pair of drunk women who thought my creeping thyme was a seat for them to perch on while enjoying a cigarette, I went into high alert and couldn’t get out of it until the show closed. Eventually the organisers made ‘DO NOT SIT ON THE BORDERS’ signs and the public started to police themselves but that initial run-in really did put a dampener on the whole experience for me.

The other thing about doing a show somewhere as public as Gardener’s World Live is the TV cameras. On that first day, arriving at opening time, one of my border neighbours texted me to hurry up, as they were filming in our area. But when I got there, the film crews were wrapping up on a garden next to mine, with no interest in my strange little artwork that meant so much to me. Suddenly that gold medal didn’t feel so special after all.

That’s the thing about these big shows. Unless you win the best medal, and the extra prizes for being best in your category, or people’s choice; unless you’re the garden that gets on the TV - you always feel second best. And if you’ve created a piece of your soul on that little patch of earth, that will always feel a little bit painful. It’s stupid, I know. The cameras go for the garden with whatever they deem as the best story, or that will create the best frame for presenters to walk through. They want something different, something relatable. And that can never include every garden.

Of course, much like when you have a baby, the chances are when you’ve finished a show garden you haven’t had any sleep. I had barely slept for days. That fizzing adrenaline gets you to the finish line and then starts to crash just as the public turn up. A few weeks later - and now a year later - I can see how much I achieved, how magical it all was, and what has come out of it.

Doing that border gave me proof (I’m always a bit of a sceptic) about my own abilities. I felt like I had a seat at the table with ‘real’ designers and horticulturists. Like I could be taken seriously in this world of plants, and that the huge risk I took in taking up this new career was going to be worth it. A very kind photographer I befriended on judging day sent me some lovely photos of my border which I used to create business cards. It helped me win a bursary place with the London College of Garden Design - I’ll start their plant design diploma in January 2027. And it gave me the confidence to take the leap and go it alone a few months ago. So I’m not saying ‘don’t do it’. I’m glad I did it. But I suppose what I’m saying is, if you like the idea of making a show garden, be aware of how hard it is going to be. Put things in place so you can recover. Ask for help. Have a rest. And if you have no desire to put yourself through this, but you do like to go to garden shows - please be kind. The designers you meet might be all smiles and fancy dresses; it may look like they’ve done this without even trying. But that’s their baby you’re looking at. Please don’t sit on it.

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The car park at Tremenheere Sculpture Park in Cornwall is like no other car park I’ve ever seen. Separating the parking bays are deep stone walls and from them, rising like alien species, are aeoniums of every colour along with rock roses, grasses, and rhododendrons. A slice of surreal planting if ever I saw one and for good reason, as this glorious place is also home to the Surreal Succulents nursery. This incredible company have rightly won several Chelsea gold medals for their stunning displays of succulents spilling out of wide planters. And that sunny day in Cornwall planted a seed that, a few years later, started to grow into my own burgeoning succulent obsession.

I was a bit intimidated by aeoniums at first, thinking anything that looks so spectacular must be incredibly difficult to grow, but reader, let me tell you, aeoniums - and succulents in general - are a gift to the lazy gardener. They thrive on utter neglect. And what’s more, they’re fantastic house plants and an incredible comfort when - like now - it feels like the sky will never be blue and clear again.

At the moment, all of my succulents - and their babies - are nestled happily on windowsills around my house. In the summer, the bigger ones will go outside. You can plant them into a dry-ish, full sun border, or just have a lovely pot display on your balcony or front doorstep. Bring them in when frost is likely. Use gritty, free draining soil. And don’t water them very much.

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Anyone who has learned not to kill houseplants will assure you that overwatering is the most common cause of accidental death. So instead of recommending a frequency for watering, I let myself be led by the plant. You can stick your finger in the soil and water only when it’s bone dry. But for succulents, I prefer to be led by the plants themselves. Once aeoniums have lost their lovely sheen, and the leaves look a little soft, that tells me they need a drink. Accepted wisdom is that they go dormant in the winter but actually, in the warmth of my house, mine tend to keep going and actually pause their growth in the hottest summer months.

Much to my husband’s irritation, I like to give all my houseplants a lovely soak in the bath - overnight, if possible. This way, with the plug in, their soil gets completely saturated. I then let the water drain away completely and put all the plants back - they NEVER get left sitting in water.

And now, like a giddy grandparent, I want to tell you about all the babies. To propagate aeoniums, you need to be brutal. It is alarmingly simple to create an entirely new plant - you just snip off a branch. But unlike the fussy business of outdoor cuttings - all that nonsense with plastic bags and misters - you just leave the branch out, in the air, because you actively want the cut end to dry out and callous over. You can leave it a day, a few days or even a week before planting the whole thing into a new pot with gritty, free draining compost. I tend to water a little, to make sure the soil is settled, but I don’t give a lot of water as there won’t be any roots to take it up for a few weeks at least. You can do this at any time of year, but I find the winter months a busier period largely because I can do it inside, in the warm.

My aeonium babies are not the only infants in my tiny succulent nursery. Daniel, head gardener at Middleton Hall, where I’ve been working part time for the last year, has a vast collection of echeverias and other succulents and I learned from him that to propagate these is an even easier activity - it just takes patience. Simply take a leaf from the plant - they’re likely to fall off when repotting anyway - and leave it on top of some gritty compost. And that’s it. The leaf will eventually sprout leaves, or roots, or both, and will burrow its way into the soil below. This knowledge has, unfortunately, led to a drastic reduction in windowsill space but my kids are delighted to have their bedroom windows turned into micro nurseries.

What staggers me is that I have actually seen plastic versions of succulents for sale recently. That’s right. Plastic versions of the lowest maintenance plant you could possibly imagine. Hopefully, if you’ve ever been tempted to go the plastic way, this little blog might make you think again. Please give it a go. Just remember to use gritty, free draining compost and let your succulents dry out between waterings, and they’ll give you year round reasons to be cheerful even on the greyest February Tuesday.

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You might remember my post about this accidental gravel garden from last year and friends, I’m so happy to tell you that the plants are making it work (as far as anything works in January). They’ve got some more friends now, too2. Leftover from my Gardener’s World Live show garden were a few pots of Stipa tenuissima which have given the space some movement, along with strategically placed self seeded lavender; The ever-useful and indestructible Erigeron karvinskianus flowered its socks off over the autumn and has set seed all over the place. A tiny little Stachys byzantina ballooned into several plants which I have split and replanted across the space. And after chucking a few Verbena bonariensis seeds around, they decided they quite fancy this strange little plot so popped up in ever-growing numbers well into the autumn. Already this year, they’re showing fresh signs of growth.

Unusually for me, I appear to be bang on trend. The world of horticulture has been getting ever fonder of growing in inhospitable substrates. Perhaps the world’s best designers have been sneaking trips to Sutton Coldfield to steal my ideas? Last summer, Nigel Dunnett’s Hospitalfield Arts garden was planted into enormous sand dunes at RHS Chelsea. I adored The Grant Horticulture’s Xeriscape garden at RHS Woodford Woodhouse. But nature itself is really the best gardener. In Norfolk last July, summer, in between giving myself concussion on the doorframes of our miniature holiday cottage, I developed a healthy obsession with sea lavender on the walk to Holkham Beach.

Never short of completely unrealistic ambition, I tracked down Natural Surroundings plant nursery near our cottage in Holt and picked up my very own Sea Lavender to take home, in an attempt to replicate the stunning wildness of Holkham on my ugly patch of suburban gravel.

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If you’ve read any of my posts you’ll know that I haven’t been blessed with a very generous amount of realism but hear me out - I do think my Sutton Coldfield garden has a lot of seaside planting potential. Yes, it is nowhere near the sea whatsoever but it is in full sun, very exposed to the wind that runs down the hill and has impoverished, free draining gravel and sand to grow in. Basically it’s a driveway that wants to be the seaside. Armeria maritima or Sea Thrift, which grows along the cliffs and rocks in Cornwall, thrives in my gravelly garden, as does Centranthus Ruber, also commonly found along the coast. Basically, any plants that like tough, rocky soil, full sun and very infrequent watering are delighted to be there. Rosemary, Lavender, Thyme and Oregano have been settling in, seeding and filling the space in the the free draining soil, and Oenothera Lindheimeri, which I transferred in last year, kept on flowering all the way to December. My allium trial of Christophii bulbs went very well earlier in the spring, too. So why shouldn’t Sea Lavender join the party?

Next on my hit list are Hollyhocks - I pinched a couple of seed heads from a delightful specimen growing in a pavement crack on holiday and those of that fancy thistle, Eryngium. At my work we have a brilliant, bright blue one which is constantly buzzing with bees all summer long. I’ve planted a wider variety of alliums to give colour throughout the summer, and one mizzly November morning last year threw hundreds of species tulips into holes in the gravel, too.

I took a note of all the saved seeds I scattered around haphazardly over the space last autumn. If I can find more with a chance of survival, I’ll be throwing them down too. It’s all very survival of the fittest, but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that some of the following will be popping up in the space this spring:

• Aquilegia saved from the back garden

• Opium poppies

• Sea lavender

• Bronze Fennel - specifically in the soil-over-slate section as opposed to the gravel-over-sand (i tried that area already and it did not work at all)

• Verbascum

• Hollyhocks

• Eryngium

• Echinops

One thing I do sadly, have to admit is that after years of neglect, the garden is absolutely stuffed with weed seeds. I do find the weeds to be less of an issue than in earlier years, as they now have much stronger competition, but my general method is to blitz a specific weed, like a dandelion, in one go, before it sets seed. This hour or so tends of coincide with a bout of planting at the same time because I find weeding for the sake of pure tidiness unbearably dull. This way, I have been doubly rewarded for my efforts, and the new planty competition gradually seems to be keeping the less welcome guests at lower numbers.

Do you have any other suggestions for a space like this? I’d love to hear them. Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read my ramblings. I truly appreciate every like, and a comment really does make my day.

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The poor little car - my late Dad’s VW, in fact - was stuck in the middle of our steeply sloping road, wheels spinning. My husband had summoned me out to help but in his infinite wisdom kept the car window closed while he made panicked, irrational driving decisions, so I was having to yell ‘REVERSE UP THAT DRIVE’ at the top of my lungs like a complete lunatic. I thought he’d reverse up the opposite drive and then park up on the kerb, or come back into our driveway, but instead he pootled off downhill to the steepest, slipperiest part of the entire street - the part where cars all end up crashing into each other - and got himself stuck again.

Eventually he managed to reverse onto the kerb - one wheel on, one wheel off but with all the wheels spinning hopelessly and a van directly parked downhill of the car there weren’t very many other options. Later that day I kept finding him missing from the house - he’d spotted an impending crash as passing Amazon drivers also got themselves stuck in the same spot and had been helping to push the van out of the way. I did not sleep very well last night. We will not be attempting to move the car in the ice again.

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It is faintly ridiculous, with really only a few inches of snow, to be so completely stranded by relatively predictable winter weather. In a way, it is quite nice to be so beholden to the whims of the seasons. If it snows, there just is no option to leave. And for a few days, it’s nice to check out from the world, build a snowman with the kids, bake some biscuits and trudge down to the park to pull a sled around.

I had returned to work a few days before the snow fell - but it was a brutal return. I’d had weeks off over Christmas and my body had gone soft. Two full days of raking, and cutting, and dragging branches to make way for a new dead hedge had my arms screaming and my brain questioning my life choices.

Gardening as a career is a brutal one in January. It is about survival. It isn’t really the cold - anyone can pull on a few layers. But there are tricks to get around the chill which creeps into wet gloves and bites at cold toes under chilled rubber. I layer cheap supermarket woolen gloves beneath gardening gloves. My boots - I’m on my third pair in as many weeks as they all keep leaking - now have the secret weapon of chemical foot warmers nestled above my toes. The tricks will get you so far, along with bowls of hot soup, hot coffee, herbal tea (dehydration is arguably a bigger risk as it’s easier to forget about water in the cold) and very hot baths after work. But they can’t mitigate the fact it just isn’t spring yet. They can’t make the sun rise any earlier. There are a few green shoots, but the presiding colour is brown - or white. The walled garden has been strimmed to the ground. Sound echoes around the empty space. There is beauty in the frosty mornings but there is also a mild terror in driving to work over black ice. In January, the flowers feel so very far away.

Still, with the whims of climate change, the day after the snow melted the temperature shot to 11C and stayed pretty warm all last week. I’ll be making the most of this springlike winter weather before the next icy blast arrives and when it does, I’ll stay indoors and tend to my succulents. Over the last year I’ve amassed a small collection, and that is set to grow as I cannot resist propagating more. The plan is to have two or three big pots of the mother plants on display, and slowly propagate their babies from leaf and stem cuttings. Later this year, if I have enough, I’ll take them to a craft market to sell along with dried flowers from the garden. They might become a little side hustle - but for now, they are a way of keeping myself sane while the soil is too cold to get my hands into.

Wherever you are, I hope you have enough food, and heating, and that you - and your plants - are finding ways to survive this, the very bleakest month of the year.

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Over the last few days the temperature has hovered just above freezing in daylight hours. Our north-facing garden has been cold enough to watch a bubble freeze before your eyes (highly recommend trying this if you have kids) - but without enough snow to make even a miniature snowman-building session a distant possibility.

Thankfully for a few hours yesterday afternoon, the thaw set in for long enough for us to travel to and from my new favourite place - a roller disco at my local leisure centre.

I stumbled across this modern marvel (£6 per person! Including skates!) after reaching peak school holiday cabin fever. Miraculously, this event takes place every WEEK at my local leisure centre and is far preferable to the faffy and frankly terrifying option of skating on actual ice. My daughter’s body, it turns out, turns immediately to jelly one skates are put on her little feet. So we took it in turns to help her wobble around the hall, safe in the knowledge that we had both feet securely on the ground.

The music was 90s, the lights were dark, the disco lights were on and reader, it transformed a smelly sports hall and home of many much-despised children’s birthday parties into a veritable wonderland in which I could wobble around myself for a bit and forget that I am a responsible adult. All of this, and cheap.

It shouldn’t be such a miracle to discover such a thing but honestly, with all the gardens closed in January, I find myself a bit bereft of easy days out. Gardens have long been my safe place with kids. Non garden people with kids assume this is a totally mad idea and force themselves to soft play and trampoline centres instead. Surely, they assume, kids won’t find a bunch of flowers in a bed interesting? Generally, they don’t. But show them a pyramid made of topiary that they can walk into (I’m looking at you Buddulph) and they’ll be chomping at the bit. A giant metal beehive (Kew), Giant stepping stones (Winterbourne), a rope bridge through the jungle (Lost Gardens of Heligan), a triple whammy of playground, giant towering perinnail tunnels and a boat trip (Trentham); or sculptures you can climb on at the home of Surreal Succulants in Cornwall (Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens). Gardens are HEAVEN with kids. Except in January, when they are all closed.

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And so, for the family, a weekly trip to the roller disco will be what will get us through.

I’m back at work on Wednesday after a rather ridiculous chunk of time off, which wasn’t really time off, because I was fulfilling the job of Santa and have still not been recompensed for my time.

I have been checking the forecast nervously. A dry crisp day will mean tree and wisteria pruning. Wet will mean tedious filling in of spreadsheets - part of the work we have set out in an ambitious bid to start trading our own plants. A near month indoors has made me soft. I’ve started waking up at the time I normally arrive at work. I have become unaccustomed to wearing more than one pair of trousers at any given time. But I will prepare soup, and set my alarm, and if my road will let me, I will scrape the ice off the car and get myself back in the gardens.

At home, with my garden frozen solid there isn’t a lot to be doing outside, so I will be comforting myself with my indoor plant obsessions. Over the last year I have steadily accumulated a collection of aeoniums along with a few echivereas and other succulants I cannot name. My plan is to propegate a sturdy bunch of them to sell later in the year at small, local markets along with dried flower arrangements from the garden. I also want to consolidate the many small pots into a few large displays - but to do this, I will need the temperature outside to warm significantly before I can start uprooting the poor things.

After last year’s veritable stinkbomb I will not be growing any paperwhite Narcissi but I do have two Hippeastrum bulbs I am trying to coax back to life again. One has sent up a confident leaf tip and the other is stubbornly refusing to budge. I have surrounded the bulbs with sticks of corkscrew hazel to offer support and decorative interest and I hope that their rapid growth will keep me cheered enough to survive until things begin to move in earnest in the garden outside.

My alarm is set for 7am tomorrow when it will be pitch black. I look forward to the day when the light comes in time for me to wake; when I can drink my first cup of tea in the garden, inspecting the change which will come so slowly at first and then begin to race upwards as the light returns.

For now, though, we are in the depths of it. So here’s to January, with three layers of trousers, dark mornings and afternoons, but the blissful (to me at least) lack of festive pressure. To wobbling around roller discos, long baths, racing Hippeastrums, and the knowledge that dawn will start ever so slightly earlier every single day. However you plan to hunker down this winter, I hope you find some comfort in it.

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After a bit of a whirlwind work year with writing gigs, show gardens and intense hard slog at a historic garden I was craving the quiet of December - but December is a strange beast. The urge to hunker down struck in November, as the days started to shrink away at quickening speed. The last of the asters finished flowering, the dying back settled in in earnest (except, weirdly, for some of my annuals like calendula, which are still going strong) and I just wanted to get indoors. So with a bit of planning and a lot of annual leave, I slowed my work schedule to Christmas wreath workshops which ended in early December, with the ambition of cosying down indoors for a few weeks.

The idea was to create a calm, relaxing festive countdown, but in a note to myself in future years - such a thing does not exist. After all the drinks, the school things, the juggles with illnesses, the buying, wrapping, panicking; the frantic trekking to butchers for beef bones to make gravy without with Christmas would be RUINED; the inevitable emotions which come along when you’re an adult, missing people who are no longer here, in the run up to this most dejavousy of holidays; there wasn’t much time for resting. The best I could hope for was a long hot bath. Then all of a sudden, December 24 flew into the end of Boxing Day and we were left with two over-excited kids, weeks until schools open again, no money and NO GARDENS TO VISIT.

Perhaps its a hangover from all the lockdowns, but my brain goes a bit funny with extended periods of the kids off school. Unlike many of my peers who seem to have unlimited funds to swan off skiing or to the Cotswolds or to some great pile in the country with friends from university rugby teams, once the presents are done in our house that’s kind of… it. And just like lockdown, my solution is to drag the kids for another ‘exciting’ walk in the park. Other than that, we tend to bribe our poorer friends with kids (the ones who do not have a country house to visit) to come and eat with us so their children will play with ours.

Have you seen the price of doing ANYTHING over Christmas? ‘Festive’ (i.e. one hour) ice skating at our local rink comes in at £85 for four of us.

Still, this slightly restless, cosy world is where I want to be. Work whatsapps are hidden; Instagram is removed. I am not ready to re-enter the world just yet but I’m getting a bit fed up of my hiding place.

Naturally, my solution to all of these uncomfortable truths has been to dig up some more of my lawn. All the pictures I have shared of my garden have until now been of its best side - the more attractive left side - the one I look at from the living room window. The right side, with its collapsing fence and ridiculous leylandii, have been ignored and abandoned for the last few years. But after a particularly stressful few days in the run-up to Christmas Eve, I decided the time had come to launch an official attack.

I had been thinking about this for a while. I’d spray painted two curving lines on the lawn to convince my husband that we could definitely sacrifice a paltry bit of grass and so, after weeks of rain, it felt right to get my half moon spade out and start to make this border a reality.

I’m doing my usual sort-of-no-dig method - by which I mean, directly planting shrubs and perennials directly into holes dug in the grass, with the intention of later mulching the gaps with cardboard and then more compost. The most significant addition is my gorgeous Cornus kousa, which was surplus to requirements for my Gardener’s World show garden and has been waiting patiently for me to work out where the hell to put it for the last six months. Joining this gorgeous multi-stem specimen have been three Anemanthe lessonianas, unceremoniously dug up and divided from elsewhere in the garden, along with Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, Dryopteris ‘Jurassic Gold’, some more perky persicarias which will give a lush splash of colour at the end of the summer. I’ve also planted a tiny little prunus ‘Kojo no mai’ which I’ve had in a pot for the last three years.

I haven’t even mulched it yet but I am sure this will be a vast improvement. With bare grass and low light, the sun has nothing to catch in much of our north facing garden. But with taller grasses or in this case the bare Cornus branches, the light had something to catch on to. Suddenly the garden doesn’t look quite so dark after all.

Last night we drank fizzy wine and toasted the end of this strange, ever-changing year. Today we met another parent with her daughter and the kids chased each other around the park on their bikes. We got soaked, but we also got out of the house, which made me feel much better. Today, despite the dark and the rain, those minutes of daylight will carry on inching their way later and later into the afternoon. All of a sudden, not too far from now, it will start to feel like the spring. Happy new year everyone.

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Time speeds up in November. Once the Halloween pumpkins are safely in the compost the speed of the lengthening darkness seems to accelerate until now, as we somehow are perched at the doorway of December, the day feels almost finished by lunchtime.

I started gardening professionally in November and it was the worst time to do it. All that raking, the plants shutting down and driving home in the dark. But it was also the best time to start because if I could handle November, I could handle anything. Especially on that first shift when the client’s cat ate my much-needed sandwich1.

Four years on and I still want to down tools and hibernate. From Friday, my main paid work for the next few weeks will be wreath workshops. I will be running four of them and am packed with nerves, but the practise of collecting foliage from the grim outdoors and taking them in to make something lovely is something that brings me comfort every year.

I know there are jobs to be done outside. But the darkness makes me lazy. I have planted most of my bulbs already - hundreds of species tulips in my gravel front garden which will, I hope burst forth in solid drifts of colour just as the rest of the perennials start to wake up. Gone are my years of bulb lasagnes. they’re lovely, and make a great gift, and they’re invaluable if you live in a flat and have limited space. But these days I want anything I buy for the garden to be forever, or at least, for more than a few years. So I opt for bulbs that will naturalise, not require throwing away. This might sound pious but really, most things that are better for the planet in the garden happen to be more cost effective or less physical effort. My beds, when I can drag myself out into the grey, will be mulched with the straggly perennials which are starting to look too tatty. They call it ‘chop and drop’. Apparently it is excellent for the soil, and for creatures - but its also just a lot less effort than carrying it all to the compost bin. There will be no raking of the leaves on my lawn. At some point, if it’s ever dry enough, I’ll just mow it, and pull up any stragglers with the cut grass for the compost. But that’s as far as my effort will go.

I think I’m very influenced by the sunlight. A bright day has me itching to get outside, dig out some lawn, divide some perennials. But this dull grey has me feeling listless and unsure of what to do with the rare pockets of spare time I have between work and children. Today I gave my office a tidy - a small act of self care which had me discovering show garden sketches, contracts, certificates and seed catalogues. A lovely way to reflect on this last, intense, crazy year.

That’s the thing about the impending darkness. While it makes me dozy, and slow, the pause in the garden creates the chance to stop and reflect. And there’s a risk that in the mad rush of May, not stopping, not resting, will eventually lead my body to go on strike in some way and force me into convalescence. So I’m trying to embrace the quiet time while it’s here. Plus, I have more bulbs arriving tomorrow and with them, the annual arrival of that specific nagging guilt as I will inevitably put off planting them until the last possible second.

I shall unveil a few of my disasters for you now. Feel free to share your own. We can always blame climate change and hold our horticultural heads up high.

1. Pathetic pumpkins

I did grow a nice little pumpkin, once. It appeared all by itself - I assume from a discarded Jack o Lantern in the compost which ended up as mulch. It spread across the lawn in search of the vanishing light and furnished me with a small, very halloweeny pumpkin just in time for the end October.

But every time I have actually tried to grow a pumpkin on purpose has ended in humiliation. This was never more the case when I was actually employed to grow vegetables for a real restaurant, keeping quiet that I had only passed the veg part of my RHS diploma by the skin of my teeth2. Brassicas proved to be my main foe (more on that later) but I was pretty confident of my cucurbit abilities and pledged to have pumpkins spilling out of pots, sprawling from raised beds and generally turn the growing area into some kind of All Hallows paradise.

This, regrettably, was 2024. The year when the sun shone about three times. The year when I actually started weeping when I checked the weather one dismal spring morning. The weather did not much improve by mid summer and pumpkins, it turns out, didn’t enjoy it any more than I did. The growing site was a bit odd - largely shaded, sandy soil - but I’d been making barrows of compost enriched with chicken bedding and manure and the newest, longest grow bed seemed like it would be a sure bet. After all the courgettes in it were spilling all over the place.

I also tried growing pumpkins in the polytunnel and had some excellent wavy vines curling all over the place but actual fruits? Only one, dear reader. This one.

Cute, isn’t it? I patiently cleared the leaves, nestled it into some straw and waited for the magic to happen. Instead, a mouse happened. I arrived to work to find the whole thing absolutely gone. I produced a grand sum of zero pumpkins and am frankly mystified about how anyone else managed to do it. Pumpkin growers, whatever your witchcraft is, I salute you.

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2. Sad Sambucas

What is the problem with this poor little Sambucas? It is three years old. It is apparently happy in pretty much all soils. Except for mine. It has been mulched, it is in part sun and it had some decent dunks of water over the summer. But still it shrivels.

My best guestimate is that it is a bit fed up with the aster - as are most of the plants in my garden - and needs more room, a decent mulch - a bit of love and attention, essentially. So that’s my plan for the autumn, but I do hope I won’t be telling you about its imminent demise in a year’s time. Unlike the other casualties in my garden at least this tree isn’t actually big enough to fall over yet.

3. Drunk gaura

The bottomless brunch of planting decisions. Just because you can put a plant in part shade and it won’t die doesn’t mean it is a good idea. Gaura is one of those plants that nurseries and garden centres claim can handle shade and they can - they will even flower. But they will flower in a really annoying, falling down drunk fashion. I managed to grow mine from seed and was delighted they grew so readily but the grand late summer finale was rather spoiled by the fact they looked like such a mess.

There is a happy ending to this tale though. I just dug them all up and put them in my very sun loving gravel garden where they are standing up all by themselves like the upstanding members of society that we knew they were all along.

4. The mystery of the vanishing echinacea

It’s not a mystery really. They just don’t like my garden. Grown again, lovingly and naively, from seed on the windowsill of our house during Covid. Into the ground in our new house they went, where they sat with nothing but leaves for the first whole year. Imagine my excitement the following year for the forthcoming explosion in bright, peppy blooms. It would look exactly like Trentham, surely!

Reader, I got two flowers and the following winter the whole lot completely disappeared. Perhaps they tunnelled under the ground to find an actual Piet Oudolf setting and not my sad little imitation. More likely, they just didn’t like the weather and my soil, and felt it would be preferable to just die than sit through another year of it.

Because I am an idiot, I bought more Echinaceas this summer, where I’ll be trialling in my full sun gravel garden in the hope that treating them mean will keep them if not keen, but perhaps still in existence. I am not feeling confident.

5. Bare roots

Bare roots are better for the planet than buying pot-grown plants. They come in paper packaging with no soil, you bung them in the ground and by the summer, presto, you have gorgeous perennials thriving in your garden.

Unless you realise halfway through the year that you planted them upside down.

I still do not have any Echinops.

6. Not very perennial chillies

Anyone studying horticulture will undoubtedly have a bit of a cocky phase. ‘Oh, its only an annual in our stupid climate’, we tell ourselves, feeling a bit pleased about global warming all of a sudden. ‘If I can only trick it into thinking we live in Mexico it will just go dormant and reappear’. The first year, this actually did work with some seed grown chillies. They stayed on a warm windowsill and really did flower and fruit again the following year. But after that, they’d had enough. So its back to the tedious seed sowing this January for me.

7. My ‘home grown’ show garden plants

Show garden newbies have an adorable naivity. They will grow many of the plants themselves, they will claim, not taking into account the fact spring will not arrive until the first day of the build, and that they are not a professional nursery, or even have a functional greenhouse. Earlier this week I finished planting out some of the hundreds of alliums I had painstakingly potted into compost last winter for my summer show border. Three of them actually flowered in time. Out of 30. Now Autumn is coming they are all shooting out roots again so I think they are alive - just had a bit of stagefright. Hopefully they’ll feel brave enough to perform for me next spring when a gold medal is not depending on them.

8. Frostbitten salvia

Salvias. Roses. Clematis. All three of these plants have me in a perpetual state of confusion no matter how many times Monty explains it. Roses and clematis at least have a variety of types and rules on pruning which my hyperactive little brain refuses to pay attention to. But the only issue with salvias is understanding if they are hardy or not. If they’re not hardy, they need to come into the greenhouse in the winter, or possibly onto a window ledge. I know this, and yet my salvias still never seem to make it. Naturally I’ve just bought a tender one because it was discounted and I’m going to wrap it up in wool and keep it in the greenhouse just so I can experience that crushing disappointment next spring when it bites the dust.

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9. The wrong trees

Please don’t judge me for humblebragging about my show garden. But this summer I created my first show garden, and it won a gold medal. But it would have been a platinum had not I chosen The Wrong Trees.

I chose the wrong trees because the nursery who kindly offered to lend me trees (unlike all the others who wanted me to buy them for several hundred pounds each in the expectation I could somehow sell them without owning a van for delivery, or having any actual money) were visiting their supplier on a day when I had to look after my kids.

So the trees they chose weren’t exactly what I was after, which was dainty multi stemmed Cornus Kousas. Instead they bought striking but chunky Cornus Kousas. They were absolutely stunning, and one of them was so enormous it would have overwhelmed the border so I got them to deliver it to my house instead. This was not a failure. It’s bloody gorgeous and I can’t wait to plant it.

My show garden was all about the relationship between the end of life and new beginnings of it. In the centre was a log spiral (one of the casualties of my own garden) rotting down, with plants growing up through the logs. The log bit, and the plants, made loads of sense. But the trees were chosen because 1. They were free, 2, They were trees and 3. They would look pretty in June, when the show was.

My final walk around the garden after the build. I walked three miles every day during the build inspecting that little square!

All through the build I kept roping passing landscapers into helping me twist the pots and rearrange them and all through the build I knew the trees, while gorgeous, weren’t quite right. I hoped nobody would notice. The judges did notice. Immediately. They told me they were too striking for the rest of the planting scheme, and their effect jarred with the rest of the story. They could see what I could not, which was that I’d chosen them for all the wrong reasons. And for that reason I didn’t get a platinum, but a gold medal instead. It made no difference to the public. Literally the only thing anyone would ask me was what those gorgeous trees were.

10. Basically all brassicas

We all know how ridiculous food prices have become. But while my husband grumbles at the tripling price of humble basics like cabbage and broccoli, I can’t help but feel it is justified. Growing brassicas without them being swallowed whole by any passing creature is, in my view, nothing short of a complete miracle. This may, possibly, be connected to how badly I did in that fruit and veg RHS exam.

But reader, I really tried. I bought the poshest mesh. I pinned it down. I put wool and ash around to keep slugs off. Still they persisted. My pak choi was a massacre. The cabbages - well they actually did keep going but they were packed with slugs and never seemed to be ready to eat. Cauliflower was a complete disaster, I lost count of how many turnips bolted. Broccoli stood no chance.

I will say thought that Cavolo nero - that fabulous dark leaved brassica essential for a ribollita or good minestrone - was sturdy, frost proof and pretty much bug proof. It could withstand a nibble and keep going, with a steady supply of un-nibbled winter leaves. I also found rainbow chard to be similarly indestructible but that’s probably because it’s not a brassica and also because nobody apart from me seemed to actually like it.

So that’s it. My personal horticultural house of horrors. Next time I promise to stop wallowing and tell you something useful. I’m thinking about my growing aeonium collection and how propagation has allowed me to stick to my promise not to buy any more houseplants (but have more houseplants anyway). Have a good week!

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1. Plastic plants

You do not need a plastic fern in your toilet. You do not need a plastic carpet in your garden which will, in just a few years, go on to leech toxins into a landfill site for longer than any of us will be alive. You do not need plastic lavender in your living room slowly warping and fading in the dusty afternoon sunlight. There are perfectly reasonable alternatives for all of these tacky, tasteless, biologically poisonous monuments of bad taste and they are called real plants.

If a fern will not grow in your toilet, because you have no windows, just put in a picture instead, or a bowl of potpourri, or some extra loo rolls, or a witty book, or dried flowers, or a candle, or that spray for when you’ve done a poo and you want to pretend you don’t do that sort of thing. Nobody will believe that you have defied all laws of nature to keep that fern alive. They will only think ‘oh, that’s a plastic plant’ and respect you just a little bit less.

I am aware that the current mad climactic situation is making most lawns look a bit shit in the summer but at least by the autumn they will grow back, unlike the sheets of plastic which will fade, warp, and require an industrial cleaner to remove fox excrement.

2. Shit in our rivers

Since April I have been working part time at a beautiful historic garden. It is surrounded by a lake and a moat and that moat, reader, is at times, fluorescent green and frothing with human excrement. This is because further upstream, a water company has dumped a literal shit load of sewage into the water. We have reported it to the Environment Agency, and now we just have to wait for it to wash away. I suppose that by the time it washes away we’ll be gifted with a whole new load of it.

On holiday in Norfolk this summer at the pristine, stunning Holkham beach, I had to drag my kids out of the water where they were watching a curious seal because a wet wipe and that same suspicious sewagey foam was making its way straight for us.

The River Wye, where I used to canoe as a child, is being slowly murdered by intensive poultry farm runoff and illegal sewage dumps. One of the many reasons I voted Labour in the last election was their promise to force water companies to stop illegal untreated sewage dumps. In July this year it emerged such dumps had gone up by 60%. I know that things take time, but as the days, weeks and years tick by, water bosses are getting richer while our entire ecosystem is being poisoned. 1

3. Completely false claims about compostable materials

   

Composting gives me a sense of calm in this hideously polluted world and also makes me feel a bit better about my kids demanding I buy fruit that they then refuse to eat. But that joyful moment of compost harvest has been spoiled on many occasion by the discovery of ‘compostable’ teabags in pristine condition.

The reality is, if it looks like plastic and feels like plastic, it will not break down in your compost bin. This stuff is not compostable unless you have some kind of industrial composting machine and in my view that means it really isn’t compostable at all, it’s biodegradable. Everything is biodegradable, even cans and plastic bottles, eventually. But for something to compost in any meaningful or useful way, it should break down into usable, friable compost which will be full of happy little pink worms and will help your plants to grow. Funnily enough, recycled cotton is ideal for this purpose, but tea manufacturers seem absolutely intent on this fake biodegradable plastic nonsense.

The only exception to this rule seems to be the manufacturers of Clipper tea, who still use cotton bags which disappear completely in my compost bin. All the others seem to find the idea completely beyond the whit of man. Which means they just don’t want to pay for it.

4. Pointless bird feeders

There is so much greenwashing in the world of gardening and bird feeding is among the worst of the culprits. Yes, it’s lovely to have birds flocking to feed in your garden but if you aren’t careful you could very easily also poison them. Not that your local garden centre would tell you. The RSPB has now stopped selling flat bird feeders due to the risks of disease but you can still snap one up literally all over the place.

I gave up on all shapes of bird feeders long ago due to the fact they fed not only cute little birds but also fat, shitting pigeons and hoards of aggressive squirrels. However, I have plenty of cute little birds in my winter all winter because I mulch the soil with compost so it is full of worms; I leave seedheads and twig piles to encourage bugs and critters and let the birds help themselves. I also leave horticultural wool on the ground over my dahlias which the birds peck away for their nests in the spring. The garden has more than enough to feed the birds over winter without adding yet more plastic rubbish into the mix which will likely help to kill them.

6. Loud, ill-informed, shouty gardening influencers

A parent asked about houseplant advice on our class Whatsapp last week. I suggested he buy a copy of The Plant Rescuer by Sarah Gerrard Jones, as this book genuinely helped me to stop killing and start propagating my now rather alarmingly large collection of house plants.

Another parent immediately posted a link to some unhinged, shouting lunatic who seemed unable to keep his phone still and insisted on taking a ‘house plant’ (unidentified - apparently all house plants are the same) out of its pot and replanting it amongst porridge oats and Epsom salts. This mad combination would apparently revive any house plant, regardless of whether it is a drought loving cactus or a bog loving fern and has been overwatered, underwatered, left in the dark or on top of a radiator. I suppose that this ridiculous, uninformed rubbish is why so many people are giving up and putting plastic ferns in their toilets. If you’re not sure, look on the RHS website or if you really can’t be bothered, DM me and I’ll point you in the right direction. If someone is yelling their head off, chances are they’re talking complete shit2.

7. Painted heathers

At this time of year supermarkets across the land suddenly start stocking a range of perfectly normal heathers that have been inexplicably spray painted bright pink, yellow or green. Nobody knows why they do this, or who buys them. What I do know is they will inevitably die due to being unable to photosynthesise, or being placed inside next to a radiator by someone who thinks they’re made of plastic.

8. Military haircuts on shrubs

Across the land, an army of hedge trimming cowboys prowl neighbourhoods in bashed up vans. They claim to be gardeners, landscapers or even designers. In truth, they are just men who own vans and hedge trimmers, and have no idea how to use either of them correctly. No tree or shrub in my neighbourhood is safe. I’ve seen Japanese maples, Magnolias, Ornamental currants and bright yellow Forsythia sculpted into the same shapeless blobs. They don’t look good and they often don’t flower because these idiots don’t know the right time to prune them. Their dead, diseased and damaged branches are never removed so they slowly die from the inside out.

If you need a gardener, I’d strongly advise looking for someone who is horticulturally trained. You can find such a gardener by searching the Gardener’s Guild. These gardeners will know their shrubs, understand how to care for them and will leave them strong, healthy and looking good for years to come. Horticulture is a real skill. It is not the same as taking out a doorstep loan and blowing the lot in B&Q.

9. Flags in front gardens

Want to be patriotic and support your country? Great! Get yourself down to a library to volunteer. Join a street litter picking group. Volunteer at a food bank! Putting a flag up in your front garden does not tell anyone you love your country. It just tells the neighbours that you are a massive racist and would rather invite Tommy Robinson in for tea than anyone who isn’t pasty white. Fuscias, forsythias, forget me nots and freesias absolutely. But not. fucking. flags.

10. Front gardens as car parks

After an incident with a white van driver last summer I had to borrow a shiny new car, complete with an inexplicably stupid key. It was smart apparently, which meant it couldn’t go on a keyring with all my other keys, and had to be hidden inside a decidedly ugly and bulky bag.

I was very glad to give this clever key back, along with its ugly little bag, and instead use my old fashioned key in my old fashioned car once it had been fixed. I am extremely good at losing keys but thanks to a handy invention called a keyring, it’s pretty impossible for me to forget to take the car key into the house as I need the house key, to which it is attached, to open the front door3.

Car makers are evidently much more clever than I am as they are churning out these ‘smart’ keys around with wild abandon, and everyone keeps forgetting to take them in the house, or put them in their ugly bags, and so all the new cars on my street keep getting stolen, so instead of just having slightly less shiny cars they’re concreting over their entire front gardens, installing bollards and high plastic fences and making the entire neighbourhood look like some kind of high security prison.

Perhaps, just perhaps, these clever keys are just a fucking stupid idea? Perhaps we don’t need everything in our lives to be smart and synced up with Alexa? Perhaps we could turn the lights on and off ourselves, or click the button on the car key, and open our own front doors? Then we’d be able to leave our poor, flag littered, military haircutted front gardens alone where the plants will use their innate smartness to grow in the spring, die down in the autumn, nourish the soil, feed the birds and look nice without a bollard, plastic fence or pointless, possibly poisonous bird feeder in sight.

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In case you’re not a gardening geek and don’t know what No Dig means, when you’re creating a new growing space, it basically consists of not digging out a new growing bed, but layering cardboard and organic matter on top of the soil or turf directly. You then let the worms do the rest, until eventually the cardboard, which has acted as a marvellous mulch to stop weeds and grass growing where you don’t want them, rots down and the soil becomes a marvellously textured, friable joy in which vegetables and ornamental plants will grow in abundance. That’s the idea, anyway. 1

Technically, the bed is a success, as in the plants I placed there have not died, and the whole thing is just about still intact. And yet even though I laid it in January, allowing plenty of time for cardboard to rot down and worms to do their business, it has taken until now, really, for the bed to become properly established. On many, many a morning in the spring I woke to find the cardboard and compost hurled all over the lawn by birds determined to get to whatever grubs were underneath. The subsequent drought meant that the rotting down didn’t really get under way until a few weeks ago; and the whole bed spent an embarrassingly large number of days being soaked by the hose because the bone-dry soil underneath was not being given any kind of help by our stubbornly dry skies.

And guess what else. It was too small. The proportions were all off - instead of shaping out a lovely curving path in the lawn it looked lopsided and stingy. The real reason for its size was a lack of cardboard, compost and energy in January which really wasn’t a good enough reason not to fix the problem. So a few weeks ago, I grabbed my half moon spade and my, er, spadey spade, and spent a few very sweaty hours channeling my rage at the many, many frustrations in the world today at the stubborn, solid mass of thatchy turf beneath my feet. My head sweated, my back ached and my punctured wheelbarrow was frankly extremely inadequate when it came to shifting all the turf to a pile at the bottom of the garden. But by lunchtime, it was done.

I divided some geums, carex, persicaria and threw them into rough holes, watered the whole sandy scene and gave it all a good mulch with home made compost, complete with tiny red compost worms who will hopefully get the whole thing moving. The next week I split some aquilegias and astrantias and found some muscari bulbs springing to life which I added to the bed, too. The next job will be to add bulbs, but, being a massive cheapskate, I won’t be ordering any until after Black Friday.

It’s very common to think your soil is rubbish. Mine is a sandy clay stuffed with large stones - rock solid in summer, and a sloppy mudbath in winter. Every inch of it, when I started digging out beds for this garden, was bone dry beneath the turf, with not a worm to be found. Every year I give the borders a mulch with home made compost, which slowly forms in my two Dalek bins from a combination of food scraps, lawn clippings, shredded shrubs and leaves. I also pack every part of the borders with bulbs, perennials, shrubs and grasses. The aim is to use up the compost, grow pretty things and just have a nice garden. A pleasant side effect has been that the dusty, dead soil has been transformed into one that is rich, easy to plant into and packed with worms. This is the case both on the no dig beds and the more traditionally dug out ones.

The conclusion to all of this I suppose, is that I don’t recommend dogma - in life, or in the garden. I have found the no dig method (or my interpretation of it) worked perfectly when creating a bed in the soggy spring on 2024. But in the same garden, persistent crows or even just a strong blast of wind made exactly the same method frustrating, messy and slow. With the climate (and everything else it seems) going completely bananas, I suppose gardeners just have to stay adapatable and for me, that means swallowing my pride, admitting when things haven’t worked, and trying something else.

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We endured a week in the rain in Norfolk (that’s right, the only week it rained all summer) before returning home to juggle days at work and days with the kids and put in place time limits on YouTube (why do they want to watch other people playing Minecraft? Why??) My patience was doing ok. September was on the horizon and with it, five minutes of peace and some time to dig up some more lawn.

And then, with September just around the corner, another bloody tree fell down. Last year, it was the wet that killed off the laburnum. This year, I can only conclude it was the drought. And this wasn’t really a tree, at least not a discernible one; it had been swallowed by ivy so many years ago that it was really a huge ivy bush on a very thick stick, and while I regularly snipped berries off for Christmas wreaths, this doesn’t seem to have been enough to relieve the pressure.

Unlike last year’s conundrum, this tree had decided to fall not just into our garden but into the one at the end of ours, forcing us to awkwardly make friends with neighbours on another road who we had never spoken to before* to apologise for wrecking the fence and knocking down half of their laburnum hedge**.

To my shame, we opted for the guy who lives on our road who claims to be able to do ‘anything really - building, landscaping, clearance’ because he was the cheapest, claimed he’d bring a chipper, and had me dreaming of all the lovely woodchip I’d be able to use afterwards.

Reader, when the day to clear arrived, two blokes turned up with fags hanging out of their mouths, an hour late, and took another hour to park the van ‘because it’s harder to do when the wing mirror is smashed’. A full day later, the tree was still firmly lodged between our garden and the neighbours’. It took two full days for them to shift it, leaving us with a completely wrecked bottom of the garden and still various bits of ivy and tree lying all over the place. All of this would be a whole lot more manageable if my local authority hadn’t stopped collecting green waste last year because of a bin strike that still shows no sign of resolution. So now, for the second year in a row, I have a huge mess to look at and the garden which I have so tenderly been developing is now overshadowed by a whacking great hole in the fence.

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However. I know that this mishap will eventually be the start of something new, and hopefully beautiful. Last year, when the tree fell down, I stared at it for quite some time and eventually decided that I would chop it up and turn it into a show garden.

I don’t think I have the emotional energy to attempt the same feat two years running but, necessity being the mother of invention, the disappearance of the tree has freed up quite a lot of rather ugly, exposed space which now, with no budget but a lot of imagination and a minor investment in a load of plants, I will have to turn into a garden.

The gap where the tree used to be has revealed a 2m square raised bed which is full sun until about 3pm. Half of it is, of course, smothered in weed membrane and gravel (the previous owner was a fan of keeping plants out and plastic in) so I will be removing the membrane, and finding a home for the gravel elsewhere.

Of course, with the kids back at school, I’ve immediately come down with a massive cold so instead of getting my hands dirty and my back sore I have been spending a lot of time in the bath poring over books about grass. I managed to find a copy of the wonderful Designing with Grasses by Neil Lucas, owner of Knoll Gardens, second hand at World of Books and have been pretty much obsessed with it ever since.

I have made a moodboard of the possibilities - giant Miscanthus, Panicum and a swaying sea of Hakonechloa. But which to choose? I think all of them.

As with all my mad garden projects, I promise to keep you posted but in the meantime, I need to go and get some new fence panels.

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*Actually we had spoken before. I had asked him not to burn things in his gar

den on the hottest day of the year and he had obliged, but that hasn’t made any of this less socially awkward.

** Not really sorry about that one. Excellent work ivy lollipop.

On one hand, my arms have a glorious tan, but on the other, preparing for work has become a delicate balancing act between not dying of heat exhaustion or not being eaten alive.

It’s very well saying to cover up, but somehow these little fuckers still manage to bite my stomach even when I’m dressed in baggy dungarees. At last week’s plant fair I sprayed every bit of exposed skin with highly toxic repellant only to find some persistent mosquito had managed to have no less than four feasts from one ankle.

Weeks ago while cutting back in our walled garden something took a chunk out of my leg. An actual round chunk, which bled, and the next day, developed a horrible, hot, sore rash all around it. Apparently this was caused by a horsefly, which lacks even the good manners of the mosquito and just takes great chunks out of its victims without administering any anaesthetic.

Unfortunately, some people just seem tastier to insects than others and, reader, the years have proven to me that I am absolutely delicious. So while I cannot avoid being bitten, I have found a few ways to deal with it. I’ll share mine but gardeners, please share yours and we can hopefully, together, alleviate all of our suffering a little bit.

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Prevention

Really this is about not asking for it. I’ve had to abandon my morning tea in the garden in my bathrobe in recent months - probably to the relief of my neighbours - as I was being rewarded with generous bites on my feet and ankles and, if I was foolish enough to start messing with the plants, my thighs and even an armpit. So rule number one is just to wear some clothes. I can’t guarantee this will completely work, of course - some how at work last week mozzies managed to get through a t shirt and dungarees to nibble on my belly. Also, I have no suggestions for not getting bitten on your face. My cheeks are, apparently, irresistable.

Hard chemicals

Normally I’m all about natural solutions but after the horsefly incident I went rogue in Boots. I didn’t go quite as far as a spray containing DEET but I did seriously think about it. Now every time I’m at work, any exposed area gets a spray with a toxic smelling, quite revolting ‘level five’ insect spray. On one 30C day when I was forced to wear shorts I managed to avoid getting bitten at all, so clearly, the chemicals do work.

Burning incense

Many years ago, when I was young and lived in Japan, I noticed all my Japanese friends would bring incense coils to burn whenever we had picnics. Just a word of caution - burn one at a time. Being a dopy and usually drunk 21 year old, I thought it would be sensible to burn one on top of a pile of other insect sticks in my flat and awoke to a room full of smoke. After that, I bought some plugs which released some kind of dodgy chemical, and that kept the mozzies out of the bedroom without increasing the risk of fire.

Aftercare

Also in Japan, when my parents visited, I managed to pour a load of tea all over my leg (told you I was dopy). My Dad, who despite being a cool rock DJ was also a bit of an aromatherapy whiz, whipped out a bottle of lavender essential oil which he brought halfway around the world in case of such an emergency. Now, if you’ve got serous burns, please ignore this, I am not a doctor. But for mild burns and insect bites, it turns out Papa Valk was really on to something. Neat lavender essential oil calms, sooths and does I don’t know what but it seems to help my mozzie bites to heal a lot faster.

My other go-to is the stinky, orange-staining but completely miraculous Tiger Balm which I have been banging on about for the best part of 20 years. Literally nothing else will stop the itching as well as this (after an initial, intense, super-itch sensation). It’s like having an ice cube with a fan on the itch and if I have bites, I am never far from a jar.

We had a living history event at work this summer and one of the medieval stallholders recommended mixing Spike Lavender oil with Citronella essential oil, in a base oil mix, as a way to not only soothe but also deter bugs from returning. I tried a bit, and it did help - the camphor in the citronella and Spike Lavender apparently is the cooling element in Tiger Balm, too.

If this all sounds a bit new age for you, I can also recommend a brilliant product by Savlon after the Horsefly attack. It’s called Savlon Bites and Sting Relief. It claims to help prevent infection and it is loaded with a local anaesthetic so great if the bites really hurt. But honestly, for mozzie bites, it isn’t a patch on the stinky orange stuff.

Have you found better solutions to prevent getting eaten alive? Please do share any success stories in the comments!

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When I last wrote, the wonderfully kind Jack Moody Nursery had come to the rescue with their very kind offer of loaning me trees; I had just about finalised my plant list and had even stumbled across a blacksmith at my new job (Middleton Hall & Gardens, in case you’re ever in the neighbourhood) who would be able to bash some old copper into a bird bath to furnish the space.

But my ‘simple’ log spiral was still a lumpy pile of hacked up bits of dead tree glaring at me every time I looked out of the window. I had created a prototype spiral out of kiln-dry logs bought for our wood burner, but as the theme of the garden is giving new life to dead things, it seemed a bit silly to buy in perfectly useful dried logs and get them all wet and unsuitable for burning. I wondered if I could hack the tree up myself and optimistically emailed Stihl asking if they fancied sponsoring the garden by giving me some of their expensive kit. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t reply. Perhaps giving someone with absolutely no experience of chainsaw work a few of their incredibly powerful and dangerous tools didn’t feel particularly good for their brand.

Luckily, Gardener’s World Live gives out a bursary of £200 for each border - not a lot - but not far off the fee the very kind Liam of McLeish Tree Services proposed in exchange for sending his Dad round to cut my tree to size - and bring a few more logs to add to the collection.

Should you ever decide to build a spiral of logs (I mean, are there better uses for your time?), there are a few things you need to know, which I have gleaned from YouTube’s lumberjack influencers, and also from RHS Bridgewater in their excellent video about logpiles for nature. The largest logs need to go at the bottom and, for a spiral shape, you will need some cut into slices, a bit like a piece of cake. This is because there is less room on the inside of the spiral curve and the slices allow the whole thing to stay level. Mercifully, Liam’s Dad was willing to give it a good go, and by the end of a few hours I had all the puzzle pieces I would need to make my dream spiral come true.

As you know, organising something like this does nothing for the quality of your sleep, and a few nights ago I woke up worrying about the level of the logs. You see, in a normal garden, you can just put the logs on the ground but in a show garden, you’re working with an empty border filled with compost. Plants aren’t really planted; they’re placed in their pots, and covered with topsoil. In many ways it’s not really a garden at all; more a very complicated (and expensive) flower arrangement. But this means the logs will need to sit higher than the plant pots or they won’t be seen at all. I consulted my fellow panic-panic-stricken Beautiful Border WhatsApp group; I asked a Facebook garden designer group, and whittled the ideas down to one optimistic solution. I will borrow more flat pieces of wood from my work, hammer Rebar poles around the structure to give a bit more support and, well, hope for the best. I’ve since assembled the logs several times in my garden, just to ensure the neighbours are completely confident I’ve lost my mind, and I suppose at this point I feel as confident as I am going to be.

In the next few days, the build period will begin, and I can be certain of at least a couple of things. One - that I was very brave to have a go at this. It’s been an adventure, and even if it all falls down I will have learned a lot. And two — that even if the whole thing is a disaster, in a few days, it will all be over, and I will be drinking a big old drink.

One of the reasons I opted for a log pile rather than, say, a patio or a wall, is that I have absolutely zero hard landscaping skills and I thought piling logs would be, well, easy. But it turns out, making logs pile up in an artistic way without falling down is a bit harder in reality than on paper.

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With nerves gnawing at my ability to sleep, and still unable to use the actual dead wood in my garden as the tree surgeon hadn’t come yet, I ordered a slightly insane quantity of kiln dried logs* and started playing a bizarre game of Jenga in the garden.

My first attempt, at the end of a long day at work, was a bit of a mess. I was too tired, I had no real plan, the logs just kept falling down, and whenever I sat down to have a rest my four year old plonked herself down in my lap and told me that I should stick to growing flowers. As the light faded, I stomped huffily inside and spent the evening watching log stacking YouTube videos by Canadian lumberjacks.

The following morning, having absorbed the quite obvious suggestion that the largest pieces of wood should go at the bottom, I managed to get the logs to pile into an imperfect spiral. It still wasn’t quite right, but it was a vast improvement on the day before.

What I still need to do is to find a way for all the logs to face outwards, neatly, as while I want the show border to look naturalistic, I also want to balance this with order. In short, I don’t want it to look like a complete mess.

At some unspecified date (he keeps cancelling), a kind - if unreliable - tree surgeon is spending the day in my garden and will hopefully be able to fashion me a collection of identical-length logs, some pizza-slice shaped, which will give stability to the spiral. I’m also looking into ways to pin logs together, inspired by this video from RHS Bridgewater.

Lumberjacking aside, I’ve been thinking about how to dress the sculpture so it looks like it has been rotting down for years. Moss is one option, and as I have a north facing, very mossy garden, I have decided to scrape and cultivate it in seed trays, over a thin layer of gorgeous Dalefoot Compost**. I’ve also been dividing Alchemilla mollis and digging up self seeded ferns from around the garden to plant in between the logs. Will it work? Or will the whole thing be absolutely ridiculous? Time will tell, but I am having fun along the way.

*We do have a wood burner and had run out of logs but ever since ordering 6 wheelie bins of them, it hasn’t been cold enough to actually burn any of them. Still, we’re now all set for the next three winters!

** Dalefoot have very kindly supplied me with their beautiful compost for growing plants for the show, for which I will be eternally grateful.

This article was originally published in Garden Folk Magazine.

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I’ve since been offered a fabulous new job at a historic garden, been buried in writing commissions and June is suddenly looking alarmingly close. So please forgive my lack of writing recently - I’ve been doing a somewhat frantic juggle which while fun, has not a lot of time for regular Substack writing.

Because I’m unable to say no to apparently anything, I’ve agreed to write a monthly diary entry about the project for the lovely Garden Folk Magazine. I will be re-publishing each entry here, so at least you’ll know I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth.

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Here’s the first one:

A few years ago, when I decided to change careers from PR to an as-yet-undefined one in horticulture, I must admit I felt a bit foolish. ‘I’m quitting my PR career to be a gardener. Or a designer. I don’t know - something with plants,’ I would explain apologetically to fellow parents at the school gates. All I knew was that my career thus far wasn’t making me happy, and I was deeply, madly, in love with gardens.

Fast forward to 2025 and here I am, feeling a bit foolish all over again. The news is out now that I’m building a little show garden of my very own this summer. The feelings of imposter syndrome are very, very real. It will take up a huge amount of time, energy, logistics and planning. Nobody is paying me to do it - I’m using savings to cover my costs. And I could, quite feasibly, make a complete and utter fool of myself. I keep remembering that line in Bridget Jones where she’s terrified of walking into the Law Society Dinner - ‘What are you doing in here? Bridget Jones, you are ridiculous.’

But we only live once, so I’m doing it anyway.

My garden is one of the Beautiful Borders at Gardeners World Live at the NEC. The theme is connections, so naturally, I’ve taken the theme to a bit of a weird place. My garden focuses on the connections between new life and, well, death.

There is method behind what, I’m sure, sounds a bit like madness. One thing gardening has taught me is to be a lot less squeamish. I’ve become obsessed with composting and with it, have learned to accept all manner of creepy crawlies in the garden. They are essential for making new soil, feeding more critters and helping plants to grow without a load of synthetic chemicals. Just as you can’t have spring without winter, you can’t have new life in a garden without also having death. The perennials need to lie down to rest, the annuals need to complete their life cycle, the birds need to eat leftover seed-heads. On a more long term scale, trees will eventually fall, their wood will rot down, and that process will feed fungi, bugs and worms, who will then feed the soil and feed the new and emerging plants.

My show garden is all about this cycle. A spiral of logs (which is proving to be a bit more challenging to compile in real life than on paper) forms the main structure of the space. As the logs rot down, they feed the soil and new life emerges from the ground. The planting will be woodland-edge-ish, and three trees of different sizes will grow around the spiral, along with grasses and absolutely loads of flowers.

But on a personal level, the garden is about a bit more than that. The last few years - which have coincided with my move into all things horticultural - I have been immersed simultaneously in the joys of new life and also a wild and ever-present grief.

I have become a mother of two glorious, beautiful children and by doing so have found my body infused with love, (and robbed of sleep), and the house filled with laughter and chaos. And I have also lost my dad. He was very ill when I started my RHS course, and died just after my summer exams. In the months after, I was buffeted by waves of grief which sometimes left me exhausted and other times filled me with a fizzing rage. He died in July, and on the days I could barely move I would sit on the lawn staring at the flowers. When the rage came, I picked up my spade and dug up the lawn. So in many ways, this garden is an expression of all of that. The joy of new life, the agony of grief, and how nature is there for the cycles of our lives, as well as the cycles of the plants.

There is a lot to do on what I know is going to be a big and emotional adventure. But first, I really need to get my hands on some logs.

This week, for my husband’s birthday (FYI my husband is called Mike, and I’m going to call him that from now on as ‘my husband’ feels a bit 1950s), I baked a cake that was half chocolate meringue and half chocolate mousse and it worked first time and for me, this is an Extremely Big Event.

You may remember me telling you about my usual ceremonial two cakes when there is a family birthday. The first is an offering for the bin. Oh how we laugh. After I have cried. On my daughter’s first birthday the baking was so disastrous, the milestone so emotional and the hormones so all-encompassing that my wonderful friend Kirsty just turned up on the door with one she had made earlier. I thought she was some kind of mystic. How was it possible to bake a serviceable cake without trashing the kitchen or losing your mind?

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I think the real secret is having kids who are not toddlers or babies. Mine are four and seven now, and they go to bed, and so I’m no longer in a permanent state of coffee-wired hysteria trying to remember my own name. But I do have some other revelations for the baking challenged. Buy a stand mixer, which can essentially do the work for you while you have a glass of wine; bake in the evening, where nobody will be jumping about demanding to lick the spoon1 and finally, get a copy of this book.2

The thing about cookery books is they have all sorts of maddening terms like ‘stiff peaks’ and ‘cream the mixture’ and they tell you what temperature to put the oven on to but they don’t say whether that’s with the fan or not. Or, like my beloved yet impossible to use 1970’s Cadbury’s Chocolate cookbook, just flat out lie to you about how to make a meringue icing until you actually blow up your mixer3.

What’s great about SIFT is there are detailed, like REALLY detailed explanations for every little thing you don’t understand. There are pictures for the stiffness of peaks. There are explanations for how to make French, Swiss, Swiss-Franc and Italian meringues (even if, admittedly, I googled it as I just couldn’t believe whisking sugar straight into egg whites would possibly work - reader - I can confirm it is true and it really does). This means you can just take your time, and do it slowly, and read all the geeky facts about what you’re doing before you do them. And all of this means, for me, at least, that you actually stand a far better chance of baking something people will want to eat.

Last night, in a moment of utter triumph, I took the cake out of the fridge where it had set, and cut it up, and we ate it. Reader, it was delicious. There is loads left. All that’s in it is chocolate, eggs, sugar and butter. It’s a miracle. And I made it happen.

Look, I know there are more important things than cake. We are living in very dark times, and the climate is ruined, and fascism is on the rise, and it is going to be February for another few months. There are many things to shed tears over right now. But cake, for me, is no longer one of them. And that is something worth celebrating.