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Winter warmer: Need a sophisticated, yet no-fuss bloom to give your frosty garden a colourful lift? Bring on the hellebores...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

It sometimes feels as though there is very little colour in my garden over the winter, though I currently have a tide of orange growing up the back fence, where some late nasturtiums suddenly decided to germinate in early September. But their tropical colour will be a thing of memory come the first frost. For real midwinter jewels, I will never do better than hellebores, which flower from around Christmas through until March.

Weekend Work: Time to plant heathers

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The hip parade: Anna Pavord is devoting a wild section of her garden to some very fruity numbers

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The "hippery" happened by accident, rather than design. At the top of the bank there's a largeish area drifting back from a curving path to finish at the eastern edge of the garden. The boundary is a wild one – holly, elder, thorn, hazel – with a view to rough sloping pastures beyond. I never meant to take in as much garden as we have, but once started it was difficult to stop. Common sense finally prevailed and I realised it was sensible to leave this last bit as the handshake between cultivated and wild, a transition between garden and landscape, cared for but not too much.

Pretty as a picture: A snappy lesson in the tricks of the garden photographer's trade

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

There is only one thing that could have persuaded me to spend a Sunday morning sitting in a far-too-thin raincoat on a soggy gravel path in a mild October drizzle, taking photos of the same herbaceous border, over and over again. In this case, it was the photography teacher Jacqui Hurst.

When heaven freezes over: How to keep plants warm this winter

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

As we start to wake up to frosty mornings, gardeners are starting to think about dealing with really cold weather. Not just soggy, damp autumn, but freezing-cold winter, determined to ruin your best gardening plans. One of the nicest and most useful additions to the winter garden is a cold frame, which allows you not only to shelter your best pots through frosts, but also keep squirrels out of containers planted with expensive spring bulbs.

Weekend Work: Clear runner beans and French beans off vegetable plots

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Finding the plot: Anna Pavord meets a first-time gardener who fell in love with the growing game

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

"Well that's a first," I thought as I turned up earlier this year at Laetitia Maklouf's flat in west London and found, pinned to the door, a note saying "Gone into labour". What with the new baby (her first) and other things, months passed before I caught up with Maklouf and her balcony, which is what I wanted to talk to her about.

Gift that keeps on giving: Home-potted flowers are a win-win way to brighten up the months leading up to Christmas

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

At a talk I gave last month about bulb planting, one cool east London resident lurked mournfully on the sidelines. When I asked why, she replied, "I don't have a garden, or even space for a windowbox. So this is all ruled out for me." Not so, fair lady of Hoxton. Indoor bulbs, planted in the next few weeks, will cheer up your winter, and make the perfect present for Christmas. All you need is some daylight, which I'm assuming they do let you have in the London Borough of Hackney.

Liquid assets: If a garden is properly looked after, there's less need for watering than you might imagine

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Dictionaries are wonderful time-wasters. I've just looked up "sustainable" in mine and been waylaid by Sussex spaniel ("a short-legged breed of spaniel with a golden-brown coat"), sutra ("Sanskrit sayings on Vedic doctrine") and sutler ("a merchant who accompanied an army in order to sell provisions to the soldiers").

Weekend Work: Time to pick tomatoes and sow law seed

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Clear the way: Don't let that overgrown garden get the better of you

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

I'm off to see Alex from the Shedworking blog. The last time he featured on this page, he was showing off his neat little garden office (aka shed) tucked down at the end of a Hertfordshire garden. I'm back this morning because a month ago he moved to a slightly bigger house, and while he has identified where he wants his new, bigger garden office to sit, at the moment it's occupied by about a ton of ivy and brambles. So he's got in a rotovator (known these days as a "tiller") for two weeks, and I've come to watch him, and possibly laugh, while he tries to clear a nice space for his next HQ.

Let Children Grow: No more tins of beans – it's a real harvest

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

For years, Dione Greenwood's school lunchbox treat was a packet of sweets. Now, five months after her school joined The Independent on Sunday's Let Children Grow gardening campaign, she has ditched the sweets and replaced them each day with an apple – and intends to keep it that way.

Legends of the fall: The golden, dying sunlight of autumn makes even drying seedheads look spectacular

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Dylan Thomas said we should rage against the dying of the light. Though I can imagine many of us feel like stomping at the very least while the autumn nights get shorter, the dying of the light does have some advantages. As winter draws in, the sun moves through a lower arc in the sky, and light angles in the garden become much longer and more golden, lighting up leaves and drying seedheads as dusk approaches. And as we move closer to the winter solstice, the sun doesn't just travel a lower ' path across the sky, it also rises and sets further to the south every day, narrowing the angle from which sunlight appears.

Weekend Work: Time to bury weeds

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Branching out: If you're rooting to plant new trees, now is the time to start digging

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

With a jigsaw puzzle, the last pieces are the easy ones. You can immediately see what fits where. You might expect it to be the same with a garden but there, fitting in the last plants is much more difficult than sorting out the first ones. I've a few spaces left for a small tree or a big shrub, but at this stage of garden-making (we've been here four years), I'm hemmed in by all kinds of constraints: the newcomers have to match the living conditions on offer; they have to fit in with their neighbours; and they have to deliver a particular gift to the garden, something that's presently missing in that place. I need a shrub that performs in late summer to fill a gap on the bottom bank, and a smallish, thinnish tree for the top corner of the flower garden, something that won't tangle with the rampageous perennials already growing there.

A bolt from the blue: You can trust in this salvia to add a shock of colour

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Your garden has some heart in it at this time of year if there's something still in flower. And you can't get more exhilarating than the medieval deep blue of Salvia guaranitica, or hummingbird sage, which pierces autumnal mornings with its deep azure. While everything else in the garden browns into wintry slumber, the salvia family turns late September and October into carnival season.

Weekend Work: Time to prune the blackberries

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Annual leave: Cornflowers, love-in-a-mist, Nigellas... not only have they got great names, annuals cheer up September too

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Annuals have kept the garden going through September, not substantial fare, but enough to provide some wandering strands of colour between the mounds of euphorbia foliage and the strappy grey swords of iris. It seemed a disaster, early this year, when my first sowings of ammi got munched by slugs. Seedlings from the subsequent sowing took time to settle in the June heat (there was a bit of summer at that stage) and did not start flowering properly until early August. The damp cool weather we had then must have suited them for they developed into beautiful plants.

Dutch courage: Eden Project drafts in 25,000 bulbs from Holland in a bid to brighten up Britain's street corners

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The Eden Project's creator, Tim Smit, absolutely loves to get people together (maybe, as a Dutchman, he thinks we uptight Brits need a bit of Netherlandish help to love our local communities). Earlier this summer, he was all about the Big Lunch, where we were encouraged to close down local traffic and hold a street party with our neighbours. And now, as autumn rolls in, it's the Big Bulb Plant.

Weekend Work: Prepare sites for new lawns

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

How does a modern designer make his mark on an 18th-century garden? By digging a hole...

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The landscape architect Kim Wilkie's recent commissions have often involved historic landscapes, but though he has great respect for their past stories, he's not a restorer. He doesn't do pastiche.

The Big Question: Should landowners be forced to give up space for allotments?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

No more growing pains: Emma Townshend finds a tiny garden full of fruit, veg and herbs and discovers the simple secret of its success

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Alex Mitchell is chopping up tomatoes from her garden, then ladling them on to pieces of toasted ciabatta that she's already rubbed with home-grown garlic. The mixture has the bright orange of cherry tomato "Sun Gold" and the deep red of "Gardener's Delight", and is topped with bright-green freshly picked basil. The result is the best bruschetta I've ever tasted; on a bright sunny day in Greenwich, it's an impressive lunch haul from an urban vegetable patch.

Weekend Work: Time to sow lawn seed

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Shooting stars: A new book by Anna Pavord pays homage to the glorious bulb

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Of all the things you can plant in a garden, I love bulbs the best. They don't provide form or substance. They rarely have good leaves or indeed any of the other steady attributes that gardeners are told to look for when they are furnishing a plot. But what fabulous flowers! Such complexity, such finesse, such gorgeous jewel colours.