Marc's Gardens

 A stone trough, grown tired with rampant Persicarias... an Agapanthus (if I remember correctly) and other oddities! Let's give it all a huge cut back; take it all down and maybe take most of it out! Then, let's look around the garden and see what free plants there are we could work with.     I am often asked about the process of garden design. The task  of designing a garden seems, at times, almost an impossible thing to do. Think about it. How do you create a garden like those you see out and about when visiting professional or pu blic gardens? It’s a mammoth task really! You want (need) trees and shrubs to give height, structure and a sense of permanence. You need smaller herbaceous plants which rise and fall at different times of the year. You’ll want all-year- round interest, yet given the constraints of border space, how can you achieve this? After all, a plant can only accommodate one unit of soil space at a time. Right? ...

I was going to visit a friend in Hemel Hempstead the other day. From Sevenoaks, this means going half way round the M25, past such notorious hold-up-hotspots as Clackets and around Jct 8 & 9. I decided to leave after 9.00am in the hope that most of the commuter traffic would be gone by then and that the M25 might be slightly quieter. Some hope! It wasn't long before I hit the first of many snarl-ups around junction 8. About an hour later, boiling hot and cursing like Gordon Ramsay in a bug-infested kitchen, I decided to give up on the idea and turn off at my next opportunity. Fortunately, the next slip road led me straight into the loving embrace of RHS Wisley. If nothing else I could at least pop in there for a caramel latte and a slice of cake.    Lots of lovely lovely Stipa gigantea As I say, it was a baking hot day, and boy! was I glad to arrive at the near-empty Wisley car park. Do you know, I have an air-condition...

Perhaps even…. The Greatest Flower? How is the humble Sunflower much like The Beatles?     Well, and bear with me on this one. Imagine you asked a hundred people in the street to   ‘name the biggest , best, most popular pop group of all time’… I reckon The Beatles would form a majority answer. Now, asking those same people to ‘name the biggest, most popular flower’ and I’m pretty sure the noble sunflower would rank highly in their responses. Therefore, and somewhat like The Beatles, the sunflower suffers from that strange and similar dynamic… You know, the one that goes something like this. Because of their brilliance and majesty, reliability and all-round loveliness, they often get a little overlooked, in favour of whatever is new and current.   George - the Dark Horse - was always my favourite!   By now, regular readers of my blog will know that I LOVE yellow daisies. Again, a rather...

The subject of horticulture as a career - or whether such a thing as a horticultural career industry even exists - has yet again been given coverage in the news and gardening media recently. The RHS has had an on-going campaign, trying to promote horticulture as a career option for the young to enter into; so too have organisations such as the National Trust and English Heritage. I don't know if it's in conjunction with the RHS but even our Alan (Titchmarsh) has been waxing-lyrical about the benefits of today's youth entering the industry: rallying, cajoling, nudging the young to consider it as a career option. I read in this month's Gardener's World magazine an interesting debate between James Alexander-Sinclair and Helem Yemm entitled " Would you want your kids to work in gardening? " On the back pages of the magazine this question is also taken up by Titchmarsh as he reflects on 50 years working within the sector. I...