Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i The English Garden

Antoinette Galbraith Antoinette is a garden writer who lives, works and gardens in the Scottish Borders. She writes regularly for The Scotsman and visits the walled garden at Glenbervie on page 42. Helen Tabor Helen is a garden and architectural photographer based in Ripon, and an award-winning Associate of the British Institute of Professional Photography. Her images of Norton Conyers are on p50. Sussie Bell Sussie began photographing the natural world with her first camera at the age of 13. She maintains that spending time creating images of nature’s beauty is a true joy. She visits Knepp Castle on p34.…

Val Bourne The author and president of the Hardy Plant Society on the kindness of gardeners and her lifelong commitment to organic gardening I grew up in an unconventional family. I had two brothers and eight male cousins. Growing up with all those boys made me fiery! I’d wake up early each day bursting with energy, so my grandmother would take me outside. It was the ‘Dig for Victory’ era and she was a keen gardener, thoroughly Victorian in her ways, having learnt from her own father. Her approach was thrifty, organic and intuitive. I’ve always gardened organically. When I was 45, I gave up teaching and began writing and broadcasting about gardening. On my first radio appearance in the mid-1990s I listened to the other gardeners all recommending chemical…

From its elevated position on a natural gravel terrace, Floors Castle enjoys wide views across parkland to the River Tweed and the Cheviot Hills beyond. The largest inhabited house in Scotland, and the home of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe, it was the combination of this setting with the castle’s cream sandstone, crenellations and numerous pepper-pot turrets that was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott. To the west of the house, a four-acre walled garden with extensive glasshouses was built in 1857. A decade later, Queen Victoria visited Floors. She and four of her children stayed for three days in the summer of 1867 and took tea in a charming summerhouse built especially for the occasion. From there, her view would have been down an 80m-long tropical corridor…

Winter is for restoration. The garden is pared back and elemental: everything is visible and in its stillness there’s time to reflect on the preceding year and to imagine and plan the year to come. Yet among the died down perennials, the seedheads left intact for chaffinches and nesting ladybirds, the evergreens that went unnoticed in summer but which now bring welcome interest, is one group of plants that are having their hour: those with stems that colour in winter. Carmine, crimson, vermilion, garnet, saffron, Titian, turmeric, sulphur and lime: a brightly coloured line of coppiced stems on a grey day will rival any bed of tulips or dahlias for eye-catching interest. The best colouring plants, dogwood (cornus) and willow (salix), don’t always look like much through spring and summer,…

‘Strawberry Thief’, ‘Willow Boughs’, ‘Acanthus’ – it’s difficult to overstate just how influential classic William Morris designs have been on English interiors and how well they capture a certain kind of English mood – timeless, anchored in the natural world and underpinned by Morris’s well-known maxim ‘have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. Until recently, it was believed all Morris’s designs and those of his protégé (and later art director at Morris & Co.) John Henry Dearle, were known. But a chance archival finding by a British employee in California has led to a brand-new collection of 26 designs, The Unfinished Works, comprising 46 iterations of fabric and 50 of wallpaper. The designs ended up in California via a…

If you stand right up against the wall of an old walled garden so you can look down its length, you’ll often be able to spot hundreds of rusted metal nails and vine eyes poking out of the brickwork that are barely visible when you look at the wall front on. If ever I visit a walled garden, it’s one of the first things I do, if I can – obviously I wouldn’t trample on any planting! I love seeing evidence of all the gardening that has gone on within the walls over the years and thinking about the gardeners who, at some point, threaded string through every single vine eye, perhaps tying an espaliered apple or a fan-trained plum to the warm brick walls. When it aired, I was…

Bespoke Gothic Tree Seat Made to your specified dimensions by a Chelsea regular. £POA, tristenmay.co.uk Broadwalk Circular Tree Seat This oak seat can be made in bespoke sizes. From £35,160, gazeburvill.com Circular Ladderback Garden Tree Seat Zinc-galvanised forged iron. £3,600 plus VAT, heritagegardencollections.co.uk Wooden Oak Circular Tree Bench Organic rustic oak that undulates around the tree’s trunk. £POA, edbrooks.com Wrought Iron ‘Saint-Cloud’ Tree Seat Simple and elegant in pale cream. £249, britishironworkcentre.co.uk Round Tree Bench A handsome bench, available in four sizes, made from sustainably sourced teak with the option to add personalised engraving. From £2,600, theoakandropecompany.co.uk…

CORDLESS (BATTERY-POWERED) MOWERS PERFECT FOR SMALL GARDENS Gardena PowerMax 32/36V P4A Lawn Mower RRP £344.99 including batteries Lightweight and easy to manoeuvre, this cordless mower from Gardena with a cutting width of 32cm is ideal for smaller gardens. Its cardboard packaging can all go in your normal recycling bin, assembly is swift and straightforward, and because it’s so light it’s easy to carry and push over the lawn. A 40-minute battery run time will be ample for most small lawns. IDEAL FOR STRIPES Worx 40V 34cm Cordless Lawn Mower RRP £199.99 including batteries It doesn’t have as long a run time as other battery mowers we tested, giving just over 30 minutes of mowing, but the Worx’s precise cut and the stripes created by its integrated rear roller will attract lawn aficionados.…

Pleached trees are often described as ‘hedges on stilts’. But that somewhat prosaic description doesn’t do justice to just how versatile, useful and beautiful an artfully pleached tree can be. Specially pruned and trained to form a clear trunk and a horizontal screen of branches higher up, pleached trees can be used in a number of creative ways, while their restrained size makes them well suited to smaller gardens. One of the most popular uses is for screening. Regulations dictate the height of fences, but if you’d prefer more privacy, a row of pleached trees along the fence line will give you another layer of privacy above it. Screening with pleached trees might be practical, to alleviate the feeling of being overlooked or to hide an eyesore, but it can…

The enchanting Cornus kousa grove has become a fluttering, unashamedly romantic place ‘Her dream house was surrounded by gardens: a berry garden, an apricot garden, a cherry garden, a persimmon garden, a potato garden, a vegetable garden and a huge compost.” Ana Roš, a passionate rock star of a chef from Slovenia, is describing in her book, Sun and Rain, her grandmother’s beautiful garden above Trieste. It is a resonant description that I cannot get out of my mind. The New Year is a good moment to dream. What is so potent about the Trieste garden is that the very names, ‘berry garden, apricot garden…’ stake a claim. It’s a matter of intention. Even the smallest patch of land can be reborn if you are bold enough to name your…

My New Year always starts with the very best of intentions and the promise of doing all those things that I meant to do last year. This winter I will clear out the shed/garage/filing cabinet, I say to myself. But these lofty ambitions (actually, the loft could do with a clear-out, too) all too soon fall by the wayside. Not this year though: the shed roof is in urgent need of attention, and that means everything precariously stacked inside needs a jolly good sort out so there is room for he-who-wields-the-hammer to work on repairs. It’s a good opportunity to go through all the accumulated detritus of several years. There is my used pot collection, which is larger than I could ever need, along with several bags of compost, some…

With over 30 years of horticultural experience, including stints at Waddesdon Manor and Chequers, Richard Ernst now leads the team at Norfolk’s Houghton Hall. He oversees the estate’s five-acre walled garden – an award-winning space created by the current owner, David, Marquess of Cholmondeley, in tribute to his grandmother, Sybil. Richard works closely with Lord and Lady Cholmondeley, guiding the vision and day-to-day care of these exceptional gardens, which include more than 170 rose varieties. With bareroot planting season in mind, he suggests ten roses for any situation. Houghton Hall, King’s Lynn, Norfolk PE31 6TY. Tel: 01485 528569; houghtonhall.com 1 Rosa ‘Sally Holmes’ A bushy shrub whose blooms open in delicate shades of pink and apricot, before fading to white. “It flowers almost continuously from early summer to autumn, and we…

A change is as good as a rest, so the saying goes. As well as a relaxing break, travelling to a new destination can spark creativity, and if your holiday takes in a lovely garden or a beautiful landscape, it could inspire new ideas for your garden at home. “I believe creativity comes out of a free-wheeling, relaxed brain,” says garden designer Helen Elks-Smith. “Sometimes the biggest inspiration is the travel itself and the feeling it gives you – it can release something inside you.” Here, Helen and seven other top garden designers share where they go on holiday, and which gardens and landscapes inspire them most. Andrew Fisher Tomlin A trip to Japan and the serene landscape of the Hakone Museum of Art has stayed with garden designer and…