Gardening

Fern Britain: Anna Pavord has frond memories of a garden favourite

Giant fronds, instant shading, exotic shapes ... no wonder the fern is a popular plant. But why is the home-grown variety still such a rarity?

Inside Gardening

Urban gardener: Weed or wonder?

Saturday, 31 May 2008

May is a time when the full reality of what needs to be done in the vegetable garden hits you: sowing seeds, tending seedlings, watering, protecting plants from late frosts and stopping slugs and snails from hijacking all your efforts. Then there are weeds. These have already had a head-start on our vegetables. However, a recent addition to my book collection is about to change their status from nuisance to opportunity – because this year some of them will be eaten. Cooking Weeds by Vivien Weise (£9.99, Prospect Books) is about just that, using nature to its full potential. I'm already set to try some of Weise's recipes, from Ground Elder Layered Pancakes to Daisy Ginger Soup.

Weekend work in the garden

Saturday, 31 May 2008

The Ten Best Garden Games

Thursday, 29 May 2008

Mind the gap: How to fill the void in your flowerbeds

Sunday, 25 May 2008

One of the greatest gardening lessons you can learn concerns the gaps in your flowerbeds. Don't take them personally: gaps happen to us all. Call in the most expensive, most accomplished garden designer you can find, and still won't prevent gaps from appearing.

Eat shoots and peas

Saturday, 24 May 2008

I thought I wasn't going to grow much food when we came to our new garden. For years in the old place I had grown almost every fruit and vegetable that would grow outside and the plan when we moved was to leave all that behind. There's no dedicated space for veg in our present garden, but each year I seem to be acquiring more and more tubs of green stuff in a spare space by the fish tank. Growing vegetables in tubs is incredibly easy: there's no digging or weeding, slugs and snails don't find the crops so easily and you can make your "garden" anywhere – on a balcony, in pots ranged down the side of steps, on a terrace.

Heathcliff of hedgerows favourite to take over 'Gardeners' World'

Saturday, 24 May 2008

Few roles on British television cultivate quite the same level of devotion as that of lead presenter on the BBC's Gardeners' World. As tender in chief to the best-known herbaceous borders in the country and custodian of the national vegetable patch, those who have assumed the role over the show's previous 40 years – from Percy Thrower to Alan Titchmarsh – have effortlessly taken up the mantle of national treasure.

Urban gardener: Paternal instincts

Saturday, 24 May 2008

I don't do water. Ever since a tricky moment in a flooding cave on the Mendips I've become, let's say, a little cautious. But recently I found myself at the bottom of my father's garden, which banks on to the River Great Ouse in Buckingham. It was his birthday and the plan was to remove timber posts and boards that had come to the end of their usefulness holding the bank in place. Now skewed, they served only to collect debris from upstream and, while I doubt anyone would notice from the opposite footpath, a slurry of litter (mostly organic, save for a plastic bag and a vodka bottle), spoilt the scene.