2023 has been a great year for me, and loads has happened at the hospice. We finally managed to get the gazebo erected. It has been really well received and is regularly used. We then had the Tatton Flower Show, which was totally amazing! It took me and my volunteers two whole days to plant up our 4m x 1.5m flower bed. In total there were well over 120 plants crammed into it. We were very pleased with the results! A big thank you to Lee Burkhill (the Ninja Gardener) for helping to design it and the four other gardens in BBC NW Tonight’s Community Garden. Within 15 minutes of the plants arriv ..read more

The last couple of weeks have been really busy at the hospice. We’ve had a new gazebo erected, the BBC have been to film our gardens, and we’ve planted up our part of the of BBC NW Tonight’s “Northern Star” garden prior to the Tatton Flower Show. Firstly, the gazebo. It has been a long time coming, but definitely worth the wait. In was donated in memory of Tracy by her family and friends, and made by Woodmines, a local company specialising in bespoke gazebos. It arrived two days before the BBC came to film, and was constructed within the day. The roof is made from sweet chestnut shingles and ..read more

Spring has finally arrived, although there can still be four seasons in one day. Today is warm, windy and wet. Tomorrow might be frosty, calm and dry. Who knows? But what I do know is that the weather has caused a lot of damage to many plants at the hospice this winter. Most of the damage was done in the two week cold snap just before Christmas. All our cordylines have died. After this photo was taken there was another cold snap, killing off the other cordyline. The frost makes the stem go soft, causing all the leaves to die back. I have cut back the stems, and am waiting a little longer to s ..read more

OK, so I’m a bit of a failure when it comes to blogging! Yet again I haven’t written anything for months. I had a good excuse for June… I did no gardening. I was on holiday with Sam for the first couple of weeks, in the south of France. We got the train down to Carcassonne, which is beautiful. The train journey down was great, but the train journey home was a bit harder work. Whilst travelling from Paris to London on Eurostar, there was a passenger behind us who kept coughing. She announced to everyone that it wasn’t COVID. Lo and behold, three days later I started to feel unwell; tired, fever ..read more

I failed to write my blog in April, but had a good excuse… Sam and I were away for a few days near Bristol on holiday. We had a lovely time staying on the Mendips and meeting up with family and friends. By the time we got back, April was history (and I forgot). So it is a double dose this time round. I am very excited to have my volunteers back in force. They stop for a few months over winter and return in spring, much to my delight! Here they are, hard at work… My lovely volunteers The bulbs were fantastic in April, as they had been in March. Just as the dafs were coming to the end, the tulip ..read more

March has on the whole been a lovely month. The weather has been good and the days have been noticeably longer. My mood has definitely picked up, thankfully! One of the jobs I always do in March is to cut back the dogwoods so as to encourage new growth for this year and to maintain the bright colours for wintertime. This year was no exception. Whilst cutting them back, I came across a wild animal. Can you see it? It is really well camouflaged. From hiding in the undergrowth, it ventured out onto the lawn and headed for the pond. The pond had been renovated last year, so I wasn’t sure if the ..read more

Finally, the days are beginning to feel a bit longer and spring is in the air. It’s light when I wake up in the morning, and still light at 6pm. However, the weather in February hasn’t been brilliant. It’s been pretty wet and really windy, with three named storms. Somewhat surprisingly, we didn’t fare too badly in Wigan! At the hospice we had no trees down, two broken benches and millions of twigs for me to pick up. Sam and I were actually away during Storm Eunice. We were on holiday in Suffolk, which didn’t fare so well. The Airbnb we were staying at had seven trees blown down, one of which ..read more

I was sure that I had written a blog in 2021, but looking back it turns out I didn’t! It was a busy year, but not that busy. I have decided though, as a New Year’s resolution, that I will write something at the end of each month in 2022. And if I fail, I will give up! I want to document some of the highlights of each month. But first a quick recap of 2021. 2021 remained really tough for the hospice. I was without my volunteers for several months at the start of the year, but was grateful that I could still come in and work. Many staff were working from home. Visitors to patients were slowly al ..read more

What a year it has been! To be honest, I am quite glad that it is coming to an end. Surely 2021 will be better, although I suspect January will be rather tricky. Life at the hospice has been really hard recently. The second wave has been much harsher than the first, and we actually had to briefly close our doors in order for a deep clean. Staff have been unwell and nearly all volunteers, including mine, were unable to come in to help out. Luckily, I have kept well throughout the pandemic, although it does help working outside! The place has felt eerily quiet, and I don’t like it. But the Chris ..read more

A couple of days ago there was a real buzz in the air at the hospice… literally! I was busy weeding outside a patient’s room when Anne, one of the wonderful volunteer gardeners, shouted out “Look, a swarm of bees!” I looked up and there they were, thousands of them just over my head. I have never seen a swarm like this before, so was somewhat taken aback. They slowly moved past us, and I followed from a safe distance. After a few minutes they decided to stop and rest in a conifer tree by one of our ponds. Here they are… It was an amazing sight, one which several patients and staff came out to ..read more