It is a sobering thought that no one alive has ever experienced a Winter and Spring in the UK as wet as this has been and, as we go into April, there is no sign of the rain stopping. This obviously affects every garden and gardener but, on the up side, it has been mild and everything is growing well. Well, almost everything. It has been a very poor Spring season for daffodils because - I suspect - they had so much rain in Autumn and Winter that they have developed excess foliage at the expense of flowers. I am sure they will come back next year but they have been a big loss. However the tulip ..read more

February in my garden - and most gardens across the UK - was unrelentingly and miserably wet. When it was not actually raining it was muddy, with constant flooding. We were forced to dig up the whole of our Long Walk and lay perforated drainage pipes to try and take away and spread some of the rainwater from our buildings as other parts of the garden were literally saturated and the fresh water had nowhere to go. This is a direct effect of climate change - it was also extraordinarily mild -  and clearly something that we are going to have to live with. In practise this opens a whole new ..read more

There are two kinds of people: those that think of February as the lowest point of the year and those that love it and I am firmly in the latter camp.  February is the month when the garden really starts to come alive and grow even if the weather can be severe and the days are still short. In February something is definitely happening. There is a thrill in the air. January in my garden, as in so many across the UK, was swept by fierce storms and downpours of rain but was mild and we go into February with snowdrops, crocus, hellebores and aconites all appearing daily. Where I live, halfwa ..read more

This garden and all who sail in her is floating into 2024 - almost literally. It has barely stopped raining for the past three months and as I write this the fields as far as the eye can see are under water as is sections of the garden .This is rather beautiful in a calm rather surreal way, especially in the brief gaps between downpours when the waters are still and become a vast lake appearing overnight. But mostly all this rain just means mud, slippery paths and the frustration of not being able to get on with much work in the garden without making a terrible mess. This is a wet part of a w ..read more

All gardeners are driven by the weather the year round but in December, in this garden at least, it dictates every detail of what we do. There is a high chance that it will be snowy, or icy, or very wet, or very windy or all of the above on the same day.  On top of that the gardening days are absurdly short.  Areas that are sun filled from April to October get no light at all and it is dark by 4.30. My garden in December is not a fun place. If it is not ankle deep in a particularly sloshy brand of mud it is frozen solid or, very occasionally, bowed under by a dollop of snow.This loo ..read more

I am writing this on the last day of October and the garden outside is barely autumnal. Most of the leaves are still green and clinging to the trees and hedges and although it has been wet all month, October has been mild.  But experience shows that, even with climate change altering the seasons, there is no room for complacency.  The clocks have gone back and winter is coming and preparation for any kind of extreme weather is sound practice. So we gradually put the garden to bed. Tender plants are protected, leafy perennials cut back, furniture brought in ready for repair and repai ..read more

October this year is entering through the back door. There is barely a hint of autumn other than the shortening days and cooler nights. The garden remains a strange matt green without a hint of the delicacy and fading that usually characterises the end of September.  But the only rule is that there are no rules. The longer I garden the less assumptions I make. And none of this harms the garden in any way. In simple botanical terms autumn colour is created by the difference between day and night temperatures in late summer and early autumn - and this year these have been remarkably consta ..read more

For us, here on the very west of England, September has traditionally been one of the drier months but also one of the gentlest and most beautiful. This is just as well because August '23 was as cold, wet and grey as July had been.  All in all it has been a miserable summer.  However it is fascinating to see what has thrived despite the conditions. Figs and tomatoes, raspberries and blueberries have been very good. Sunflowers - which hated last summers heat and drought - have been lovely yet tithonias , the Mexican sunflower whose brilliant orange flowers are usually such a feature ..read more

Whereas a year ago we came to August on the back of the hottest, driest weather the UK had ever known, this July was cold and wet. So it goes. Weather is one thing and climate another and the latter is steadily getting warmer and bringing erratic weather in its wake. Whereas this gardener wore unseasonably heavy clothing and wellingtons in the July mud, the garden loved the rain and tolerated the cold so looks much fresher this August than a year ago. Often August can feel as though summer is growing weary and jaded but not this year. However the one thing that is always constant in the Augus ..read more

Last summer July was baking hot here in the garden with the temperature rising above 40 degrees for the first recorded time. It was certainly the hottest and driest I recall in the UK since the famous baking summer of 1976. But the garden came through. Some things performed less well than usual but nothing died and the value of having plenty of organic matter in the soil and a thick mulch over any bare soil was clearly proved. Regardless of the weather, July is the summation of summer, the month when the days are still long, the growth as full as it ever might be and none of the slight wearin ..read more