September has been wet and cold at Longmeadow but also extraordinarily busy with filming and writing commitments. Whilst these projects are enjoyable and exciting it has meant, for the first time in nearly 6 years of writing this blog, I have simply not had time to write this month’s entry. In the mean time I have attached the my job recommendations from last October. These apply to the garden every bit as much in 2024 as they did in 2023 ..read more

September bathes the garden in golden light. September sun is often the most benign of the year, the mornings and evenings chilly enough to need a jersey but the days bright and shirt-sleeve warm. Some of this is due to the changing climate but September has always been one of the best months and always with a marked seasonal shift, with a new term, new season, new feel in the air ..read more

We come into August with a generally held belief that - in the UK at least - it has been a 'bad' summer. The weather seems to have been greyer and colder and damper than usual. In fact the evidence is that this is not so. There have been no long spells of hot, dry sunny weather but it has been pretty average ..read more

This strange year has - sometimes seemingly against the odds - reached June. Despite the weather this is summer and the garden knows it. The wet weather stretched on into May here, with little sunshine and less heat but the garden has flowered profusely. Whilst it may not have been warm, it has not been especially cold. Lots of rain and mild temperatures make ideal growing conditions for many plants. So June sees roses blooming in every conceivable way and the borders filled with flower - many of which are very early this year. It is as though summer overrides the weather. Even the rainy, gre ..read more

April was cold and wet again, the winter’s miserable weather continuing long into Spring. But the floods - at time of writing at least - have at last abated and there is that wonderful sense of the natural world unfurling out into the light. The garden seems not have minded the endless wet and although cold for humans it has in fact been mild with little or no frost so everything is flowering at least 10 days earlier than usual - if not ever. The tulips have been fantastic and all the fruit trees seemed to blossom at once at the end of April spilling into May in a glorious froth of flower. Th ..read more

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