10 beautiful garden ideas for different parts of the garden

You can sense it in the slowly stretching evenings, the higher skies, the shifting quality of light, and the noisy chatter of birds. And you can see it in the flowering hellebores, witch-hazel and sweetly perfumed daphne, as well as the snowdrops, daffodils, cyclamen, aconites, crocuses and dwarf irises that have pushed their snouts through cold, wet soil to burst into determined, brilliant bloom.

Q: Could you please recommend a good peat-free seed compost? I’ve tried a few over the last few years but haven’t had great results. I’d really like to do the right thing environmentally but am now at the point where I’m sorely tempted to go back to using a conventional peat-based compost. CF County Kerry

My garden is gone.

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Orchids seem to do best if a greenhouse is devoted solely to their cultivation, though some types such as Odontoglossum grande and Coelogyne cristata will succeed very well in a general collection of plants.

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One of the greatest drawbacks to successful gardening is badly drained ground. Wherever water lies in the ground at a depth easily reached by the roots of most cultivated plants they do not thrive, except where the water is constantly on the move, such as the bank of a river, brook or lake; there many plants will flourish. There are some wild plants that succeed in soil that has reached a water logged state, but generally such land is useless for gardening, farming or forestry purposes unless steps are taken to free it from superfluous moisture.

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A good pair of loppers can make spring pruning a breeze. However, most loppers seem to make even a strong person feel pathetically weak if the branch is thicker than half an inch. Attempting to cut bigger branches with such inferior loppers, particularly branches in the Goldilocks size of 1 to 2 inches, can be difficult even with all the muscle in the world. The Corona extendable DualLINK bypass loppers allow you to adjust the length of each handle from 29 to 37 inches to gain more leverage from different angles, and the blade-and-hook end is nearly twice as large as those on other loppers I’ve used. I find that I can use these to easily slice through stems up to 2 inches in diameter.

February marks the transition from winter to spring. Although the chill may persist, promising signs of the upcoming new season are scattered throughout. Bulbs cautiously break through the soil, and daylight gradually begins to appear.

We all have ‘difficult garden areas‘ or spaces we want to revamp without re-designing the whole garden.

I’m Maria Nieuwenhof from Quebec, Canada (Zone 5). I was going through my pictures over the last few days and trying to figure out what annuals I will start from seeds this year for my bouquets. When I go to see friends, or when I visit my father in Montreal, or when I have an event to go to I bring one or more bouquets. I started in late April with my first bouquet that had daffodils and ended in early November with achillea.