Brian Minter: Darker hues, more insects and climate protection top gardening trends for 2024

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.

How to Grow and Care for Camassia (Wild Hyacinth) Camassia spp.

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.

Anyone who knew Angela Jupe, the late landscape architect and garden maker, will remember her particular love of snowdrops, or Galanthus, as this genus of dainty bulbous perennials is properly known.

Kitchens are often the “hearth of the home” because they're actively used every day and are often the main gathering and socializing spot for family members and friends.

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.

The Gardening Course for Beginners offered by GardenAdvice.co.uk is designed for those new to gardening or with a new garden or garden that needs to be renovating

A Love Affair with Texture, Stone and Water | Talk & Tour Moving to a new home with no garden, dry rocky soil and huge stone outcroppings was just the challenge this gardener was up for. Starting a new garden from scratch

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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.

We’ve been to our fair share of local Manchester parks and gardens, that’s for sure! But which do we recommend?

Are you looking for garden ideas for a difficult part of your garden?