British Pop Decor Is the Funky Trend to Make Your Home a Playful Escape

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Garden fire pits provide a cosy campfire atmosphere in any garden. They can make the focal point of a patio for big gatherings or part of a quiet, comfy nook to curl up in.

I first learned the fundamentals of kitchen gardening from my mother, who learned it from her father, a passing-on of traditional skills repeated down through countless generations.

Vote now, and pick the garden you’d like to win this year’s People’s Choice award for the Gardens of the Year Competition 2023, sponsored by Yeo Valley. Take a look at this year’s finalists, and vote for your favourite below. Voting closes at noon on Monday 6 November.

While bird feeders are common in Britain’s gardens, bird baths are less so. Bird baths are a brilliant way of providing birds with a regular supply of clean water for both drinking and bathing. Bird baths become even more essential in the colder months when natural sources may be frozen or in the height of summer when water can be hard to come by.

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Mainland UK is home to many natural treasures. While many are world-famous and are visited by millions of people each year, there are several that many haven’t even heard of, including some locals.

Brass is such a versatile material. It can pair well with other metals like gold or cast iron, but it can also contrast nicely with chrome or nickel finishes. If you prefer a shinier look, you can choose a polished version, but if your style leans more antique, you can look for an aged option.

Herefordshire forms part of the Marches, the ancient border territories straddling England and Wales. To the east lie the majestic Malvern Hills, and winding through the centre is the great River Wye, the valley of which is burnished with colour in October and November. 

In the summer of 1863, a world-famous English botanist was pondering why the shoots of climbing plants twirl around as they grow. In this episode, join Emma the Space Gardener as she explores the fascinating world of plant movement, and what that has to do with the first plants that ever flew on NASA’s space shuttle.

When Philip Miller, chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden, collected a sample of Lavandula x intermedia subsp. intermedia in the summer of 1731, he could scarcely have imagined it would still be in a collection some 300 years later. Yet today, pressed and labelled, Miller’s specimen is the oldest entry in the herbarium collection at RHS Wisley. What’s more, Lavandula x intermedia is widely grown, being especially good for oil extraction. In this lies the brilliance of pressed flowers and herbaria specifically: they provide a window on the past and a view of what the future might look like. 

This article has the potential to be very short. That is because most garden plants provide some type of environmental benefit to their immediate surroundings—assuming they are chosen appropriately for the location, are not over-managed, and are not invasive. Plants cool the air in summer, reduce localized flooding risks, act as homes and corridors for wildlife, are barriers to pollution, and attenuate noise. But there may be some characteristics that help specific plants excel at providing benefits to us. And this may give some species or varieties an environmental edge, particularly on a small (individual plant and garden) scale. This is something I have been exploring in my research over the last 15 years for the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in the United Kingdom.