Create a Barbie dream garden with many shades of pink

I am bored of rain. Fed up with cloudy days. Sick of the grey drip-drip-drip of this cool, showery, sun-starved, stormy summer, and the monotony of a weather forecast that only predicts more of the same. But even so, I’m forced to admit that the silver lining to what’s been a very sodden growing season is that many of our most beautiful, late summer-autumn flowering garden perennials and shrubs are loving the biblical quantities of rainfall in recent months, a high note to what’s otherwise been a forgettable year.

Dennis Leupold | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

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Gardening with kids is a great way for them to learn to love being outside, and if they grow their own veggies they will eat them! Once a child is interested in gardening they will be enthusiastic about growing everything, however there are some staple flowers that are easy to grow and give fantastic results making them perfect for children. Sow direct seeds are best for children, and take away a little of the impatience they often feel!

An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.

2017 is the 100th anniversary of the start of the Cottingley fairies story, a hoax which entrances the UK to this day. Cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright faked photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden, intended to be a practical joke on their grown-ups. When Elsie’s mother showed the photos to the local Theosophical Society, she set in motion a chain of events that led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to declare the photographs to be authentic. He wrote an article on fairy life for The Strand magazine in November 1920, and fairy fever gripped the nation. Conan Doyle later wrote a book on the subject, The Coming of the Fairies – The Cottingley Incident.

Magnitude.io are preparing for their next space plant mission to the International Space Station (ExoLab-8), and are recruiting a real-life teacher to join the mission in virtual form. That teacher’s Bitmoji will serve as the @astro_moji mission specialist. So if you’re a Teacher, Educator, Librarian or Docent anywhere in the world, head over to the website for more details.

In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks to Vertical Veg Man Mark Ridsdill Smith, an expert on small space gardening on Earth. Small space gardening shares many of the same constraints facing space gardeners, although harvesting runner beans up a ladder isn’t one of them!

Today I learned about the social media phenomenon that is #FingerpostFriday. It involves people posting images of fingerposts. But I’d never heard that name used for the things I simply call signposts.

Kathy and Stuart Pickering created their rustic cottage garden in a stretch of field.

Q: I’m thinking of buying a polytunnel to extend the growing season, but while many of my gardening friends think it’s a great idea, others have warned me off it, saying that they’re a lot of work to look after. Any advice would be welcome. PK, Co Kildare

Where to buy September issue with 2-for-1 Garden entry card and guide 2023