If we could step back in time to flick through the pages of popular garden magazines from bygone eras, it’s safe to say that we’d find few if any features on rewilding, sustainability, environmentally conscious garden design or the rich biodiversity of brownfield sites. Instead, those popular publications typically dispensed traditional gardening advice on how to cultivate a range of choice plants and protect them from common pests and diseases. Some of it, unsurprisingly, hasn’t aged all that well.
Few of us, for example, would contemplate installing a stuffed cat among our flower beds to scare off destructive sparrows, as suggested in an early edition of Curtis’s the Botanical Magazine. Or dousing our rose plants with a solution of water and turpentine to kill off “mischievous grubs”. Their kind advice to use poisonous chemicals such as arsenic, sodium chlorate, simazine, paraquat, DDT, drins and neonicotinoids to control weeds, pests and diseases feels a million miles away from the planet we inhabit today. The same goes for well-meaning suggestions on how, for example, to achieve the perfect weed-free lawn, colourful carpet bedding displays, or heated glasshouses heaving with tropical fruit, all of them elements of a garden that we now know require intense maintenance and come at an unaffordable environmental cost. As we contemplate ways to combat climate change and grieve for the escalating loss of biodiversity, the world has moved on and gardeners with it.
So have those magazines’ modern counterparts including Gardens Illustrated, the well-known international gardening magazine often described as the horticultural equivalent of Vogue, whose Irish-born editor is Stephanie Mahon, the award-winning author and gardening
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Common juniper (Juniperus communis) is one of only three conifers native to the UK. It’s a member of the cypress family and grows on chalk or limestone in lowland areas, and moors, woodland and cliffs in northern Britain. Juniper is in decline in wild populations and has been designated a UK Biodiversity Action Plan priority species. This special tree has disappeared from several areas in the south of England. Many remaining colonies are so small that they’re considered functionally extinct. Scotland is now the stronghold for 80 per cent of the UK’s juniper trees.
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In a world increasingly focused on sustainable living, the choices we make extend to every corner of our lives, including our outdoor spaces. When it comes to garden furniture, the term "sustainable" goes beyond a mere buzzword – it's a commitment to a greener and more ethical lifestyle.
There’s no denying that gardening is an occupation that throws up a lot of questions, but garden design apps can help. Whether you’re new to it or a seasoned, green fingered pro, big projects like landscaping or planning a garden from scratch need a lot of information along the way (which a garden designer can help with if you have one, but these apps will help if you don’t) but it’s the smaller issues like plant identification or concerns about flowers that are equally tricky and it can be a nuisance to dig out a book to help you.
They say that you can tell a surprising amount about a gardener by the kind of potatoes they grow. Some of us, for example, are traditionalists who’ll plump for the floury, fluffy ‘British Queen’ (colloquially known as ‘Queens’) every time. Others are passionate foodies who prefer the firm, waxy, flavoursome, yellow flesh of a salad potato such as ‘Charlotte’, or the heirloom ‘La Ratte’. Individualists, meanwhile, often like to seek out unusual kinds, such as the dark magenta-fleshed ‘Vitanoire’, or the knobbly ‘Pink Fir Apple’, the heritage variety famed for its more-ishness.
I planted bare-root raspberries “Autumn Bliss” a few years ago. The first year all but one plant died. Thinking I had neglected them, I bought more bare-root plants and planted them in the same bed and these all lived. In their first year, they only produced a few raspberries, but last year they fruited well.
When it comes to botanical longevity, it’s fair to say that annual and biennial species of plants are the “here today, gone tomorrow” ephemerals of our gardens and allotments. No sooner have they made our acquaintance, then they up and disappear like thistledown. Perennials, by comparison give far more bang for their buck, but even they can’t compare to ornamental trees and shrubs, many of which are easily capable of outliving their owners by decades, sometimes centuries.
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