Six on Saturday: the Temperature is Dropping

This month, we’re collaborating with some brilliant businesses to bring you our very special “12 days of Christmas” prize draw, offering 12 generous prizes to 12 lucky winners throughout the month of December.

Cobra, the garden machinery experts, are delighted to offer readers the chance to win a CS1024V Li-ion Cordless Chainsaw, worth over £115.

Consecutive days of frost have certainly put paid to most herbaceous plants in the garden, and with time and less chilly weather I could now begin cutting back some of the top growth and improving the general scruffiness of some of the borders. Meanwhile, I have  finally been giving some thought to  a certain event that seems to have taken many people by surprise this year, and have at least ordered some seeds from Chiltern Seeds and bedding plants from Brookside Nursery Nursery so have achieved something garden-related in the last week. I still have a ramble at least once a day, albeit more of a sprint than a ramble – if you need to take it at a more leisurely place, then please do.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the recent epiphany in gardens and mental health is a new discovery, but gardens have long been linked to good health and quiet reflection. In fact, the late 20th-century rift in our relationship with the natural world can be seen as a historical blip in an otherwise unbroken bond between man and nature. The well-documented surge in interest in the natural world during Covid was in fact a restoration of a healthier relationship that we as a society had been enjoying for centuries.

Creating a garden is, initially, an introverted process. It takes a while to imagine a garden and to develop it into its final form. For much of that period your thoughts are just part of an evolving dream of a future reality. It takes longer to build a garden and a whole lifetime, or more, for that garden to mature. To embark on making a garden is an act of faith. The creative journey is made unique by the relationships we have with those we enlist to help us. Without other people there would be no garden. Together, we generate a great alchemical soup of ideas, we consider constraints and we discuss details that ultimately coalesce into the new garden. Landscape gardens can express themselves in myriad ways. I have always enjoyed the freedom landscaping offers to explore what the land, the people and the circumstances ultimately reveal.

The Piet Oudolf field at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset is the much-photographed and universally adored example of a style of planting that has been gathering momentum since the Victorian era. In defiance of an increasingly industrialised landscape, garden-making has steadily become more conscious of the vitality and importance of wilder and naturalistic landscapes as they disappear in an ever-more urban world. But it was Piet Oudolf who has transformed this yearning for the wild into a widely recognised style, one which has arguably been the defining characteristic of contemporary garden design over the last 20 years. 

As inextricable from mass festive wares as tinsel and paper hats, the poinsettia blazes red in most shops and homes during December. Being such an omnipresent sight makes it unappealing for many of us, but, thankfully – if the standard scarlet species makes you wince – there are less common forms available that are well worth buying to brighten the house this Christmas.

Why Is My Christmas Cactus Dropping Leaves? 7 Causes and Solutions

After a few days of clear sunny days and blue skies, even with a hint of warmth in the sun on Thursday, it was almost inevitable that we would soon be seeing our first frost of the season – and so it was, arriving like a thief in the night. Temperatures dipped to -2°C in the early hours, and haven’t risen above 5°C for the rest of the day, finally putting paid to autumn for this year.

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