The Virgin Gardener, By Laetitia Maklouf - A Review

The Virgin Gardener is intended to be a starter guide for people who have either never gardened before, or are are very new to it and want some low hassle projects to get them started. Don't let this put you off if you are a bit more experienced however as there are plenty of interesting and quirky ideas in here for you too. I'd count myself as being somewhere in the middle. I'm not a total newbie, but I'm certainly not an old hand by any stretch of the imagination. For me this book filled in some informational blanks on topics that other books just seem to assume you know, and gave me some ideas to try out both in the garden and inside.

The Flowerpot Gang

This is a fairly brief post to fill anyone interested in on my experience of being a volunteer for the current series of The Flowerpot Gang.

The episode that was broadcast this week was based in Sunderland at the young carers support centre and, being a priviledged resident of that fair city, I responded to the call for volunteers made the previous week. I emailed in as instructed and, much to my surprise, I was contacted within a couple of hours by someone from the production company inviting me along last Friday and asking for details of when I'd like to come along and what I could do. I work full time so was only able to go for the afternoon session. This was a bit of a shame as it turned out because most of the interesting work was done in the morning, and apparently most of the filming was too.

Garden Log - August Update

This has been a really exciting month for things getting going and loads of fantastic flowers appearing. It's nice to start getting a proper idea of how things are going to develop once the planting ages and gets denser.

Life In A Cottage Garden, By Carol Klein - A Review

Written to accompany the TV series of the same name (which unfortunately I've not seen and have infuriatingly just found out was repeated last month), this book takes you through the development and  changes to Carol's garden at Glebe Cottage over the space of a year.

Garden Visit - Durham Botanic Garden

Last week the other half and I visited the Durham Botanic Garden. We've been there a few times before, but we'd yet to see it in summer. The garden is run by the university and is used as a teaching resource as well as a public attraction.

Despite the garden having obviously suffered from the same appalling summer weather that the rest of us have endured it was looking very pretty. It was fairly obvious that the gardeners were battling with the aftermath of all of the rain with lots of massively overgrown plants and several of the paths being washed away.