Secret Gardens

I was recently given a load of garden books that had belonged to my mum. There are several interesting ones there that I'll review as I get through them, but the most eye-catching one for me was a book on the creation of private spaces within the garden called Secret Gardens that looks like it was published by an Australian magazine. How it found its way into my mum's collection I have no idea. I assume it was a charity shop find...

Anyhoo, reading through this book really got me thinking about things I'd love to do, but there is a limit to the amount I can or am prepared to do to my current space. As I've mentioned before, the house is rented and given how reluctant the landlord seems to be to spend money on it, I'm loathed to put too much into the garden.

The Curious Gardener, By Anna Pavord - A Review

The Curious Gardener is a collection of Anna Pavord's articles from her column in The Independent. It is set out by month with a few relevant articles and then a "what to do now" section.

Autumn in Stuarts Park

Stuarts Park, Middlesbrough, is somewhere I've written about a few times. It's a lovely period park that has been getting slowly restored over the last few years and I spend my lunch time there as often as I can. The upper ponds area of the park is one of the recently restored areas and is starting to look really good now that the mud slick that has surrounded the ponds for the last few months has started to give way to grass. There is a lovely selection of trees there including one of my favourites, the weeping willow. If I ever have a garden big enough to accommodate a large pond, then it will definitely have a weeping willow planted next to it.