Gardeners' Heaven

If you’re serious about raising your own plants from scratch, there’s one piece of kit you’ll find incredibly useful – an electrically heated propagator. But there’s no need to invest in a great big elaborate one that costs a fortune. Nowadays most garden centres sell small economical versions about the size of a standard seed-tray [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh Midwinter isn’t the time you’d usually be thinking of doing some serious plant propagating, but its perfect for tip-layering – an old but effective way of propagating all sorts of cane fruit (blackberries, loganberries etc) and ornamental rubus species such as Rubus thibetanus and ‘Benenden’; also the unusual dual-purpose Japanese wineberry which [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh When you’ve cut your teeth – so to speak – on the usual radishes, lettuce, courgettes, carrots and perhaps a tub of tomatoes on the patio, most novice veg growers like to branch out into more exotic territory. And there’s plenty of scope. A lot of veggies that are rather pricy to [...]

Achimenes, also known as hot water plants, were once a great favourite with Victorian gardeners and they deserve to be better known now. Distantly related to gloxinias and African violets, they are showy, short, bushy pot plants that are ablaze with exotic busy-lizzie-like flower in a huge range of colours from early summer through to [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh A good many shrubs that are growing in small gardens right now are really more suited to far larger places, and though they are undoubtedly lovely when first planted – and for several years after – they can in time outgrow their space by a large radius. Now, in many cases over-large [...]

by Alan Titchmarsh When you want masses of colourful pot plants to fill your conservatory or indoor windowsills this season, keep costs down by growing your own – from seed. Nowadays all sorts of popular annual species are available in economical packets, which will produce more than enough for your needs, and probably provide spares [...]

A century or so ago, a hotbed would have been one of the vital tools in any self-respecting head gardener’s armoury, along with several acres of walled garden, a huge range of glasshouses and dozens of helpers. You might have to pass on the rest, but a hotbed is entirely do-able even in today’s tiny [...]

The humble olive tree. Go on holiday and you see groves of them, seemingly battling their daily existence on the most precarious of slopes all across the med. Olea Europaea has been cultivated for olive oil, fine wood, olive leaves and the fruit. November is peak harvesting time and the recent high winds in the [...]

When your stack of seed catalogues reaches critical mass and the weather stops you doing anything useful outdoors, it’s time to make out your annual seed order and post it off. Oh, I know you could probably buy what you want from your local garden centre in spring, but there’s a lot to be said [...]