gardening

Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Kleine episode 4 – High Summer: In July and August the garden is building to a peak. Flowers are at their very brightest and most beautiful with geraniums abounding and the fragrance of lilies pervading the garden. To keep the garden looking glorious, there is staking to be done, roses to deadhead and cuttings of asters to take.     Carol sets to work in her hot borders. She plants out the castor oil plants, grown from seed, and places cannas, gingers and dahlias to create an exotic, hot, explosion of colour. Carol

Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Kleine episode 3 – Spring into Summer: In May and June, everything in the garden is surging forwards, full of exuberance. Rather than sitting back to enjoy it all, Carol is planting out sweet peas, picking the first salad leaves and staking perennials.     Blossom drips from the trees, the woodland garden is carpeted with bluebells, and primal ferns begin to unfold. Carol’s opulent oriental poppies pop their hats in the early summer heat and, as the welcome hum of insects returns to the garden, Carol and husband Neil take delivery of

Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Kleine episode 2: March and April is a time of huge change in the garden, as the remnants of winter make way for the hope of spring. Carol is busy clearing away the last of the winter detritus to make way for waves of planting. There’s pruning to be done, and she sows the first seeds of the year. Snowdrops are replaced by celandines and violets, and along the lanes and hedgerows, primroses abound.     A local hedge pruner, who has come to cloud prune Carol’s box hedge, finds his work interrupted

Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Kleine episode 1 – Winter has come… harsh frosts have shattered Carol’s tulip pots, and her brick paths are ruined. Carol takes shelter in the potting shed and prepares her garlic for spring planting. On finer days, she begins pruning late-flowering clematis, and when the thaw comes she begins a major re-vamp in the borders.     As the long dark days pass, the first green shoots of the new year appear. First it is snowdrops in ones and twos, and then in drifts, carpeting the woodland floor. These are then followed by