Snoozing, Squelching and Silvery Mud

Tags

Cardiff Bay, Gwent Levels, Newport Wetlands Centre, Richard Mabey, RSPB

Christmas presents

So the big day has been and gone for another year. In the Welly house it was a nice chance to relax after the previous busy days of preparation. Gardening featured heavily as a theme for presents. I was delighted to get some wooden seed trays which will look perfect in the greenhouse, there was Richard Mabey’s excellent Flora Britannica, membership of the RHS and 2 mugs which will keep me supplied with tea throughout the growing year.

Then Boxing Day arrives and we enter ‘Chrimbo Limbo’ as I heard it rather aptly referred to on the radio the other day. For some reason, I do seem to have spent a lot of time over the last week asleep. I even nodded off one afternoon whilst reading my new book, although that is no reflection on Richard Mabey’s writing, I hasten to add. I think the dark, gloomy days are getting to me and my body clock. We like to get out over the Christmas period and get some fresh air and exercise but this year the weather has done its best to put a halt to this idea. It has officially been declared the wettest year on record in England; as for Wales, well if there has been a wetter year I’m just glad I wasn’t there to experience it. The incessant rain has made most of our favourite places to walk no-go areas turning them into muddy quagmires with huge puddles. We’re hardy folk though and we’ve donned waterproofs and wellies and squelched our way around the appropriately named local RSPB Wetlands Reserve, despite lashing rain and howling gales.

Newport Wetlands Centre

The reserve was created in 2000 to compensate for the loss of mudflats further up the coast at Cardiff. The Cardiff Bay project constructed a barrage to make a freshwater lake with the idea of regenerating the old city docks by creating a marina. Mud flats are an incredibly important habitat but unfortunately a muddy tidal estuary doesn’t look that attractive when you want to build penthouses and bars, so it had to go.

The Wetlands Centre at Newport used to be a dumping ground for waste from the nearby power station but it has been transformed into 145 acres of reed beds and lagoons. Situated on the Gwent Levels, an area of ancient marshland grazing and reen systems (drainage ditches), and looking out onto the Severn Estuary, it is a flat, bleak landscape. I like walking here. It isn’t what you would call beautiful in the way that a Cornish beach is or the rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales are but there is something about the place. For one, I love being by water and, whilst there is no sandy beach or stunning cliffs, I still find it incredibly soothing and good for the soul.

The Severn Estuary

There is also something about somewhere that is bleak. You have to try that little bit harder to find the beauty but it is possible, even with a power station not too far away. On a frosty day, with the bluest of skies the weather bleached reeds glisten, golden in the light. Even on a gloomy winter’s day feint shafts of sunlight appear from the heavily laden clouds and there is enough light to create a silvery, shimmering effect on the muddy beach as the tide goes out. Dotted about the mud are hundreds of footprints of the birds that have been here seeking out food buried below and flocks of birds scoot along only a few feet above the water.

Frozen lagoon

We’ve seen the lagoons frozen, creating duck ice rinks and, at the other extreme, some of the ponds almost dry after month upon month of drought. We’ve stood transfixed by murmurations of starlings and watched agog as a heron swallowed a duckling whole. In summer, the place is a teeming with dragonflies and damselflies, moths and butterflies, and stunning orchids appear alongside the paths. We’re ever hopeful that one day we’ll spot the magnificent bearded tit or hear the boom of a bittern, both inhabitants of the site. Fellow visitors taunt us, their sightings written on a board in the visitors centre. One day we’ll be lucky too.

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Merry Christmas

Tags

cranberry sauce, Damson gin, mince pies

So this is a little later than planned owing to a bit of a baking extravaganza that has transformed my kitchen into what now resembles a bomb site.

Christmas treats

But at last the presents are wrapped, the cranberry sauce and stuffing are made and the mince pies and other tasty treats have been baked. The damson gin has been decanted for a Christmas Eve tipple. And the house is decorated with some flowers picked from the garden and seed heads picked back in the autumn.

Flowers picked from the garden for Christmas

So all that is left, before I flop onto the sofa with a cup of tea, is to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Christmas can be a difficult time and so often doesn’t match the picture sold to us by TV programmes and magazines. Hopefully, though, there’ll be the chance to relax a little, enjoy some good food and company and recharge the batteries.

Merry Christmas, Love Wellywoman X

Christmas Cranberries

Tags

Blackmoor Nurseries, Christmas dinner, cranberries, Delia Smith, Pomona Fruits

My cranberry plant

Cranberries are a bit of a strange fruit. Related to bilberries and blueberries they tend to get wheeled out only for the festive period in the form of a sauce or jelly to accompany turkey and all the trimmings. Either that, or we drink the juice, which reputedly has great qualities for curing bladder problems. The flavour of cranberries is certainly unique. They are very tart and can’t really be eaten without some dose of sweetener. I’m not sure if it’s the tartness but they have a strange after taste too which I find really hard to describe but which has a sort of drying effect on the mouth. I know, I wouldn’t get a job for the cranberry marketing board, would I?

They are mainly associated with America and Canada where they grow in moist, acid, boggy soils. It’s commonly thought that they grow in water but it is only at harvest time that the beds where the cranberries grow are flooded to aid the harvest. A special machine removes the cranberries from the plants and then the fruits float to the surface creating the spectacular sight of red covered lakes. I was surprised to find out that they do grow in the wild here in the UK. In fact, there used to be a place in Lincolnshire known as Cranberry Fen because of the quantity of the fruit that used to grow there in the peaty ground. Draining of the fens changed the growing conditions and the native cranberry declined but they can still be found in parts of the Peak District, Cumbria and the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire.

I have never been much of a fan of them to be honest but then we inherited a cranberry plant 2 winters ago when we took on our allotment. At first, we weren’t sure what the straggly looking plant in its own dedicated raised bed was. I had an idea it might be something that needed ericaceous growing conditions and so had a look through a few books before coming to the conclusion it must be a cranberry. The raised bed itself was in the way of my plans for a path on my newly designed allotment and so the cranberry was going to have to be moved. Wellyman and his reluctance to get rid of anything wanted to give the cranberry a go so we found a home for it in a large pot filled with ericaceous compost in a shady part of the garden at home.

From a central clump the cranberry sends out long stems, known as vines in the commercial cranberry growing circles, and if you had the right soil conditions could make good ground cover. It’s evergreen with the leaves taking on reddish tints from late summer and then, in spring, tiny pink flowers appear. As the summer progresses the tiny light green fruits swell and then start to flush red from August with them being ready to pick from November onwards. I hadn’t really given much thought to actually using them last Christmas but then I spotted a recipe card by Delia Smith in my local supermarket and thought why not give making my own cranberry sauce a go.

I can’t eat much sugar which means the whole festive period is a bit of a torturous experience but this recipe used mainly orange juice as a sweetener. Initially, I wasn’t so keen on the resulting concoction but after 24 hours in the fridge the flavours had developed and it did taste good.

Cranberries picked for this year’s Christmas dinner

This years crop is much smaller in comparison to last year. I think the flowers suffered from the cold spell, all the rain and the resulting lack of pollinators. There should still be enough to make some sauce for Christmas Day though.

Would I recommend growing your own cranberries? I guess it depends on how much you like them. I have come across several recipes that use them which don’t involve simply having them as part of a Christmas dinner, so they can be more versatile that you might first think. They are easy enough to grow but for me they are too much of a novelty to make them worth buying a plant or two. Still, if you have your own plant at least it means you don’t have to rely on your local supermarket providing them. I hear there have been runs on cranberries in some stores over the last few days.

If you would like your own cranberry plant there are several mail order nurseries that can supply you with one. Try Blackmoor Nurseries and Pomona Fruits.

Spick and Span

Tags

Hellebores, snowdrops

Emerging snowdrops

I had a bit of a frantic tidy up this weekend. It had something to do with lying in bed all last week and having too much time on my hands to think about all those jobs I wanted to be getting on with but just didn’t feel up to doing. I do like things to be tidy. It stems from living in tiny places at university and then a minute flat when we first got married. I hate not being able to find things, can’t abide clutter and I definitely believe in a tidy place equals a tidy mind. Recently though I’ve been so busy certain cupboards and drawers have become a bit unruly. You know the thing, you open the cupboard door and things fall out but because you’re in a hurry you just wedge everything back in again until the next time, when of course it all falls out again. Well it was all starting to annoy me so I spent Saturday whizzing around like Mary Poppins, cleaning and reorganising.

It wasn’t just the house that had suffered a bit of neglect over the last month or so. The front and back gardens were looking a bit worse for wear. Granted it’s December and they are unlikely to look at their best but there was a general soggy scruffiness that just looked messy. The main spur though was the sight of the first little clump of snowdrops that we spotted in the churchyard in town on Saturday. It seems pretty early but it got me thinking about my own snowdrops and whether they were showing any signs of an appearance.

On Sunday morning I had a bit of a poke around in the borders and there they were, hidden under a pile of decaying alchemilla foliage. They’re just little green shoots at the moment with no real signs of white yet but even so it was a great discovery.

I don’t tend to tidy up the garden too much in autumn, preferring to leave seed heads to catch any frost we may get, and this year was no exception. It can be good to leave the top growth of some plants to provide the crown with a degree of protection from the winter weather and, of course, plant debris can provide a great place for ladybirds and other insects to overwinter and ultimately the leaves will break down and enrich the soil. However, as with most things there are downsides and just as piles of leaves may act as a warm duvet for beneficial insects so too are they for those creatures you don’t necessarily want in your garden such as slugs and earwigs. For me, it’s really down to personal preference and available time as to whether to clean up the garden or not before spring. I was pleased though to get my hands on quite a few slugs and some snails eggs all tucked away under a soggy geranium. At least that’s a few less of the mollusc foes for the garden next year.

Hellebore flower buds

It seemed a shame though to have snowdrops pushing through and not be able to see them because they were smothered under dying plants and so Wellyman and I spent Sunday clearing up both gardens. With secateurs at hand, asters, alchemilla and geraniums were cut back. Some plants were left though. Sedums, heleniums, achilleas and grasses were left for their structural qualities. These have looked great over the last few weeks covered in frost and they will provide some height and interest in the garden well into the new year.

One part of the garden had become a bit of a no go area after it had been taken over by Verbena bonariensis plants which had self-seeded everywhere. I’d left them to flower over the summer and into autumn but it all just looked too much of a mess now. They all came out to reveal the winter flowering honeysuckle coming into flower.

In my front garden the tidy up allowed the Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn’ in all its full candyfloss-pink glory to take centre stage. It felt great to get out into the garden, into the surprisingly warm sunshine and get some fresh air and exercise after a week stuck in bed. It felt even better once we’d finished to see the garden all spruced up and ready for those spring bulbs to push through.

Tissue Mountains and an Award

Tags

Garden Media Guild Awards 2012

It has been quiet on the Welly front for a bit as a result of catching the lurgy. We went away last Thursday for a long weekend to visit family and drop off Christmas presents. On the way up north Wellyman started to feel under the weather and on arrival retreated to bed. Ha ha! A cunning ploy to avoid the mother-in-law you’re thinking. Unfortunately not, as it wasn’t just a touch of the sniffles, or what is otherwise known as ‘manflu’, but some virus that kept him in bed all weekend only for him to emerge in time for us to leave on the Sunday. By which point I was now feeling unwell. I wouldn’t recommend a 5 hour car journey when you’re having hot flu-like flushes and your muscles and joints are aching so much you just want to be lying down in bed. And, of course, Sod’s law meant just as home was nearly in sight a sign said the junction we needed was shut and that we would have to take a detour. When we finally rejoined the motorway we were then greeted by a profusion of traffic cones and 40mph restrictions for mile upon mile.

We did finally get home where I pretty much went straight to bed and that is where I have remained all week. I caught a few glimpses of the garden covered in a beautiful hard frost but the closest I’ve got to any sort of plants this week has been the flowers on my duvet. I’m up and about now and hopefully, in a few more days, I’ll feel back to my normal energetic self. I’ve lost my sense of smell though which I’m really hoping is only a temporary situation as my dad had something similar last year and completely lost his sense of smell and hasn’t regained it. I picked some winter flowering honeysuckle from the garden today in the hope I’d be able to smell its powerful scent but no, not a thing.

I did get something through the post yesterday however that made me smile. A couple of weeks ago there was a glittering awards dinner at a swanky London hotel to honour those working in garden media. Very much the preserve of those earning a living as journalists,  photographers, presenters and writers, there is one category however, that is also open to amateurs, that of the Best Blog. Back in September I thought I’d give it a go and entered Wellywoman. I knew the competition would be stiff as the majority of entries are blogs written by professional writers but if you don’t enter you’ll never be in with a shot.

On the day of the awards ceremony I was at home, working, but I was following the proceedings on twitter. I had hummed and hawed about going but in the end finances wouldn’t allow. I was a little envious on the day reading everyone’s tweets about what they were wearing and the excitement building. I was even more gutted not to be there when I discovered Chris Packham, a teenage crush of mine, was hosting the event.

The winner of the Best Blog 2012 went to the Guardian’s garden blog and with the great array of writers they have on board this was well deserved. But then, and I can’t quite believe it, Wellywoman was a finalist. I didn’t find out until several hours after the ceremony had finished and Wellyman had a look on the website and there it was. I was pretty gobsmacked and then I treated Wellyman to some impromptu dancing around the kitchen. The other 3 finalists were Michelle Chapman for Vegplotting, James Alexander Sinclair for his blog for Crocus and Kate Bradbury for her Gardener’s World blog.

Of course, as I wasn’t there, I didn’t get my certificate on the day but it cheered me and my Rudolph-like nose up when I got the envelope yesterday and opened it up to find the certificate inside.

If you’d like to give it a go next year, take a look at the Garden Media Guild Awards website.

Looking Back – Powis Castle

Tags

abutilons, Cliveden, clivias, National Trust, Powis Castle

Powis Castle

Seeing the garden outside descend into its winter slumber with soggy, decaying foliage and bare earth appearing as plants die back can make me feel a bit glum but I know I appreciate spring all the more for its vibrancy and zingyness because I’ve gone through the grey and damp of winter. It’s hard though, when I’m working on something that needs me to write about summer and the abundance on my plot, to feel the inspiration when I’m typing wearing fingerless mittens, a massive cardigan and slipper boots whilst sat in front of my SAD lamp. That’s when I turn to my store of photos for inspiration. They’re a reminder that winter will pass even if it doesn’t feel like it at the moment.

The other day I came across some photos of a visit we made to Powis Castle in mid-Wales a couple of years ago. It was somewhere we had wanted to visit for a while and seeing as it was Wellyman’s birthday we thought we’d make the journey. Now managed by the National Trust, the castle and its gardens are set in a stunning location, The medieval castle, distinctively built from red stone, is perched high on the edge of a ridge and to one side gardens tumble down in a series of terraces. The gardens have a strong influence of Italianate and French design and certainly on a warm sunny day in June it was easy to think we were somewhere in Europe rather than the Welsh borders. Enormous dark green clipped yews cascaded over the terraced gardens.

One of the terraces and its borders

The scale of everything was really quite something. The castle with its position on the edge of the cliff looms over the garden. When the gardens were designed in the 1680s by William Winde, who had also created Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, he built terraces and herbaceous borders on a scale that matched the grandeur of the castle. The top terrace has deep borders either side of a path with impressive planting and this is replicated on the terrace below. Statues and enormous pots compliment the planting, again giving the place a continental air. The terraces led down to an orangery packed full of Clivias or Kaffir Lilies. These tender plants from South Africa were named after Lady Charlotte Florentina Clive, the granddaughter of Robert Clive, otherwise known as Clive of India. Unfortunately not in flower for our visit it must like a spectacular sight when they are in bloom.

The shelter from the castle and the terracing has created a micro climate which allows an impressive array of plants to be grown. They have a good selection of Abutilons, an exotic plant, which takes you by surprise when you see it thriving here in mid Wales. There are some beautiful Salvias, Ceanothus and a good selection of Roses.

The view from the lower garden up to the castle

This probably isn’t the best garden to visit if you have mobility problems as there are plenty of steps which are quite steep in places. The lower garden was originally a kitchen garden but became a more informal flower garden at the beginning of the 20th century. Packed with Peonies and Alliums when we visited, you also get some stunning views back towards the castle. From this lower garden it’s possible to walk through a woodland area created in the 19th century and planted with rhododendrons back towards the castle where there is the opportunity to purchase a plant or two from the small plant nursery. Generally, I’m disappointed with the selection of plants on offer at these places. So often the plants for sale are those ubiquitous varieties you can find anywhere not the unusual plants you’ve spent the day admiring but here at Powis Castle there was an excellent choice and the blackcurrant Salvia particularly attracted my attention. Although with nowhere to overwinter it I resisted the temptation.

Powis Castle is admittedly a little off the beaten track, although this has its advantages as there were no Sissinghurst style hoards to contend with, but it is definitely worth a visit with its stunning setting, gorgeous plants and a style of garden design not often seen in the UK.

For more information about Powis Castle take a look at the National Trust’s website.

If you want to see what I get up during winter take a look at my blog post over at Sarah Raven’s blog Garlic and Sapphire.

Weaving, Winding and Snipping

Tags

Charles Dowding, Espaliered apple, Japanese wineberry, RHS, tayberry

Whether it’s an allotment or garden, most of us don’t have a lot of growing space and have ambitions greater than room will allow. There are ways of maximising space though. Fruit bushes and even trees can be trained in all sorts of ways making it possible to fit quite a selection into a small area. With careful planning and some nifty work with the secateurs it’s surprising just how much you can grow.

Training my tayberry

My tayberry is a perfect example. A cross between a raspberry and a blackberry its growth habits are certainly more blackberry than raspberry. The canes it sends out are long, really long, up to 9ft. It’s also a biennial cropper which means that it sends out canes one year which then flower and fruit the next. The idea when I first planted it was to train it into a panel of wire fencing with one year’s canes which would be bearing the fruit trained in one direction and then the fresh canes it sent up during that growing season trained the other. That was the plan anyway. I just didn’t give the plant enough space or metal fencing for this method to actually work. Instead, I ended up weaving and winding the canes around the metal support in a snake-like fashion. The problem came when the new canes started to grow from the base during the summer. It’s important to keep the two different years’ growth separate so that when you come to prune out the canes that have fruited you don’t mistake any of next year’s growth. If you do you’ll have no fruit the following year. In the end, I ended up allowing these stems to simply grow out along the ground. By August, the tayberry had stopped fruiting and I pruned those canes out at the base and removed all the growth that was on the metal support. The task then was to wrestle with the new growth. Fortunately, the canes remain really pliable and apart from the vicious thorns (you can buy a thorn-free variety) it isn’t too difficult a job to wind these stems in and out of the fence support, snaking them around just as the others had been. It is a bit of a faff but doing it this way means my tayberry only takes up a space of about 4ft. Ideally, each year’s worth of growth would have a space of about 6ft so that’s a space of 12ft in total but I’m not sure many of us could devote that to one plant.

A fellow allotmenteer has employed the same strategy successfully with a hybrid blackberry and Naomi at Out of my Shed recently wrote about training her Japanese wineberry which has very similar sprawling growth. Her ideas are much more aesthetic than mine! This summer I visited the kitchen garden of a local restaurant and I loved the idea they had had of growing a thorn free variety of blackberry up one side of an arch and on the other an apple was being trained to form an apple and blackberry crumble archway.

A blackberry being trained up an archway

I dream of having my own orchard but at the moment it certainly isn’t a possibility but I did manage to squeeze in an espalier apple tree into the garden last spring. I was impatient and so bought one that came already trained into 2 tiers but when I pruned it in July I spotted two branches that looked like the beginnings of a third level. With the posts and wire in place for the tree already Wellyman added another line of wire and I tied some twine around the 2 stems to the wire to start training the branches down into a horizontal position. We only got 6 fruit from the tree this year but I’m hopeful as the tree gets older that we should get a good supply.

I have toyed with the idea of adding some stepover apples to one of my beds at the allotment. These are the type that grow to about 1ft in height before the branches are trained out horizontally. I really like the idea that I could get several varieties running down the edge of one of my beds with space to grow salad crops which would not make great demands on the soil. Charles Dowding successfully grows crops like this at the base of his larger apple trees. Pruning of fruit trees grown in this way might seem quite daunting but armed with my RHS encyclopaedia it wasn’t actually that difficult. It is mainly about keeping the shape of the trained tree and encouraging fruiting wood by keeping the stems short and stubby. One of the great advantages of all this pruning and contorting is that it actually encourages the plants to produce more fruit, a bonus in a small space.

Pears, cherries and nectarines can be trained to fit smaller spaces and gooseberries can be made into beautiful standards giving your kitchen garden or allotment a sophisticated air. Currants can also be trained and look beautiful up against a wall dripping in glistening fruit. By concentrating growth to fewer stems and opening up the plant more light can get to the wood to ripen it, important for fruit production. It also means fruit will ripen more quickly and air flow around the plant is improved, leading to fewer problems with fungal diseases.

I’d love to see any of your own examples of growing fruit in small spaces.

Through the Lens

Tags

Elspeth Thompson, IGPOTY, Kew, RHS photographic competition, Val Bourne

Josie Elias winner of the RHS Photographic Competition 2012 (image courtesy of picselect)

We’re surrounded by glossy gardening magazines and beautiful, photograph packed books but garden photography often gets overlooked. Maybe because we are so spoilt with such stunning photographs that are just there. I bought an old gardening book the other day and the contrast between it and its black and white photographs and poor quality printing with today’s gardening books is startling. I have always loved photography right from the time I got my first tiny camera when I was about 8 and, of course, I love plants so it’s probably no surprise that plant photos are quite a passion too. I recently had to find a photo of myself and after trawling through thousands of photos stored on my computer from over the last seven years I found only a handful; there were several more of Wellyman, the rest were mainly of plants.

I avidly read gardening magazines and books and yet, and I’m quite embarrassed to say this, until about 9 months ago I could have only named one gardening photographer. Thinking about it now I think it’s rather strange that whilst I could name quite a long list of gardening writers and journalists, the people whose work appears alongside the words had gone unnoticed. Sometimes you’ll come across a book or article that hasn’t any images and they don’t suffer for this but they will invariably have some sort of illustrations to accompany it, as if the words on their own aren’t enough and that our eyes crave some kind of visual stimulus.

Some of my favourite books such as the collections of Elspeth Thompson’s articles for The Telegraph and the recent Gardening series by Val Bourne lack any photographs and yet I love them. However, I am a bit of a photo-addict. For instance, I really dislike recipe books without photographs. To see the prepared dish and its appearance is what makes me want to cook. As for garden writing, I’ll admit there are elements such as the heady perfume of Viburnum bodnantense which can’t, disappointingly, be captured by a camera but there is so much about plants and the spaces we create for them that is about visuals. How dull would life be without these images capturing the light glistening on grass seed heads, frost sparkling on evergreens and water droplets captured on the leaves of Alchemilla mollis?

Amber Rose Amos RHS Photographic Competition 2012 (image courtesy of picselect)

Over the last year I’ve met a few garden photographers and have had the pleasure of working with one of them. It has certainly opened my eyes to the skill that is involved in capturing the beauty of the plants we love so much. Botanical art has always been held in great regard but outside the circles of the garden media plant photography seems rather neglected and yet some of the best images really are beautiful works of art.

I’m so often frustrated with my own camera skills. I have a decent enough camera but lack the technical knowledge that allows me to achieve want I really want. Occasionally, I’ll take a photo I’m really happy with but this tends to be a bit of a fluke rather than any actual skill. Certainly the right camera, lenses and other equipment that are part of a professionals kit make a huge difference but it’s not as simple as having all the gear, years of training learning to understanding light, texture and form as well as depth of field, apertures, shutter speeds and all the other terms that go over my head are all prerequisites for creating great photography.

Plants have always been at the heart of photography. At the same time photography was developing in Victorian Britain so to was our understanding of plants. It’s not surprising then, that the pioneers of photography such as William Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron and Anna Atkins used plants as their subjects. The latter used a technique called cyanotyping which consisted of laying on top of photo-sensitive paper the object you wanted to capture and then exposing the paper to sunlight. The area around the material would change to a blue colour but under it would remain white leaving an image on the paper. Atkins was particularly interested by ferns. These were very basic images but must have been captivating.

Cherry Blossom on the way to the plot. One of my own favourites.

Today, the increasing popularity of print media has meant that plant photographs are in huge demand but when it comes to exhibitions, landscape and portraiture still come out on top. I think this is such a shame as they are certainly just as worthy of the audience. The International Garden Photographer of the Year, in conjunction with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, hold a competition every year open to amateurs and professionals alike, to find the best photographers out there. Each March the winners are announced and an exhibition is held at Kew which then tours the country. If you love plants take a look at their website and I’m sure you’ll be blown away by the images on display.

For me a visit is already pencilled into the diary for next year but in the meantime I’ll keep trying to improve my own attempts whilst making more of an effort to appreciate the work of the garden photographers whose images we see so much of and yet know so little about.

For more details of IGPOTY, how to enter and where to see the exhibition go to igpoty.com

The RHS also runs a photographic competition every year if you fancy giving it a try.

If you love plants and photography take a look at a few of these photographer’s websites for some great images. They are some of my favourites.

Jason Ingram, Paul Debois, Stephen Studd and Mandy Disher.