Christmas gift guide: houseplants & horticulture

On-trend interiors are currently channelling the 1970s jungle vibe, so here are some pressies for budding gardeners with a growing enthusiasm for all things green-fingered…

What's planted where

Even in a weeny windowbox, it's easy to lose track of the plants, seeds and bulbs that are in there, especially if they're lying dormant, died back or, not wishing to be negative, but just plain dead. And it's not unheard of to forget the name of that favourite flowerer… Pop in a plant marker, with the plant name (and date of sowing or bulb planting) written on it in pencil indelible marker and you'll know what's where. So useful.
Wooden plant markers, £3.95 for 40, Sarah Raven



Light up

Light the way, or show off a favourite plant, with this space-saving planter featuring a built-in solar-powered LED lamp. Yes, fairy lights are lovely, but this will sit on a tabletop. Once fully charged, it gives eight hours’ light, perfect for outdoor entertaining.
Elho Flower Light, £35.95, The Worm that Turned







Learn with experts

No, not the services of a gardener. This is RHS Ambassador Jamie Butterworth, whose RHS remit is to encourage more young people to get into gardening. This online gardening course teaches how to convert any spot into a plant paradise including how to plan properly, what to plant for both food and beauty and how to maintain it all.
The new Contemporary Garden course, led by RHS ambassador Jamie Butterworth, from £79, www.learningwithexperts.com (gift vouchers available)


Hearts on hand

Yep, an actual plant. This Ceropegia woodii, aka chain of hearts or string of hearts, is a trailing vine, looking its best cascading from a hanging basket or down a set of shelves. It's often to be seen in the top #houseplants Instagram posts
Ceropegia woodii, £12.50, Trouva







No visible means of support

Terrariums look great, although their popularity may have peaked. However, as anyone who's ever owned one knows, the plants can quite quickly fail to thrive. That micro-environment needs careful managing in order to create optimum growing conditions. I've learnt this the hard way, by making several terrariums and watching their decline. See James Wong's terrarium advice. However, if you routinely kill all houseplants, an airplant (Tillandsia, to be precise) is much less demanding than soil-sited plants. This just needs a bright place, good air circulation and squirting with a plant mister a few times a week in summer, less frequently the rest of the year.
Airplant terrarium kit, £10.50, Crafty Plants (I'd leave out the reindeer moss when assembling, myself)

As seen on my screen

Definitely not Crocs. I appreciate that you don't reeeeally need special outdoor shoes for a bit of light pruning on the balcony, but these will identify you as a gardener when you're going out for supplies, visiting a garden for inspo, guerrilla gardening etc. Light, comfortable and waterproof, Backdoorshoes are made of super-lightweight expanded foam, in sizes 3-14, in loads of jolly outdoor designs including flowers, veg, grass, meadows (like mine, left).
Backdoorshoes, £25, www.backdoorshoes.co.uk

Chelsea Flower Show: the popular plume thistle

Every year at the Show there's a plant (or more than one) that's seen in lots of the show gardens. This year, for me, the main two were lupins and peonies, as I wrote about in my guest blog for That's Not My Age.

Last year, for example, was the bronze iris.

This year, as well as lupins and peonies, there was a smaller specimen on show in many, many gardens. Small-flowered, with a tufty, thistle-like flowerhead, it's the plume thistle, or Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpureum'. I took a close-up shot of it on the Hardy's stand in the marquee:

And here it is in some of the gardens:

Morgan Stanley (with lupins and peonies)

The Anneka Rice Colour Cutting Garden

The Mind Trap garden

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RHS Chelsea Flower Show: plans and photos

I've just come home from press day of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2017 (Monday May 22).

In a previous post I promised to compare the plans of a few of the gardens with the reality by posting the plans and my photos of the finished gardens

Here is the RHS's own Greening Grey Britain show garden:

It's designed for an urban apartment block, with ideas for planting in restricted spaces, integrating everyday elements such as storage for bins and bikes. 

I had difficulty getting a photo of this as every time I went past it was either being filmed in, or full of celebs.

Adam Frost and Joe Swift

Bees, bins and bikes

The M&G Garden is inspired by a disused Maltese quarry. 

Large limestone blocks are softened with grasses, evergreens and ground cover with the emphasis on protecting the fragile environment (both of Malta and Earth as a whole).

This looked very like its drawing:

The Mind Trap garden features metal walls, which represent both security and imprisonment.

It's a representation of living with depression, and the planting varies to reflect mood swings: shade-loving plants for low mood, and sun-lovers for more upbeat moments.

Chelsea Flower Show: how plans become planting

So excited to be going to press day of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show on Monday. It's my tenth year of covering the Show for various publications; this year I'm guest-blogging on Chelsea gardening trends for fashion and lifestyle blog That's Not My Age.

One of the elements I love best about the Show is the chance to see how the designs have been realised. So here are a few of the garden designs as they appear on paper (or screen). And I'll come back and add photos of how these same gardens actually look next week.

Here is the RHS's own Greening Grey Britain show garden:

It's designed for an urban apartment block, with ideas for planting in restricted spaces, integrating everyday elements such as storage for bins and bikes. 

The M&G Garden is inspired by a disused Maltese quarry. (I'm particularly keen to see this one realised, as I'm off to Malta next month.)

Large limestone blocks are softened with grasses, evergreens and ground cover with the emphasis on protecting the fragile environment (both of Malta and Earth as a whole).

The Mind Trap garden features metal walls, which represent both security and imprisonment.

It's a representation of living with depression, and the planting varies to reflect mood swings: shade-loving plants for low mood, and sun-lovers for more upbeat moments.

My choice from Chelsea 2016

How to plant up a window-box

Whether you have outdoor space or not, a windowbox lets you see your gardening endeavours from inside the house, and if you plant the right specimens, you can create your own wildlife watch, with flying visits from bees and butterflies.

Watch your windows
If you have a casement window, you might be better off positioning your windowbox below the windowsill, or you're in danger of knocking off your containers or decapitating your plants. You can work around this, by having a box on one side, or planting low-growers.

Choose your container
First, measure the width and depth of your windowsill to see what size to buy, and check that the sill is level enough to support a window-box.

Having just redecorated with white walls, I went for the Socker white metal windowbox, £12 from Ikea. (I'm not using the hanger as my box can stand directly on the windowsill.)











If you're filling your box with flowerpots, you don't need to drill drainage holes, but if you're filling it with soil and planting directly into that, you do. If you don't have a drill, you can make holes in a plastic windowbox with a pointed implement such as a screwdriver, and some persistence.

And to avoid water trickling down the side of the house, or dripping on heads, it's also best to add a 'windowbox saucer' underneath. Mine is a black plastic 'trough tray', £2.92 from B&Q.

Pick your plants
As what's in the box will be visible from inside, go for contrasting or co-ordinating colours, up to you. For minimum maintenance, choose plants with a long flowering period. I've gone for scabious, compact lilac-blue flowerheads on tall, airy stems – one at each end – and golden yellow small-flowered petunias in the middle. (I've also tucked a couple of oxalis bulbs into a little space, but they're quite old so I'm not holding my breath.)

Scabious attracts pollinating insects (a bumble-bee landed on one of mine as I picked it up in the garden centre), and flower into September.

Work out how deep the plant needs to be inside the box; the soil level needs to be a little way below the rim. Add a layer of soil (I used John Innes peat-free with Miracle-Gro) to suit the biggest plants, tip them out and place them in the box. Fill around the edges with compost and press down to avoid air pockets. Add soil to a level suitable for the smaller plants, prise them out of their little plastic pots, position and fill around them with compost.

Water once the box is in position – it will be heavy – and keep an eye on it. Water a couple of times a week; poke a finger into the soil to see if it's getting dry. You'll need to do this even if it rains, as the building's walls shelter the box and it will stay amazingly dry. Deadhead (pull off dead flowers) to encourage more flowers. Here's the finished box in position.

Brighten up January with flowering bulbs and funky plants

After taking down the Christmas decorations and the tree (which I cut up to burn on the stove –pine burns really well, with a satisfying crackling as the flames hit the sap), the house looks bare and boring.

It's time for a New Year re-run of bringing in the greenery, that fine old pagan custom we all participated in before Christmas. At this time of year, we can be forgiven for getting ahead of ourselves, season-wise, by bringing in spring-flowering bulbs – not least because almost everything in the garden is frost-chewed and blackened.

If you don't have your own bowl or pot of bulbs that you've been preparing for weeks, then supermarkets are a good source. My pot of Paperwhite narcissi and white hyacinths are from Tesco, £1.50 and £2.50 respectively. They were in pale-pink paper pots, a colour I hate, so I've wrapped them in newspaper (thought that was appropriate for the Paperwhites), but you could use leftover wrapping paper, brown paper, tissue paper... Just cut strips, wrap around the pot and secure with sticky tape. It doesn't have to be perfect; it's not permanent.

The pointy green shoots pushing up from the soil are an annual reminder of the renewal of life, the flowers are bright and cheerful, and the scent!

This isn't just something to do at home. Buy a pot of bulbs for your desk, or try a succulent. These tough little plants are brilliant for a dry, unhealthy office environment. The idea of greening the indoors after Christmas is one that Dobbies garden centres subscribe to, and the company has a great range of interesting – not too large – plants in interesting pots.

I have their cactus in a star-design pot (£3.99), which has withstood freezing temperatures in my bay window for the past couple of months, but there are all kinds of angular containers, including a mini-greenhouse frame, and terrariums.

Scott Provan, Dobbies houseplant buyer, has a tip for displaying your plants: 'When arranging plants for display, trios work best, with a mixture of heights. Use your tallest plant at the back and softer textures at the front. Try mixing up cacti and succulents.'

My choice from Chelsea

This year I wrote two image-led features on the Chelsea Flower Show within 24 hours of returning to my desk after press day (Monday, same as the royals, although the press are chucked out before the royal visit). Having got up before 6am for two days on the trot, I was tired. Hence the delay in this post – just a few of my favourite shots from the Chelsea Flower Show.
5,000 poppies

The Telegraph Garden, inspired by dinosaurs

Beautiful bronze irises, from the Vestra Wealth Mindful Living garden. Shades of bronze, orange and copper were everywhere at 2016's Chelsea.

Basil plants for free – in five minutes

I can't smell basil without being whisked back to the greengrocer's in Rome where I first encountered fresh basil. Sent out to shop for tomatoes for dinner by the friend-of-a-friend I was staying with, I asked the shopkeeper, who was on the phone, for pomodori, and he weighed them out. Then I asked for basilico, and he gestured for me to take a massive bunch. I offered my cash and he waved it away, as if to say: you can't have tomatoes without basil.

The dinner that our host made that night is something I still love – I ate it this week. It's a more substantial version of insalata tricolore, adding pasta to the mozzarella, tomatoes, basil and avocado. I also like to add olives, sundried tomatoes and toasted pine nuts.

I like to have a constant supply of basil but it's tricky to grow from seed, and if you buy packets of fresh basil it dries out and goes brown very quickly. I find the easiest way to have enough for your summer eating (homemade pesto! Mmm) is to buy a pot of growing basil from the supermarket. The pots are always full to bursting with little basil plants to ensure a large head of pickable leaves.

All you need to do is take the little plants out, and repot them in a bigger container where they'll continue to grow, and each one will become a bushy plant, with lots of delicious basil leaves. So you'll have enough basil to see you through the summer. And if you have plants left when autumn approaches, take the pot indoors.

I've grown an aubergine!

It may be small but it's glossy and darkest purple. And tonight, it gets eaten, along with... one or two ripe red tomatoes. I haven't managed to get them to turn red naturally for years without resorting to windowsills, brown paper bags and bananas.

Gorgeous gooseberries

Who knew that gooseberries ever turned ruby-red and wine-dark? And sweet?! Not me, until the gooseberry bush had a bumper crop this year. I say bumper crop; last year there were about five berries... Perhaps being dug up and replanted was the TLC it needed, and I'm sure the weather helped. (This bowlful is just one picking.) And this lot made a gorgeous gooseberry fool with crème fraîche and a dash of elderflower cordial.

Wonderful ways with weeds

Now the clocks have gone forward we have an hour more light, and what better way to spend it than weeding? (Yeah, right!)

Ripping the weeds out now while they're young and tender means they're less likely to take over, robbing your poor plants of nutrients. So what better method of destruction than using the weed to feed yourself or your plants?

The two I put to good use at the weekend were nettles and comfrey. When they're young and tender, nettles make a lovely soup. Pick the smaller top leaves (you'll need to wear gloves; the little ones can be vicious too). Avoid ones that are likely to have been watered by dogs, and check for greenfly; they're not easy to wash or pick off.

And for the soup: gently fry a chopped onion in oil or butter, add a couple of small diced potatoes, a couple of handfuls of nettle leaves (discard stalks, which can be tough), and some stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer until potato is soft - by which time the nettles will have lost their sting. Blend until smooth, then serve, for a deliciously fresh-tasting soup.

Comfrey makes a great liquid feed for your plants. Pick the bigger leaves lower down on the plant, put into a container with a lid, weighted down by bricks or plant pots. As they decompose, the leaves produce a seriously stinky liquid (you'll be glad it's under a lid) which makes a great plant feed, as it's rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium plus other trace minerals. Dilute it 1:15 and water your plants with it.