my top wild flower mixes and garden-worthy varieties Wild flowers were my first love in the plant world. Here are my favourite varieties, that flower for months, not just a few fleeting weeks, and are possible to grow in your own back garden. For i
a spring wild flower adventure I remember one sunny May weekend nearly 20 years ago spending a couple of days botanising down in the West Country. We had a white 2CV, and drove around very slowly, roof down, spotting any colou
my favourite british wild flowers I'm on a mission to get more of us to grow British wild flowers in our gardens. As ever-increasing numbers of these plants vanish from the countryside, our own private spaces become more importan
sowing flowers in late summer I am a believer in late summer sowing – getting most of my hardy annuals into the ground as soon as I can. The soil is warm in late August, and with a little rain the top few inches of ground sh
the wild flowers of sicily It had to be the most unpromising bit of landscape I’d ever seen. The entire bay – literally – was rimmed with oil refineries, tanker loading bays, incomprehensible tangles of pipewo
how to sow your own pictorial meadow The pictorial meadow is a whole new way to garden and it’s utterly genius. It’s an adaptation of a cornfield full of annual “weeds”, without the corn, the flowers packed in lik
how to grow wild flowers in container pots There are so many reasons you might choose to grow wild flowers in container pots – perhaps you’ve got limited outside space, like the freedom of moving your plants around to keep things v
how to create a mini wild flower meadow When Britain hosted the Olympics in 2012, I heard almost as many people talking about the colourful meadows at the Olympic site as about Sir Chris Hoy and Mo Farah. The perennial wildflower meadows in
