Join the GardenDrum conversation for
~ a weekly email update
~ access to our exclusive Garden Design Centre and
~ to tell us what's your main gardening issue today?
Who will rid me of the troublesome beasts?Help!! The deer are somehow getting into our garden again. Can our international GardenDrum support network come to the rescue with some advice? I thought I had solved the problem 18 months ago when we got the front gates working again and put up deer fencing along a low section of the boundary wall of our garden in Argyll in the west of Scotland. Continue reading
Snippets from a garden design courseI have forsaken my yoga class this term and enrolled on a 10-week course in garden design run by Edinburgh’s Botanic Garden adult education team. I should say straight away that it’s not what GardenDrum’s professional bloggers would regard as proper instruction in garden design. It’s only 2 hours every Tuesday evening, and the main point of it is to learn about using plants in garden design. So there’s nothing about hard landscaping or garden construction, except in general terms. Continue reading
Owning up to garden failuresI wasn’t going to tell you this, but I’ve just been re-reading parts of Samuel Pepys’s diary and have realised that the only point of any sort of diary or blog is to tell it warts and all, so here goes … the mini-herbaceous border in my rental garden in Edinburgh, stocked in May with free plants generously donated by my next-door neighbour, was a pretty comprehensive failure. Continue reading
Sculpture garden in the west of ScotlandWe’d seen Caol Ruadh many times from the water when we turned north from our mooring and headed up the Kyles of Bute towards Colintraive: a majestic, red sandstone mansion, with a sweep of broad, terraced lawns leading from the house down to the water. Continue reading
‘Progress’ at SherbrookeSummer is almost at an end in Britain and it seems a good time to take stock of progress at Sherbrooke, my 1.25 acre garden in the west of Scotland. Looking back at my previous posts on GardenDrum, I see, last November, a despondent account of work unfinished and plans thwarted, accompanied by pictures of rubble, mud and debris. Continue reading
A Mediterranean cottage gardenThe British really do take their love of gardening with them when they move to other parts of the world. I’ve just come back from a short stay in the Haut-Languedoc region of southern France. It turned out that our self-catering apartment was half of a house, and that in the other half lived the owners, Tom and Frank, who moved there around 6 or 7 years ago when Tom was made redundant from his job in Manchester. Continue reading
Gardening gloves – the hole storyI have just thrown out four pairs of gardening gloves – every one with a hole in the right index finger. It doesn’t seem to matter what they’re made of (see Exhibits A to D), they all wear through first in the same place. Continue reading
Honey, I moved the lawnI have just moved about 8 square metres of turf from the east coast of Scotland to the west. It’s the sort of daft thing I do these days. My years of “sensible” gardening on a smallish surburban plot in Cambridge seem a distant memory. Now I try to juggle living most of the time in a rented house and garden in Edinburgh with maintaining – and trying to renovate – an acre and a quarter of wet, weed-infested hillside in Argyll. Continue reading