Lavishly illustrated with Emma Mitchell’s instantly recognisable sketches, paintings and flatlays of found objects, The Wild Remedy offers a whole year of hedgerow observations, walks among rockpools and country rambles, while demonstrating how the author turns to nature to assist in navigating her mental health.

If you’ve still a little Christmas money burning a hole in your pocket, then let me help you spend a very few pennies on some shiny new gardening tools. You can tell yourself it’s a noble deed in the cause of tidying the garden, and if Marie Kondo comes round to complain about more stuff, we can lock her in the shed.

House of Plants, the first book from Caro Langton and Rose Ray, was beautifully produced and packed full of personal reflections, inspiration and practical advice. I couldn’t wait to find out if their new title could build upon the success of its predecessor. Read on to find out how it measures up.

Kate Bradbury’s previous book, The Wildlife Gardener, gave us a step-by-step guide to creating an organic garden that placed an emphasis on biodiversity. In her latest title, she describes a year in the life of her own small garden in Brighton. But there’s a bit more to it than that.

Robbie Blackhall-Miles of Fossil Plants wonders what his grandma would make of what he’s been getting up to with her butter knife. This is the third post in the series on A gardener’s tools.

Death and taxes, wrote Benjamin Franklin, are the only certainties in this world. I feel he could quite safely have added “weeds” to the list without the least risk of damage to his reputation. My own cv comes up pretty short in the area of Founding Father, but rather the opposite under the category of Proficient and Joyful Weeder. And this is just the time to indulge in a prolonged bout of that particular activity.

I have a new best friend in the garden. He’s eight foot tall, has three legs and seems perfectly happy for me to stand on him for extended periods. I am of course referring to a tripod ladder, but not just any tripod ladder. This is the tripod ladder I’ve had my beady eye on ever since I began gardening as career, and it’s made by the UK company Henchman.

Flamboyant, fabulous – on occasion demurely restrained – the dahlia is an exquisite conundrum that encapsulates the vibrant energy of the garden as high summer turns towards autumn. In her latest book, Naomi Slade explains her fascination with the flower, and introduces us to over 65 captivating varieties.

Seven acres of beautifully landscaped gardens in Kent, boasting award winning perennials and more late summer colour than you can shake a stick at. When an opportunity came up to meet the garden’s curator and the man behind Dyson’s Salvias, I wasn’t about to refuse.

Pauline and Paul McBride know how to do summer perennials, and I’ve been keen for several weeks now to get down to Sussex Prairie Gardens to see how the plants have been coping in the heat. We chose a sweltering day for it. There may also have been cake.

You may consider the assemblage of flowers and foliage won from the garden into posies an appropriate activity for a big ’airy gardener. You may not. But if it’s good enough for that Dan Pearson, it’s good enough for me.

For this, the second post in the series on A gardener’s tools, we’re introduced to a fork with a difference. Carly Green of the National Botanic Garden of Wales gives us a peek into her tool roll.

Monday – press day at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show, beneath a sun that shone with almost cruel intensity upon the show ground. So intense was the light that I’ll have to ask you to forgive this year’s photographs for being a little more washed out than usual – golden hour shots would have done the gardens more justice, but I was on site neither early nor late enough to catch the low slanting rays.

Simplicity and delight in a flower, or a weedy menace? As is so often the case, it depends on your approach to gardening. One thing beyond debate is that, once established, this doughty little daisy will flower its socks off all summer long.

With so much to take in at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, one visit is rarely enough. I was fortunate enough to be able to get there for a second time, this time later in the day, to catch up on those gardens and plants I’d missed on press day, with a change of camera lens and a mind to focus on the details.

If Chelsea is to be any more than the (admittedly rather fabulous) latte froth upon the upper lip of the horticultural industry, it needs to have something to say, not only to gardeners like you and me, but to homeowners with an emerging interest in their outside space, to indoor gardeners with not so much as a balcony and, I’d venture to suggest, to park bench philosophers.

Behind every glorious garden, whether the overriding style be neatly formal or wondrously wafty, there’s a machine-wielding gardener keeping the underlying structure in trim. It’s as necessary in a small domestic garden as a large public one, and in this post I’ll be putting machines aimed at both ends of the spectrum through their paces.

March 2018 – what the heck was that? Just as we were beginning to enjoy the first signs of spring, the Beast from the East brought snow and cold weather from Siberia. Twice. Thankfully for us, rumours of its return at the end of the month proved to be groundless, though our friends in the north were less fortunate. We just got very wet instead.

A trip to Hever Castle Gardens with the Garden Media Guild. Daffodils, miles of yew an impressive Italian Garden...and an unexpected encounter with bedding plants.

A day in the life of a garden blogger. Spring rebooted, the vernal equinox. Surely winter's finished with us now?

With one almighty flounce, Winter departs, and Spring asserts itself upon the outside world with a conviction that grows by the day. It’s the perfect time to be thinking about how you want your garden to be over the next year, and if that’s something you’ve not attempted before, Lucy Bellamy’s *Brilliant & Wild: a garden from scratch in a year* might just be the book for you

From a dull grey start to a bitter, snowy end, winter has been topsy-turvy, and is now in the throes of a tantrum at being asked to go home. We may struggle to keep up; the garden, of course, takes all this in its stride.

There’s a new gardening podcast in town. Co-hosted by yours truly and Sunday Times gardening columnist Laetitia Maklouf,  it’s aimed squarely at newbie garden owners and enthusiastic amateur gardeners, and comes with a no-jargon, no-nonsense approach and take-home tips aplenty from the great and the good of the horticultural world. It’s called The Virgin Gardener Podcast, and you can find the teaser episode on iTunes right now.

Do you ever feel you’re getting buried under the weight of information and conflicting opinions on the internet? It’s as true with gardening as any other subject you might throw at Google. So in this post, I’m recommending you buy a packet of seeds and get on with sowing the contents. Then you can read the advice, contradictory or otherwise – but at least that way you’ll have avoided the procrastination hump.

I’m delighted to welcome Kew’s Miranda Janatka for the first post in a series on A gardener’s tools, in which different gardeners will be writing about the tools which they find invaluable in their labours, as they tend gardens and nurture plants. Having seen a photography of Miranda’s dissecting kit on her Instagram feed, I had to ask her if she’d be happy to go into the background behind the collection and, fortunately for us, she said yes.

Undoubtedly cute in the right place, but a magnificent pain in the backside in the garden – furry critters have been wreaking havoc again. This time the rabbit damage was limited to a fig tree, but its survival is still very much in the balance.

To the uninitiated, hashtags are probably the most confounding aspect to social media. But a little delving reveals them to be a powerful tool for cutting through the online flotsam and plucking related content out from the relentless flow of global chatter. As winter turns to spring, I’m launching a hashtag to encourage Instagram users to share their seasonal images.