The English Garden

Enjoy over 60 beautiful gardens a year with The English Garden. Every issue features country, city, cottage and coastal gardens, with advice on how to recreate them. Be inspired by articles written by the country's top garden designers and discover the best plant varieties for your garden, chosen by expert nurserymen and plantspeople.

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THE ENGLISH GARDEN

This Month • Our guide to plants, people, gardens and events, tasks and shopping in January

People to Meet • Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Out & About • Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month

Things to Do • In January, Jane Moore is pruning fruit trees on cold crisp days, de-leafing hellebores to ward off black spot, and planning ahead with her seed catalogues

Beautiful & Useful • New plants, books, tools and creative designs, plus shopping inspiration

A Clean Slate • Whether or not you’ve made New Year’s resolutions, one thing the first day of a new year does bring is that sense of clearing the decks and starting afresh. As the garden begins to show the first signs of emerging from its winter slumber, it’s time to get outdoors and make your mark. The Hewitt Potting Shoe, £265. Tel: 01730 826900; alitex.co.uk

THE HIGH GROUND • For a garden that gets absolutely everything right look no further than Rockcliffe, occupying a lofty spot in the Cotswolds and the overall winner of The Nation’s Favourite Garden 2023

NATURAL Progression • By harnessing and deferring to nature Carol Bruce has perfectly balanced wildness with constraint in her superbly imagined and endlessly abundant garden at Old Bladbean Stud in Kent

The Long Game • Making sense of a 70m long sloping strip of land was a challenge relished and expertly overcome by Claire and John Spendlove at 111 Main Street in Lancashire, where a line of connected garden rooms leads the visitor on a fascinatingly playful journey

In The Mood • Highfield Farm in South Wales is the kind of garden that elicits a response. You’ll feel something as you move from carefully curated space to carefully curated space, each created and tended by a passionate plant collector and an ardent horticulturist

Points of VIEW • On the one hand Warwickshire’s Priors Marston Manor is a Georgian landscape garden of incredible views; on the other it’s a charming series of rooms filled with romantic planting and delectable surprises

Organised CHAOS • A garden that evolved by happenstance over the years as its owner’s passion for the project burgeoned, The Old Rectory in Suffolk is beguilingly diverse and welcomes nature with open arms

Ring the Changes • Tantalise your tastebuds by growing something new in the vegetable plot this year. Ollie Hutson, head gardener at The Pig, has exciting suggestions

One of a Kind • A rare monotypic genus, comprising just the one species, the outstanding conifer Cryptomeria japonica offers cultivars in different shapes, heights and hues, says John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries

FROND REGARDS • Often dismissed as background greenery for shady spots, ferns offer a detailed beauty that deserves closer inspection. Helen Picton of Old Court Nurseries makes the case for putting them in the spotlight

LOOKING FORWARD • Four expert gardeners and growers share the good practices they’ve developed to take into 2025

Global Gardens • In a series of extracts from her book, Amazing Gardens of the World, Vivienne Hambly selects 20 must-visit garden destinations from across the globe

LAW & ORDER • Anthony Tavernor, owner of Plas Cadnant on the Isle of Anglesey, outlines his ten golden rules for restoring a lost garden

Hello Sunshine! •...