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.

CONTRIBUTORS

Welcome

The English Garden

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

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

Jim’s Garden Diary • This month, Jim Cable adds accent plants to the flower garden, harvests early-summer crops, divides bearded irises and tidies up tired perennials and shrubs

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

Dining Out

The Call OF DUTY • Amid the wild, sweeping landscape of North Yorkshire’s Nidderdale, William Moore and John Wilson felt a compelling obligation to make their garden at Cow Close as complementary as possible to its powerful setting

Working with Nature • With a blank canvas and no specific ideas beyond a wish to be sympathetic to its bucolic Somerset setting, the owners of New House Farm enlisted Fi Boyle to design a space that exudes vitality and serenity while putting an ecological approach first and foremost

Let the Fireworks COMMENCE • The gardens of Cheshire’s Abbeywood Estate burst into life in high summer, when Harry and Lynda Rowlinson’s exuberant tropical planting in a scorching palette of red-hot colours proves a real hit with visitors

Sweet DREAMS • Louise Allen and Piers Newth dreamt of spending more time in their beautiful and sustainable garden at the aptly named Dreamers Cottage in Oxfordshire, and a change of focus in their vintage tool business let them do just that

Only CONNECT • Tasked with linking a rather modern and open cottage garden to the surrounding Cheshire countryside, designer Janine Crimmins has thoughtfully restructured and punctuated the space to create unity and cohesion

Enchanted ISLE • Overlooked by a fairytale tower, the magical gardens of La Seigneurie on the tiny island of Sark have been developed by generations of a feudal family since Elizabethan times

Lazy Summer Days • After months of hard work spent getting your garden summer-ready, it’s time to kick back and relax as you enjoy the fruits of your labour from one of these comfortable and stylish outdoor lounging options

Social Climbers • Add vertical interest and smooth unsightly surfaces with a charming climbing rose. Ian Limmer of Peter Beales Roses has ten favourites to recommend

Everyday Heroes • Gracing just about every garden in the country with their pretty unassuming charms, easygoing hardy geraniums are a firm favourite of Sue Clarke, holder of two Plant Heritage National Collections, who recommends the best species and varieties to try

DIZZYING HEIGHTS • Reduce visual monotony by adding an element of vertical interest to your garden with an obelisk or arch left stylishly bare or covered with colourful climbers

PRETTY & PRODUCTIVE • With attention to just a few key principles and inspiration from some of the country’s finest kitchen gardens, you can create a vegetable plot that’s every bit as beautiful as it is abundant

TRADE SECRETS: Take a Clematis Cutting • Choose from the right group and clematis can be surprisingly easy to propagate by taking internodal cuttings. Andy Jeanes of Raymond Evison Clematis explains exactly how to do it

RIGHT PLANT, WRONG PLACE • Native weeds are loved by wildlife,...