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So it turns out that life with plastic really ain’t that fantastic after all. Not given how little of it in the gardening world can be recycled, and most of it ends up in landfills, filling our earth with fragments of plastic that will take hundreds of years to fully break down. Ask any mindful […]

The Garden Media Guilds annual awards are a pretty star-spangled affair. Set in the Savoy (which have toilets that challenge the Bellagio in Vegas) its a celebratory event where journalists, photographers, producers, bloggers and other garden media folk gather to see who is crowned the winner in the categories. Social Media Influencer of the Year […]

If you’re wondering how to can attract more bees to your garden then you may not have thought of introducing a fruit tree.  At present, the UK is home to over 250 species of bee with the majority being solitary bee species. As well as increasing crop size and quality, bees play a pivotal role […]

Most people struggle with creating their own townhouse or terraced house garden, as space is often too small to imagine, or they try and simply cram in loads of ideas, making it look cluttered. Given the lack of space and adjacent properties, my clients often complain that there’s no privacy and that space limits what […]

High impact borders can bring the wow factor to your garden. It doesn’t matter whether you have a postage stamp sized garden or a few acres, the principles are the same. Here in the Exploding Atom Garden, I’ve been planting up what I’ve nicknamed the ‘Moody Goth Border’. The aim for this border is to […]

I must admit I was intrigued when I got an email out of the blue asking to come to see some community gardens up in Bury. It wasn’t just the offer of tea, slices of cake and seeing some beautiful borders; it was the fact that these gardens had been created from scratch only a […]

I started this garden design blog to help people make the most of their outdoor space by sharing all of my garden design and horticultural knowledge in easy to digest blog articles. It’s grown pretty rapidly and is now listed as one of the UK’s Top 10 Gardening Blogs! All thanks to you, the keen […]

I’m going to be brutally honest in this blog post, in that I’ve wanted a greenhouse for so many years but never had space for one. I’ve wanted one so much that when I bought one a year ago it languished behind the garage, unpacked for over 12 months. The irony of getting what you’ve […]

A modern garden design style can turn a garden into a room you just can’t wait to be in. Summer evenings are spent sipping fizz out on your garden terrace, with careful mood lighting, dramatic planting and the feeling of privacy. Plants are organised into blocks of colour. Everything is in its place with neat […]

Now I would usually argue against planting in the middle of a 30-year record heatwave. However, when you’ve got a hundred or so plants sat waiting to go in, you can’t really hold off as they frazzle in the 32-degree heat. So I’m caveating this article that where possible avoid planting in the middle of […]