Not freezing, but grey.  A grey day.  English weather, says Jane. Then, inside the glasshouse at Wisley I was admiring a green wall of ferns and other plants.  Expensive and time consuming?  Yes indeed, grown in a modular system, says the notice.  Alas, not for me.  I got home, and saw my very own green own wall of variegated ivy, which grew by chance from a few tiny pots of Homebase ivy bought five years ago, to stabilize the earth walls by the greenhouse.  I’d never really looked at it before.  Not so glamorous, my unplanned green wall, but maintenance is nil, ditto cost.  Birds...

‘Daisies are our silver,    Buttercups our gold: This is all the treasure    We can have or hold. Raindrops are our diamonds    And the morning dew; While for shining sapphires    We’ve the speedwell blue. These shall be our emeralds–    Leaves so new and green; Roses make the reddest    Rubies ever seen.’ A hymn by Jan Struther (aka Joyce Maxtone Graham) which we used to sing at school as children, and which has stayed with me ever since. OK the words are so banal and the rhymes so plinkety plonk doggerel that I squirm writing this, yet then I found them...

Jonquil had to choose between her bedroom with its sky view, and her basement with its garden view, and she chose the first.  I thought she was mad, but now I understand.   I lay in bed, sleepless.  The dark sky became dull gold, then bruised yellow and mauve, then it became a band of brilliant rose against blue, this faded, and it became stippled with little clouds.  It changed each moment.  It was my garden in the sky.  A garden which just arrived, and gave.  Every day different.  Then I fell asleep.

All those fancy bearded iris, heavens I’ve tried to grow them – in the sun, in shallowly planted with the rhizomes in their cradles on the soil, but!  Spent a fortune on Cayeux from France.  Useless.  On the farm the rhizomes developed holes as if mites had been in them.  RHS advice was irrelevant.  English/Dutch  iris slightly better, like a water colour painting, and up every year.  Iris sibirica, not much good. But one is flowering now, in the depths of January – Iris unguicularis from Algeria, blue with patches of tiger skin stitched on, and nothing else around.  In the...

Just read an article in the New Scientist (Smarty Plants, 6 December 2014) about the intelligence of plants by Anil Anathaswamy.  I had explored this concept in my book LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND GARDENING.  Plants respond to touch (Mimosa pudica quickly, but others more slowly, heavens a lot more slowly), they respond to light and shade, they can hear (we saw orchids swaying to music in Thailand, yes, I am not joking), they can smell and communicate.  ‘They think, they react, they remember.’ Now it’s being explored scientifically.  With plants, ‘you get into this space where you are...