Category: Gardening
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Pond Cottage nature notes – making a happy mess.
Too hot to do the outside work I had planned. I stay indoors with windows open to invite a cooling breeze while I tweak at words for next year’s Pond Cottage entry in Scotland’s Gardens Scheme 2026 Yellow Book. Is it right?
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Galanthus “Trumps” at Pond Cottage
Here we are. At the start of our visiting season I’m not in the best of moods but I stop reading the news to take a walk round the garden and I can’t help smiling when I find the snowdrop given by a dear, gardening friend last year. Perky, eye catching, Galanthus “Trumps” could do…
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Rewilding: or how to be led by Nature
It’s been ploughed and cultivated for perhaps 200 years. How to turn an acre of field into a wild garden?
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Here’s to a new season of unruly gardening
Which season are we in, exactly? Looking through old blogposts it’s almost quaint to note how I marked the comforting rhythm of the four seasons. Four seasons? More like two now I often think: winterish and summerish.
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Standing against the storm
Don’t despair, ‘doomism’ prevents action. Get into the garden. Plan and plant for today and tomorrow. That’s where hope grows. But I can’t keep politics out of mine. In an election year we can put pressure on politicians to get their cross-party act together, finally treating climate crisis with proper urgency.
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Life is just a bowl of bullaces
In other words, we’re a wild garden adapting to the challenges of climate change: – mulching, replanting, learning from plants and wildlife.
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The Pond Garden in June
Blue skies again. Sunshine sparkling on the pond. A friendly breeze ruffles new leaves and turns the wind turbine merrily. What kind of killjoy would complain about the promise of yet another glorious summer day? It does seem perverse. How often have I moaned about waking to endless cold, wet midsummer days? Now, we open…
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Rebellion in the garden
The benefit of hindsight: a sometimes comforting blurring of the vision in the rearview mirror. Scrolling through Wikipedia timeline it’s unnerving to see how much trouble was piling up for the 21st century.
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No garden retreat at Little Sparta
Order…disorder: “The present order is the disorder of the future.” Louis Antoine de Saint-Just 1767-1794 But it’s Ian Hamilton Finlay’s words that echo round the garden today.
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Winter into Spring
It’s a turning point. For so long it seems a teasing fantasy, a few brave buds on some hopeful trees and shrubs, a cheery blackbird outside the bedroom window greeting an earlier sunrise. Then suddenly there’s no doubt. Whatever the weather, Spring is here and this year it brings an unexpected new season to Pond…
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Pioneering women gardeners: visible at last
Girls will be boys? The terms of employment were simple, if a little strange. The first two women admitted to the staff at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1897 were to be known as ‘boys’ and had to dress like boys too.