Deck the halls: 21st-century Christmas wreaths and table arrangements

Conjure your own winter creations from foraged foliage and florist’s stems. The key: anything goes

Dried chillies, lavender, feathers and palm fronds: these are not your usual Christmas wreath ingredients. But by combining more unexpected plants and flowers with seasonal staples – pine, conifer, eucalyptus, say – you can create displays that venture far beyond holly, ivy and mistletoe. Nik Southern, owner of London- and Essex-based florist Grace & Thorn, mixes fresh materials with dried foliage or flowers, forages for many ingredients and is liberal with the spray paint.

“Whether you’re going to your local woods or taking a walk down by the canal, keep your eyes open for things you could use, and later dry or spray for different effects,” she says. “Be careful with picking berries if you’re not sure what they are, though. And keep an eye out for great shapes and textures that you could layer together.”

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How to ease a cold with herbs

Our gardening export on how common culinary herbs can make brilliant medicines

There’s nothing like a long-distance flight to test your immune system – my neighbour spluttered while the row behind hacked and the other side sniffled. Once home, and with the day the right way up, I lost no time in gathering some herbs to keep those germs at bay. The common cold is a beast, I believe, that cannot be tamed – you just have to ride it out – but a choice handful of our common culinary herbs are brilliant medicine. And they are far kinder to you, the environment and your purse than many over-the-counter cold medicines.

Rosemary and sage are classic herbs for colds and sore throats. Both are known for their antimicrobial and antiviral properties. Rosemary is said to stimulate the circulatory system and thus is thought to encourage blood flow to the brain to relieve headaches. I find a steam inhalation of a handful of bruised stems and leaves works wonderfully for blocked sinuses.

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Gardening tips: plant a lovely shrub for lemon-yellow blooms

Plus, frostproof your pots and visit one of the UK’s wonderful arboretums

Plant this Prizes for the least catchy name ever go to Coronilla valentina subsp. glauca ‘Citrina’, but this relative of the humble pea makes a wonderful small shrub for a sheltered, sunny spot with sharp drainage. It’s covered in lemon-yellow blooms from winter to late spring. Height and spread: 80cm x80cm.

Raise this Plant pots may have spent all summer frazzled and dry, but waterlogging can easily kill plants now winter is here. Use pot feet or bricks to raise containers from the ground and stop water pooling around the base. If you’re not sure if pots are frostproof, wrapping with bubble wrap may prevent damage.

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Nine top tips for renting a property Nottingham Estate Agents

The private rented sector of the UK property market has grown dramatically since the late 1990s and the growth is predicted to continue. OnTheMarket.com’s renting guide Private rentals accounted for 4.7 million or 20% of households in England in 2016/17, more than doubling in number since 2002 (Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, July 2018). […]

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Let’s move to Littlehampton, West Sussex: ‘A surreal mishmash’

Several eras have left an imprint on this south-coast seaside resort, right up to today’s star architects

What’s going for it? What will future historians make of Littlehampton? It’s a curious place, stitched together from various patches that align but somehow don’t connect. At its centre, an old Sussex port on the River Arun, church, quayside, winding lanes and still intact. To the south, facing the sea, a 19th-century resort from the era when salt water and bracing breezes were the cure for all ills. To the west, the dunes and silence of Atherington beach. East? 1920s and 1930s private estates of luxury villas, high walls and climbing roses, as if the upper crust cast of various Agatha Christie whodunnits had settled en masse. Laid over the top, a layer of 1930s to 1960s municipal seasideness – seawalls, proms, concrete, the marvellous bleached-white shelters of Mewsbrook Park, the miniature railway terminus. Here and there, arrivals from the era of regeneration and seaside gentrification (Littlehampton has never quite become the new Margate), designed by assorted young and star architects. It makes for bizarre juxtapositions, surreal even. Littlehampton is a curious place. But all the better for it.

The case against… That English south-coast bleakness, the sea often “indistinguishable from the sky”, as Virginia Woolf once put it. Still old-fashioned, in good and bad senses.

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