How to add space and value to your home Nottingham Estate Agents

Selling your home quickly and for the right amount is about giving your property the edge over others. OnTheMarket.com looks at ways of breathing life into your home. Major conversion projects, such as excavating basements or building conservatories, take time and money but they can yield excellent returns. Loft conversions, for example, can add up to […]

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Allan Jenkins on gardening | Get your timing right for summer-sown greens

Sow successive rows of spinach and spring cabbage if you have room, and it’s nearly the last chance for ‘Oriental leaves’

August gardening means autumn (sorry). That doesn’t mean the weather won’t be hot and dry, though it can be a sultry month. Land will likely need constant watering and weeding, mulching maybe. There isn’t as much to sow, though, so try to make good use of summer space that opens up as potatoes are lifted, peas finish, and shallots and onions are dried.

Timing is more of a thing now, so sow successive rows of spinach and spring cabbage if you have room. It is nearing your last chance to sow chard and ‘Oriental leaves’. Pak choi, mibuna, mizuna, and komatsuna (mustard spinach) are mostly fast-growing and widely available in garden stores or online from Chiltern (chilternseeds.co.uk), Real Seeds (realseeds.co.uk), and Kings (kingsseeds.com), among others.

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Perfectly polished: a former varnish factory in east London

A colourful artistic couple have converted an industrial space in Shoreditch into a vibrant home

It has become less ravey since we moved in,” says Di Atkinson of Shoreditch back in the mid-90s, when the former factories and warehouses were just that. “Buildings were taken over for two-day raves and used as squats. It is more gentrified now.” Di, an author and historian, lives with her husband, the British artist, Patrick Hughes in Great Eastern street. The couple met in 1986 at the Chelsea Arts Club. Peer through the window at street level and you will be greeted with a pleasing vista: other people working. Number 72 is home to the atelier Reverspective.

Inside, artists sit on swivel chairs surrounded by tables crammed with tubes of paint, brushes, rags and mixing palates. They are working on Patrick’s optical-illusion 3D canvases, creating intricate details of familiar scenes: the canals of Venice, a library, or surrealist images, a rainbow escaping from a box, a never-ending maze. This is Patrick’s business, making and selling his unique Reverspective artworks. Patrick and Di are old school: they live above the shop.

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Perfectly polished: a former varnish factory in east London

A colourful artistic couple have converted an industrial space in Shoreditch into a vibrant home

It has become less ravey since we moved in,” says Di Atkinson of Shoreditch back in the mid-90s, when the former factories and warehouses were just that. “Buildings were taken over for two-day raves and used as squats. It is more gentrified now.” Di, an author and historian, lives with her husband, the British artist, Patrick Hughes in Great Eastern street. The couple met in 1986 at the Chelsea Arts Club. Peer through the window at street level and you will be greeted with a pleasing vista: other people working. Number 72 is home to the atelier Reverspective.

Inside, artists sit on swivel chairs surrounded by tables crammed with tubes of paint, brushes, rags and mixing palates. They are working on Patrick’s optical-illusion 3D canvases, creating intricate details of familiar scenes: the canals of Venice, a library, or surrealist images, a rainbow escaping from a box, a never-ending maze. This is Patrick’s business, making and selling his unique Reverspective artworks. Patrick and Di are old school: they live above the shop.

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Gardens: a riot of colour on the Emerald Isle

There’s an spot in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains where reds, oranges, yellows and pinks reign supreme

Nestled in the mountains in West Wicklow, Ireland, sits a remarkable modernist garden. By high summer, it is a riot of reds, oranges, yellows and pinks: the intense red of Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ goes off like a firecracker between waves of Leontodon ringens, a sort of aristocratic hawkbit that has golden heads of flowers above deeply toothed, leathery leaves; in the background, the smoke bushes smoulder and path edges are lined with Fuchsia ‘Corallina’, blazing like embers.

But these are more than just splashes of colour: this is a garden that unfolds its melody in great gestures and allows you to peer up close at its drama. This is painting with broad brushstrokes; vast numbers of plants are used, with hundreds of dahlias grown from seed flowering in their first year, often earlier than those grown from tubers. This allows owner June Blake to experiment with colour. “I’ve grown 400 to 500 dahlias to get the colours I like,” she says. “You collect the seed at the end of the season and sow the following spring, editing out the colours you don’t like.”

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Gardening tips: plant Russian sage

Then visit a soundscape in a walled garden and irrigate your crops evenly

Plant this Russian sage, or Perovskia atriplicifolia, comes into its own as midsummer tips over into late-summer lassitude: its aromatic, silvery foliage and spires of lilac flowers look good with grasses in a sunny border. Height and spread around 1m x 1m – choose cultivar ‘Little Spire’ if you lack room.

Visit this The walled garden at Harewood House near Leeds has been transformed into a musical art installation this summer. More than 30 “audio interventions” by Australian musician Genevieve Lacey have been hidden around the space for visitors to explore. Until 29 September, visit harewood.org.

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How to revive tired plants | Alys Fowler

Decisive pruning is often the kindest cut, says our gardening expert

Too much rain, too much sun, too much rain again and everything flops. Lank growth is not good at standing upright – petals turn into dirty hankies and everything rots. This results in all sorts of leaning on neighbours or just plain flouncing on the floor, which in turn makes for a perfect hiding place for slugs.

The truth is, once something has flopped, the best option is often some careful pruning and accepting that there is little else to be done. Retroactive staking rarely works; it looks forced and too much string is involved. Sometimes you can belt a plant together rather than stake it – tying string around its middle to hold it in – but often cutting back is the best option.

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