Gardening tips: plant a beach aster for a slice of the seaside

Then prepare potted plants for your own holiday, and visit Arundel Castle

Plant this Get the seaside look with the drought-tolerant daisy flowers of the beach aster, Erigeron glaucus ‘Sea Breeze’. Perfect for gravel gardens, crevice gardens and romping along a drystone wall. It needs full sun, and there are two forms, pink and mauve – both a ground-hugging 30cm x 40cm.

Try this Trips away can leave pots and hanging baskets parched. If you can’t get a friend to water, gather containers together in a shady corner to reduce evaporation, water before you go, and buy watering spikes to keep plants moist. Terracotta pots will dry out much quicker than plastic ones.

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Out of the shadows: plants that thrive in shady gardens

Glossy and somtimes surprisingly lush and tropical, greens that favour dark corners can create a deeply restorative space

Deep shade doesn’t even flirt with the sun. In the penumbra cast in this shadowy world, plants that thrive have had to adapt to just glimmers of light – deep shade is defined as having less than two hours of sunlight a day.

The leaves of shade-loving plants often have a deep-green colour, and tend to be thinner and broader than their sun-loving cousins. This is because they have adapted to absorb the filtered light under the forest canopy. They are also usually shinier, to reflect light into the margins and corners of their world. It takes a lot of energy to grow in such poor light conditions, and a greater allocation of energy goes into defence mechanisms against hungry herbivores. These plants have camouflaged, often mottled leaves and inconspicuous flowers and fruit compared with sun worshippers.

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How to grow cress | Alys Fowler

If ever there was a plant for window box-growing, this is the one, says our gardening expert

Wrinkled Crinkled Crumpled cress: has anything ever sounded more pleasing to grow? It sounds like the stuff of story books, afternoon tea, and of course egg sandwiches. It is the same cress you used to grow in an egg shell or on a piece of damp kitchen paper, but a much better variety, with ruffled edges.

Lepidium sativum is a very old vegetable from the Middle East, in the brassica family. Sativum translates as “from seed”, meaning it was cultivated, and you can trace its history back to early Persian vegetable gardens in 400BC.

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£6,000 a year for a room? If I were a student, I’d probably go on strike too | Patrick Collinson

Rents paid by university students have been rising by about double the rate of inflation for years

• University – you know the fees, but what about the costs?
• Super deluxe student accommodation for wealthy parents

When did it become acceptable to treat university students as a cash cow, milked for absurd rents that bear little relation to the underlying cost of the accommodation?

Rents charged to first-year students have risen at around double the rate of inflation year after year. The hundreds of thousands of fresh undergraduates heading into halls this September can expect to pay well over £6,000 for even basic single rooms. At the start of this decade, the typical student rent was equal to just over half the maximum available cash they could obtain in loans and grants. Today that has soared to 73%, and it continues to rise.

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How to build a climate-proof home that never floods

The Netherlands has found an ingenious way to combat rising water – build housing that does the same

Could climate change-resistant homes help solve the housing crisis? The Met Office’s conclusion was unequivocal. There is “no doubt” climate change played a role in the record-breaking temperatures that fried the UK and northern Europe last month.

But there was an irony in this year’s latest heatwave too. The scorching heat that sparked fears of buckled train tracks and made many of us yearn for rain was a symptom of a gradual shift that isn’t just raising temperatures but is making flooding more likely too.

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A guide to dealing with bats in the attic Nottingham Estate Agents

Have you discovered a family of bats living in a house you want to buy? Estate agent Hennings Moir talks us through the implications of living with these uninvited guests Bats are an endangered species and are protected by law, which means it is a criminal offence to try to kill or remove bats or […]

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Sajid Javid refuses to rule out stamp duty reversal so seller pays

‘I’m a low-tax guy’ says chancellor as he reveals he is considering policy changes

The chancellor has refused to rule out reversing stamp duty so it is paid by the seller, rather than the buyer.

In an interview with the Times, Sajid Javid indicated he was willing to consider the policy, which was said to have been favoured by Boris Johnson during the Tory leadership campaign, among others.

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