Why love and gardening always grow together | Allan Jenkins

When it comes to showing you care, there are so many more ways to let them know than with a bunch of roses

Valentine’s week. Red roses incoming, but what to talk about when we talk about love? I am not here to tell you not to buy roses (well I am, but in bushes in season please). I thought instead to explore my love for gardening, how it happened. How, although I am attracted to its essential solitary nature, it can be enhanced when I am sharing its pleasure with someone.

With Mary, who lets us grow on part of Plot 29. For my simple joy of working alongside her, without much time for chat, though humping manure helps, a little heavy lifting. And her quiet companionship.

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A guide to buying property abroad: Seven top tips Nottingham Estate Agents

Are you thinking about buying a dream holiday home? Not sure where to begin? OnTheMarket reveals seven top tips to get you started. Buying a property overseas is a major decision. It’s important to do as much research as possible and to seek independent advice. You’ll also need to bear in mind that the legal […]

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The bright stuff: a guide to interior lighting

Ceiling pendants and floor lamps, dimmable LEDs and coloured bulbs… Nothing changes the mood of a room quicker than a new lighting makeover

Lighting can be used in many ways to transform and illuminate a home. It’s mood-altering and life-enhancing, and whether you’re looking to cast a cosy glow or light up your living space, it’s often the quickest way to refresh a room without lifting a paint brush. Even a stand-alone floor or table lamp can provide direct pools of light and a welcome glow where it’s needed.

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The bright stuff: a guide to interior lighting

Ceiling pendants and floor lamps, dimmable LEDs and coloured bulbs… Nothing changes the mood of a room quicker than a new lighting makeover

Lighting can be used in many ways to transform and illuminate a home. It’s mood-altering and life-enhancing, and whether you’re looking to cast a cosy glow or light up your living space, it’s often the quickest way to refresh a room without lifting a paint brush. Even a stand-alone floor or table lamp can provide direct pools of light and a welcome glow where it’s needed.

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Gardening tips: plant a star jasmine

Then visit Kew’s orchid festival and protect houseplants from spider mite

Plant this For an evergreen climber with a scent that knocks your socks off come summer, look no further than star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides). It needs full sun and a sheltered spot.

Visit this Kew’s 25th annual orchid festival opens on 8 February, showcasing the wildlife and culture of Indonesia. Expect stunning displays of orchids, including an erupting volcano made of the flowers as a centrepiece. Until 8 March, details at kew.org.

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For peat’s sake: how to protect bogs | Alys Fowler

We can all help to preserve these precious landscapes

In a shallow pool amid a mossy landscape is a trap, a tiny triggered vacuum that sucks in unexpected prey at great speed, absorbs what it needs, then ejects the empty husk of its victim. If you’ve sunk and splashed your way through a peat bog in summer, you may have caught a glimpse of the plant’s more alluring feature, the showy yellow flowers that wave above the water.

Bladderworts are free-floating aquatic plants that sink back in winter to tight buds, washed along in the currents of wilder weather. They are not alone in their bizarre eating habits. There are sundews whose hundreds of pin-shaped tentacles wrap their sticky digestive juices around their prey, and butterworts, which possess the strongest glue in nature to trap hapless insects wandering over them, among the heathers and layers of sphagnum moss that make up peatland.

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Cutting it fine: why winter stems should be left until the last minute

Chicago’s magnificent Lurie Garden is a great advert for delaying your big chop

An admission: for a gardener professing to love the wilder, naturalistic look, I have difficulty restraining my inner neat-freak. When it comes to the annual cut-back of spent herbaceous stems – a task carried out between autumn and spring, depending on your preference – I have a propensity to rush for the secateurs. The idea of leaving so much garden maintenance to the last moment is often too unsettling. But over the years I have learned to be patient. With garden designers increasingly championing “four-season” planting schemes, an appreciation of winter seedheads – which are attractive, and an important resource for wildlife – has curbed my pre-Christmas tidy-ups: now I wait until February-March, when signs of new growth appear at the base of perennials, before chopping away dead stems.

A garden very much embracing this delayed cut-back is the Lurie in downtown Chicago, a three-acre plot at the south of the city’s Millennium Park and a masterpiece of year-round herbaceous planting. Its naturalistic scheme – which includes over 120 native prairie species – reconnects the city with the surrounding Midwestern grasslands and their dramatic seasonal flux. As in the wild, flower and grass stems are left standing right through to spring, before they are mown to ground level.

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