Missing Plot 29’s healing powers | Allan Jenkins

After enforced rest for garden and gardener, it’s time to (slowly) start spring

I have been exiled from the allotment for a few weeks now in a smaller world of pain. The plot is at the top of a hill and walking steep slopes has been beyond me. The meditation medication it brings me has been unavailable. This weekend I think all that will change. Though it may involve taxis.

A garden, I think, responds to constancy and attention. Fidelity, regularity and care are what works, as in any relationship. It doesn’t do so well when these are withdrawn, no matter the sound reason or intention.

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A guide to student property: Legal rights Nottingham Estate Agents

OnTheMarket looks at a few key facts for students to consider when renting their first property. Students renting self-contained accommodation from a private landlord will most likely have what is called an ‘Assured shorthold tenancy’ (AST), making the student an ‘Assured shorthold tenant’. This means the tenancy will usually last for six or 12 months […]

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Flaws and effect: Jenna Lyons’s ‘imperfect’ New York loft

Jenna Lyons, the former creative director of J Crew, uses her refurbished New York apartment to show off her love of objects with a past

Jenna Lyons, style titan and former executive creative director of J Crew, admits to a lifelong appreciation for the timeworn, which underpins her vibrant sense of design. “I love a sense of history in something. I love a patina, I love seeing someone else’s touch, or seeing a stain, or seeing a nick or a chip. Materials get soft and they get round and they change colour,” she says. This passionate embrace of imperfection can be seen throughout her three-bedroom loft in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, which she spent two years renovating.

When she was looking for a new home, a long stint living in a Brooklyn brownstone informed her list of prerequisites – she wanted it to be all on one floor and large enough to accommodate the “main parts of life”, like cooking, eating and hanging out. “I rent the apartment downstairs as my office, but when I bought the loft above it was all open plan and hadn’t been touched in about 40 years,” recalls Lyons, who is currently working on a top-secret beauty project, designing a hotel in the Bahamas and gearing up to launch a lifestyle television series and e-commerce site in the summer.

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Flaws and effect: Jenna Lyons’s ‘imperfect’ New York loft

Jenna Lyons, the former creative director of J Crew, uses her refurbished New York apartment to show off her love of objects with a past

Jenna Lyons, style titan and former executive creative director of J Crew, admits to a lifelong appreciation for the timeworn, which underpins her vibrant sense of design. “I love a sense of history in something. I love a patina, I love seeing someone else’s touch, or seeing a stain, or seeing a nick or a chip. Materials get soft and they get round and they change colour,” she says. This passionate embrace of imperfection can be seen throughout her three-bedroom loft in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, which she spent two years renovating.

When she was looking for a new home, a long stint living in a Brooklyn brownstone informed her list of prerequisites – she wanted it to be all on one floor and large enough to accommodate the “main parts of life”, like cooking, eating and hanging out. “I rent the apartment downstairs as my office, but when I bought the loft above it was all open plan and hadn’t been touched in about 40 years,” recalls Lyons, who is currently working on a top-secret beauty project, designing a hotel in the Bahamas and gearing up to launch a lifestyle television series and e-commerce site in the summer.

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Switcheroo: the former mill that’s now an upside-down family home

How one stylish couple have transformed a rundown cotton mill in Todmorden, West Yorkshire

The toss of a coin decided which half of a rundown cotton mill in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, Louise Lockhart and her husband Paul Slade would make their home. Unable to afford the whole building, they joined forces with another couple and bought the mill together, with the aim of bisecting it to create two separate homes.

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Use warming mats to heat your seeds | Alys Fowler

Rubberised pads are a cheap, compact alternative to a greenhouse

All my current fantasies are about greenhouses. I am tortured by emails from fancy manufacturers seducing me with modern glass cubes and cute-as-a-button wooden structures. Imagine standing in a greenhouse, I think, as I play Tetris with seedling trays on countertops at home. What starts off on windowsills quickly sprawls on to any flat surface.

So, for a fraction of the price of a greenhouse, I’ve been trying out BioGreen’s rubberised warming pads as a new solution. You sit the seed trays on flat plastic mats that heat the soil to 5-10 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature. If you stick a bit of recycled polystyrene underneath, and add in some cheap LED grow lights with a timer, you’ve got a pretty good propagation unit.

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Gardening tips: plant a rose

Then visit Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden and force rhubarb, sea kale or a dandelion rosette

Plant this Take advantage of the current bare-root planting season to add a rose to your garden. ‘Starlight Symphony’ is a climber with clusters of single white blooms around a pink central boss of stamens. It’s compact, reaching 2.5m tall, and has good resistance to the usual diseases roses succumb to.

Visit this If you love plants, but are more of a palm than a snowdrop when it comes to cold tolerance, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh has more than an acre of glasshouses to wander around. This year, it is celebrating 350 years. Check the website for lots special of events: rbge.org.uk

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