The English Garden

Enjoy over 60 beautiful gardens a year with The English Garden. Every issue features country, city, cottage and coastal gardens, with advice on how to recreate them. Be inspired by articles written by the country's top garden designers and discover the best plant varieties for your garden, chosen by expert nurserymen and plantspeople.

Welcome

The English Garden

This Month • Our guide to plants, people, gardens and events, tasks and shopping in April

People to Meet • Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Out & About • Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month

Things to Do • In April, Jim Cable suggests shopping for yellow-accented plants, mulching beds, harvesting rainwater and making water available to garden wildlife

Beautiful & Useful • New plants, books, tools and creative designs, plus shopping inspiration

Easter Parade

The New OLD WAYS • A grand old Tudor manor house whose gardens had slipped into disarray, Chenies Manor in Buckinghamshire underwent a revival in the 1950s thanks to Elizabeth Macleod Matthews, and her methods are employed by her daughter-in-law, Boo, to this day

Hidden BEAUTY • In a most secluded Cotswold location is a rare garden of refined elegance, its structure and planting honed by designer Rupert Golby so that it pulses with wave after wave of spring loveliness

Paint by TULIPS • On a blank canvas of a garden in Surrey, designer Arit Anderson has imposed a bold 3D grid to link indoors with outdoors and create separate leisure zones, and then painted the space with 6,500 of the owners’ beloved tulips

Journey of a LIFETIME • At Pine House in Leicestershire, this kaleidoscopic dream of a garden has been developed and honed over 46 years by Sue and Tim Milward

Built to LAST • A tremendous feat of Victorian engineering, the landscape of Stobo Japanese Water Garden in the Scottish Borders has endured for over a century, its sense of flow and zen-like peace prevailing

COLOUR PARADE • Out come the tulips at the wonderful Cotswold garden of Trench Hill, where the bright and beautiful planting even gives the view a run for its money

A TOUCH OF CLASS • Add instant elegance with a pergola. There’s a style to suit every garden, whether you want shelter, growing space or a sophisticated focal point

Dreaming Spires • Just outside Oxford is Waterperry Gardens, former site of another centre of learning. Head gardener Pat Havers suggests ten flowers for vertical appeal

Persistence Pays • At Twelve Nunns nursery in Lincolnshire, Val Bourne admires the range of beautiful Harvington hellebores, bred from these notoriously slow-growing plants and painstakingly selected over 40 years to achieve an astonishing array of colours and forms

Capture the Magic • Ideas for dramatic spring displays and oodles of suggestions for conditioning, combining and arranging the specialities of the season from Milli Proust’s new book, The Grower’s Guide: Floristry

Potted Perfection • With careful planning and just a little craftiness these carefully chosen container combinations of spring flowers and foliage will sparkle all season long

Tresillian in April • In the first part of a new series following the seasons through the productive Victorian walled garden at Tresillian House in Cornwall, head gardener Duana Pearson offers tips on early potatoes, peas and beans, while her predecessor, John Harris, explains moon gardening

Life is Art • Inspired by her rural life by the sea in Cornwall and her daily walks of discovery, Lou Tonkin makes exquisitely detailed lino prints that capture the beauty and detail of the natural world

One Step at a Time • Stepping stones can...