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.

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The English Garden

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

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 May, Jim Cable suggests removing weeds before laying gravel, starting a show-stopping container display for summer and experimenting with herbal teas

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

All Dressed Up

Between Two WORLDS • Fantasy and reality merge in the otherworldly garden of The Manor at Hemingford Grey, setting for Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, where rose-spangled borders, sharp topiary and dreamy meadows mingle

The Secret GARDEN • The discovery of crumbling 19th-century walls at ten-acre Old Hall Farmhouse in Norfolk, inspired textile artist Jane-Ann Walton to weave a colour-filled garden along the lines of her favourite book by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Words Unspoken • The silent dialogue between the landscape at Highlands in East Sussex and the team who nurture it has resulted in a beautiful garden where nature leads the way through woodland, meadow and pollinator-friendly plantings

Flying COLOURS • The gardens at Hertfordshire’s Alswick Hall have been lovingly restored and redesigned by Annie Johnson and her garden team to create a colourful confection of flowers and plants to enjoy all year round

A Sleight OF HAND • Visual trickery is order of the day at Daglingworth House in Gloucestershire, where a traditionally English landscape garden gives way to a dazzling array of altered perspectives, follies and trompe l’oeils

Picture PERFECT • Mark Bolton has applied his photographer’s eye to his own garden at Bowhay House in the Devonshire village of East Prawle, developing from scratch an exemplary cottage garden that’s a visual feast

It’s Show Time • We talk to the talented designers who will be responsible for creating the eight show gardens and seven sanctuary gardens at this year’s spectacular RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Acid Drops • For an enlivening jolt of colour in zesty yellow or green, try these ten plants suggested by Claire Greenslade, head gardener at Hestercombe Gardens

Amateur Dramatics • Breathtaking roscoea are one of the few hardy members of the ginger family. National Collection holder Barry Clarke tells Kerrie Lloyd-Dawson how easily grown they are in any English garden

On a Wing and a Prayer • As butterfly populations across the country declined, one woman, the late Trudie Willis, turned her garden at Priors Oak in Suffolk into a haven, with special plantings to encourage the very rarest species

TRADE SECRETS: Hydrangea Cuttings • Gorgeous, floriferous hydrangeas are so easy to propagate from cuttings if you time it right and use the correct tools. The nurseryman Maurice Foster is a renowned breeder of these shrubs and here offers his own tips on taking and caring for cuttings

POT LUCK • Extra height, succulents, leafy plants with a tropical mood, unusual bulbs and tender treasures: anything is possible in a container. Here, five experts reveal their favourite plants for pots

BY DESIGN • Discover the inspiring spaces, and the people behind them, that scooped the coveted top spots at...