A gardening podcast. Sort of.
The Gardens, Weeds & Words podcast returns! Explore nature, botanical art with Margot Reverdy, and quiet spaces for thought, plants, and connection.
Bramble & Briar
For all the hours I spend planning what to plant and how to look after it, my garden has it’s own ideas about how it wants to grow. I can go along with Mother Nature, or steer my own course, but that's often where things go awry...
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Latest posts
Not dead. Yet.
As five summer heatwaves bake the UK, a garden's soil buffer disappears. Here's how hardy geraniums, potted backups, and future planting adapt to the heat.
A prickle: red bistort
Can you grow bistorts on baked clay? Tackling 'right plant, right place' dogma and the art of negotiating with nature.
Casualties
This year's August garden audit grapples with the drought. Tracking plant casualties, managing root stress in extreme heat, and learning to work alongside an increasingly unpredictable climate.
A prickle: Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’
Falling hard for Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’: appreciating its fiery, aging blooms and how to protect young shoots from relentless molluscs.
High summer is the garden’s Blackfriars underpass
Three heatwaves in, the garden faces its toughest mile. An honest look at drought, shaded relief, and guiding plants through the final stretch of summer.
Meetings with plants: Rose ‘Munstead Wood’
A gorgeous, velvety-crimson rose that shifts like berry tones. My experience growing the elusive Rose 'Munstead Wood' in Kent, and why it's worth the wait.
Fertiliser is turning your plants into junkies
What's the point of planting a rose in the ground, if you're going to treat is as though it's still in a pot? Discover why feeding the soil, not the plant, builds a resilient, happy, and thriving garden.
Meetings with plants: lemon verbena
It's time to liberate the lemon verbena, kept in a tiny pot for far too long.
Gardening while the planet burns
Gardening is inherently egotistical, and that’s okay. Maybe we stop burdening our flowerbeds with the weight of global salvation and choose to garden anyway
Meetings with plants: giant scabious
Giant scabious, Cephalaria gigantea, a delicate way to bring height, sparkle and presence to the summer border.
Midsummer gone
I've already moved on from midsummer.
Long grass and daisies
Midsummer is almost upon us, and soon there won't be much more we can sow in the garden for this year. Time to sit back and enjoy the long grass and daisies
Wet and windswept
Musings from a rain battered garden
Remedy for ageing
Summer arriving early was a bit of a shocker, but maybe the garden has the answer to making time pass more slowly
Meetings with plants: firethorn
Living with three very mature pyracantha shrubs. Grazed knuckles and spikes through your gloves is the price you pay for character and wildlife value
QiGong, and the art of standing in the garden
I’ve been standing all wrong, and while I’ve yet to work out quite how the realisation is going to play out in my garden, I'm convinced that it will.
Meetings with plants: Clematis montana ‘Broughton Star’
A marvellously serene hooligan, Broughton Star has all the vigour of a clematis montana, with double and semi-double flowers in shades of soft pink, and foliage emerging bronze.
Should know better
Reframe garden overwhelm, decision paralysis and frustration as super powers that help develop your gardening practice. Check. Still hurts to mess up, though.
Meetings with plants: black elder
Our hedgerow elder's darkly glamorous cousin – beauty, grace, and a street fighter zest for life
Love song to a washing line
Some things must be tolerated in the garden, and the laundry is one of them. An old fashioned washing line feels like the most peaceful way to share the space...