Gardening

If you work any kind of regular hours, it is easy to feel disconnected from your garden. It has its finest moments when you are stuck in the office. Your flowers are blooming away while you play solitaire over an over-chilled sandwich. The answer is to design your garden around the times when you are around: evenings and nights.

A garden designed to work at night can be a magical place, filled with intimacy, intrigue and wafts of delicious scent. Here’s how to go about making it somewhere you escape to after work, rather than gaze at with regret over the washing up.

Scented flowers

Night-time gardeners have a quirk of nature on their side. Flowers that are pollinated by night-flying insects such as moths need first to be found by them. They signal their presence in two ways: by being pale in colour, so that they show up in low light; and by starting to pump out scent as dusk falls. It is therefore fairly easy to assemble a cast of glowing white, pale blue and purple scented that will do as much for you as it does for the moths.

Some personal favourites are jasmine, Wisteria floribunda, night-scented stock and honeysuckle. For true drama I move the houseplant Epiphyllum oxypetalum – known as queen of the night – outside onto my porch in summer. On warm evenings its huge and dramatic for-one-night-only flowers produce a sweet, heady, almost overpowering scent.

In China and throughout the East its blooming inspires ‘sundowner parties’: you sit, sip Singapore slings, and breathe in the scented air.

Cyclamen

Dark backgrounds

A pale plant shows up so much better against a dark, dense background. Yew hedges are the masters at this, but a privet hedge or even a dark brown fence will throw your pale beauties into relief. In a night garden, you can also use hedges to help capture scents. Any breath of wind will whisk them away, so use hedges to filter wind and help pool scents around seating areas.

Light

You can make all kind of night-time effects with uplighters and spotlights and colour washes, but I reckon it’s pretty hard to beat a string of fairy lights and a few candles in jars for magic. Cheaper too. Solar lights save a vast amount of fuss with wiring but the LEDs they use have a slightly harsh blue glow, so look for ‘warm white’ or those covered in coloured paper lanterns.

Fire and stars

You see little of your garden in summer, but the problem becomes worse as nights draw in. You do need something to tempt you outside when evenings are far from balmy. A fire pit with seating around it makes a wonderful focus for autumn and winter celebrations, and if you treat yourself to a telescope, earlier nightfall becomes something to look forward to.

I just have a bird spotting telescope, but it draws me outside to look at the craters when the moon is half full – blanket round shoulders and clutching a hot toddy – and to just enjoy being out in my garden at such a peaceful time.

Lia Leendertz is a garden writer.

I once had to sit in a yew tree with a smoke machine and press a button at the required moment so that a great bellow of smoke would appear. It was a pretty awful job, as more smoke seemed to come out of the back of the machine than the front. I came out thoroughly preserved by the end of the take.

This was the same year that as researchers for the Christmas special, Clare and I spent a good month or so, after work, sitting on the office floor creating Christmas decorations from the garden. Clare even perfected frost-tipped seed heads (sugar water and into the freezer).

People would mutter darkly that we weren't Blue Peter as they had to skirt around our ever increasing pile of poppy heads shimmering in gold dust, teasels that sparkled with glitter, pine cones dusted in snow and huge piles of fairy lights.

We tied and sprayed, glued and glittered all manner of garden debris into really quite charming decorations. Both our mother's still have some of these decoration. And I can say, hand on heart that I was truly proud of the end credit that had a tree covered in our decorations.

The opening shot was of Monty striding across a lawn frosted in the Gardeners' World logo. We laid down the plastic template and prayed it would get cold enough. On the actually night, it froze perfectly and the next morning I tiptoed across the lawn to remove the template.

To say we went over the top, is to miss the point, television is a funny game, but the one thing that is for sure is after a year of working with the same crew, the same bad jokes and endless cups of tea, it does begin to feel like family. And although it might have been misguided, we took our task to make the garden look like Christmas seriously because it was, if a little make believe, just like the real thing.

Every year I still make those same decorations though I have forgone the glue gun and glitter for more natural materials that will break down.

Instead of ribbons and fishing line (invisible if you're going for the 'it's magic' look) I use phormium leaves to tie hanging tree ornamentals. New Zealand flax as the name suggests is a wonderful material that can be prized into the finest strands. You take a leaf and pull gently from the edges and you will see that with a little effort you can pull string-like strands apart and tie up poppy or teasel seed heads. It's incredibly strong stuff. These are perfect for naturalistic decorations, the colours compliment the blondes and browns of dried seed heads and will eventually biodegrade back to where it came from, so to speak.

"For a little red I collect some tiny red crab apples from the park."

For a little red I collect some tiny red crab apples from the park that persist on the branches right into January and hanging these as baubles, they have incredible strong stalks that you can tie off and they take a while before they rot. I like to use dried chillies and holly berries as well to make it a little more festive.

I have never bought a tree and don't intend to start. Last year I used a hazel branch stuck in a pot of sand. I admit that is a slightly eccentric take on a Christmas tree, but it worked well enough and when I was bored of it went straight onto the compost to feed next year's Christmas dinner.

Alys Fowler is a writer and broadcaster. Read more of Alys's Gardening blog posts.

On a cold, frosty morning like today the idea of diving into a cold garden pond for a swim isn't my idea of fun. But these natural swimming ponds are becoming quite popular as people like the idea of swimming in clean, chemical-free water. Perhaps in the summer when the water temperature was higher I might be tempted.

They function and look exactly like a pond but have a large plant-free area which is the swimming zone. This can be deep or shallow and usually has steps down into the water. The planting is confined to a 'regeneration zone' outside the swimming space and that is where the filtering and cleaning of the water takes place. Crucially this is also the area that any wildlife stays, as the thought of coming face to face with a frog during a morning swim isn't my cup of tea!

These specially designed ponds first appeared in Germany and Austria during the 1980s and have since become popular across the Continent. They arrived in the UK about a decade ago and there are now an estimated 20,000 across Europe including several open to the public.

Despite my reservations, we are currently designing a natural swimming pond (NSP) for a client in the New Forest and so have been finding out a bit more about them. The two zones need to be roughly equal in size to achieve a balance and a pump keeps the water moving around the system.

The plants and the gravel they are grown in act as biological filters so that the water in the swimming area is clean and soft on the skin and hair. No chemicals need ever be added making the running costs significantly lower than a conventional pool as well as much more environmentally-friendly.

We are designing the pond to look as natural as possible with soft curves and lawn, gravel and rocks around the edges to make it look as though it has always been there. You can also make them more formal with decking or paving. We'll make sure there is a seating area next to the water because it is likely to get plenty of use either as a diving platform or for those who don't want to swim but who can't resist the temptation to paddle or sit with their legs in the water.

Both styles will look amazing after dark with careful lighting. The planting in the regeneration zone can be selected from a huge list of suitable moisture-loving plants. We are choosing low-growing water lilies as well as huge leaved arums and hostas, with flag irises and bullrushes for height.

Regular maintenance will be reduced compared to a normal pool but leaves still need to be skimmed off and there will be need for some gardening to be done as the the regeneration zone does need to be tended like any garden area. Some plants will have to be cut back occasionally, some lifted and divided as they grow too large and there will be some weeding.

My biggest concern is what the water temperature will be and how often swimming in the pond would be comfortable. It seems that the larger the body of water, the more it will retain warmth during the year but there are also options to add some background heating through the use of solar panels or ground-source heat pumps. We are going to find out more about them and that might just be enough to persuade me that I want a natural swimming pond too.

Janine Pattison MSGD is a award-winning garden designer.

Water hyacinth

Baby blue flowers rising from gloriously glossy, luxuriously generous leaves make water hyacinths among the most beautiful of all the pond plants you can grow.

If you've got a taste for the tropical and your pond is nestled in among exotic Colocasia, canna lilies or bananas, this is the water plant for you.

Mind you, if you're growing it for its flowers it can be a bit of a lottery. It has its roots in hotter climates than ours, it doesn't always flower in the UK unless we have a good hot summer.

If that is the case, you'll be rewarded with that lovely flower stem with clusters of pale lavender flowers, stained darker blue on the top petals. Think of this as hitting the jackpot: most years you'll only get leaves, but what wonderful leaves they are.

Look closer and you'll see bulbous, air-filled spongy sacs at the base of each stem, allowing it to float freely on the surface of the water (no fiddling about with aquatic pots and compost required). The dense purple-black roots hang down into the water below, feeding from nutrients in the pond - and water hyacinths are greedy enough to give even the most rampant algae a run for their money. That means if you suffer from green water or blanketweed, water hyacinths can be a good way to keep the problem under control.

Water hyacinth

As it spreads its glossy green pads across the water, sending out stolons or runners to produce new plants, fish and other wildlife such as frogs or toads start to shelter in its shade.

It can double its size in a matter of weeks: far quicker to cover a pond than a water lily, it's a great filler in a new pond where too much of the surface water is open to sunlight.

With that rate of growth, you might expect it to get troublesome, and indeed in its native waterways in warmer parts of the world, it's a real nightmare, highly invasive with a habit of blocking local waterways.

Luckily here a good frost will stop it in its tracks, so it's never had a chance to become a problem.

You can overwinter a water hyacinth: but you'll need a heated greenhouse, plus lots of light (not a feature of a British winter, on the whole).

We have no heat on the nursery, so we've never been able to keep it - and many people who have tried say they succeed until February or March but then fail. Most people just pull out their hyacinths at the end of the year and throw them on the compost heap. That might seem extravagant, but they're not that expensive and are available again from mid to late May onwards after the risk of frost has gone.

Linda Smith of Waterside Nursery was awarded Gold at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2011 for her display of aquatic plants.

As October turns into November and then into December, the spirit of the gardener often sinks to a seasonal low. The leaves have fallen from the trees and all too often the garden is a brown and soggy mess.

Autumnal prairie boarder

There can be something to admire though, and that is the huge range of seed heads which garden plants leave behind after their flowers have long since finished. These are joined by the seed heads of the wide range of ornamental grasses we now have available.

Before I go any further I had better deal with the objection that is often raised - how often I hear people say "but everything in my garden gets wet and then a storm blows it all flat". True, wet and windy autumn weather soon reduces many garden plants to mush. Most grasses however do stand such weather very well and there are some flowering plants which also have physically very strong stems and in my experience cope well too.

Dipsacus fullonum (teasel)

Certain biennials such as teasels (Dipsacus fullonum) and mulleins (Verbascum spp.) are very resilient, and since they usually self-seed well, they keep going well from year to year. Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea), perform similarly, and a forest of the tall and narrow seed heads of the foxglove relative Digitalis ferruginea on a misty morning can be a mysterious and dramatic site. Amongst annuals, the rounded heads of opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) and love-in-the-mist (Nigella damascena) look good and stand well too.

Perennials tend to vary, both in the quality of their seed heads and how well they stand. I tend to do a two-stage clear up, removing all the messy mushy stuff in November leaving behind the strong and good-looking ones until a final late January clear up. Iris sibirica with its rich brown seed heads on sturdy 80cm stems is a favourite, Acanthus spp. look majestic until about Christmas, Echinacea purpurea heads look darkly attractive for a while, although they disintegrate as they gradually lose their seeds, while Astilbe spp., especially the upright Astilbe chinensis, look good in groups and are strong enough to withstand quite heavy snow too.

The all-time winner though is Phlomis russeliana whose candelabra heads - whorls of old flower bases arranged up a very sturdy 80cm stem, stand all weathers; the plant is evergreen too, one of the few perennials which never really has an off-day.

Phlomis russeliana

Dark seed heads like the phlomis or echinacea look particularly good against soft wispy grasses - the contrast is a winner in the November garden. At this time of year grasses can be magical, but only if the late afternoon sunlight can hit them at the right angle - when varieties of Miscanthus or Molinia can glow with a radiance that I think is as good as anything in the garden in June. As well as looking good, winter seed heads are a good food source for birds, so as well as admiring late-season beauty, we can do the rest of creation a good turn too.

Noel Kingsbury is a garden writer who's best-known for his support of ecological planting.

Tulipa 'Ballerina'

Tulips make the best spring-flowering cut flowers. There's nothing that comes near their incredible range of colours and their variation of flower shapes from the tall, and elegant Lily-flowered, to the frilly-edged and crimped Parrot brigade. In the vase of 'Crème Upstar', 'Ballerina' and 'Orange Favourite' they're scented too, with a sweet fragrance reminiscent of freesias.

They last brilliantly in water, particularly if you pick them and then strip most of the leaves, before plonking them into a bucket of cold water, with a sheet of chicken wire attached over the top. Leave them like this for 4 to 6 hours. This allows the stems to set rigid, with every flower completely straight on its stem, and puts right that classic tulip problem where the flowers hang forlornly over the edge of a vase.

Now is the moment for planting Tulips.  They start putting roots down and the cold temperatures help to wipe out viral and fungal diseases that lurk in the soil and which may infect the bulbs. Planting late is a traditional means of disease protection.

Tulipa 'acuminata'

Tulips should go in deep, in trenches or holes dug to 20-30cms. Deeper planting means you won't need to stake and kept cool, deep down in the soil, means your tulips are more likely to flower year after year.

I use a bulb planter with a spade like handle to do my planting in borders, but in the cutting garden we dig out trenches and plant tulips in those.

If you garden on heavy soil, cover the base of wherever you're planting with 5cm of washed sharp sand, horticultural grit, or spent compost. Add a handful of bonemeal to encourage formation of next year's flowers and mix it into the soil and grit at the base of the hole. Place the tulip bulbs, pointy end up, about 8cm apart and cover with soil. Again, if you garden on heavy soil you can mix grit at approximately one-third volume with the infill soil.

If you're short of space, cover the first lot of bulbs with soil and then add a second layer before filling in the hole. There is still enough soil above the bulbs to allow you to over plant without damaging them. We do mixed colour combinations in the cutting garden just like this, with lots of crimson-black varieties (such as 'Black Hero', 'Havran', and 'Queen of Night') in the base layer, with some carmines and brighter reds (such as 'Tambour Maitre', 'Antraciet' and 'Jan Reus') on top for contrast.

On poor soil, it's worth giving almost all spring-flowering bulbs a potash feed in the early spring. This helps with root and bulb formation and will encourage them to stick around and flower on and on for years.

When you cut tulips, make sure you leave a short section of the leafy part of the stem below where you cut. This gives the bulb a chance to make enough food to survive through the dormant period and makes it more able to produce flowers the following year. It is also important to leave the browning foliage on your tulips until every leaf has died right down, usually by early summer.

I have found no benefits from digging up tulip bulbs after flowering each year, so I leave them in place. In mid-June I rake up all the dead foliage, mulch with 5-8cm of compost or well-rotted manure and over plant with half-hardy flowers or vegetables like courgettes or pumpkins.

Sarah Raven is a broadcaster and garden writer.

Most gardens have a veg patch tucked away somewhere, a strip of land set aside for spuds and beans and cabbages. It's all rather homely-sounding, with echoes of Beatrix Potter and flat caps and hoeing.

Raspberry

But I've had it with homely. I want a berry patch.

Berry patches are altogether more luscious and indulgent. They're places of pleasure, sweetness, seduction: where every branch drips translucent red and purple jewels swollen with sugar. They're American inventions: the equivalent of our prosaic and functional fruit cage, though that doesn't come close to capturing the spirit of Huckleberry Finn adventure, of childhoods spent getting lost among the blueberry bushes with faces smeared in purple and stomachs aching with strawberries.

Designing a berry patch can be as simple or as complicated as you want. Regimented rows are easy and traditional, but uninspiring: I'm planning something altogether more elaborate, a fruitier version of a potager. In the berry patch in my head, there are blackcurrants underplanted with strawberries; gooseberries cordon-trained up one wall and a fan-trained cherry spreading its arms luxuriously across another.

"Use thin 'Ballerina' pears as vertical accents to cram in as much fruit as possible."

You see, berry patches can be wonderfully decorative. You can make the most of training fruit into fans, espaliers and cordons, adding step-over apples to edge beds and tall, thin 'Ballerina' pears as vertical accents to cram as much fruit as possible into a small space while creating beautiful, architectural shapes to admire in winter.

Symmetrical designs for the layout, just as you'd use in a potager, are immensely pleasing: lay out beds in geometric patterns, perhaps L-shaped around a central square, or paths heading out from a circle like spokes in a wheel. I'm planning to put a huge container in the centre of my berry patch, filled with ericaceous compost so I can grow my beloved acid-loving blueberries even though I've got alkaline soil. They make beautiful, ornamental shrubs with superb autumn colour and, of course, those smokey blue-black berries.

For all their beauty and their sensual pleasures, berry patches are very easy-going. You can place them more or less anywhere in the garden, even if there's relatively little sun – most fruit bushes don't mind shade, though if you're growing strawberries or cherries you'll need some sunny patches.

"If you're growing strawberries or cherries you'll need some sunny patches."

And they're so practical: you can protect all your fruit at the same time with a netting cage to keep out marauding birds. It doesn't have to be too industrial-looking: I'm thinking tall, slender wooden posts, with copper piping between them and central, higher posts from which I'll hang my netting on rope swags.

With careful planning, you can have fresh fruit to pick from May to November, starting with the earliest of gooseberries: trained into cordons, you can plant four different varieties even if all you have is an eight-foot stretch of wall (and still have space for lingonberries at their feet). 'Invicta' is standard-issue and super reliable, but for the best flavour try red 'Whinham's Industry', 'Careless' or vibrant purple 'Lancashire Lad'.

Strawberries start around June – plant early, mid-season and late varieties to keep them coming – and can be tucked into more or less any sunny corner. They make wonderful ground cover. Then it's berries all the way: blueberries, whitecurrants, redcurrants, blackcurrants... Raspberries can be lined up along the back, and blackberries, tayberries or loganberries trained to romp over a wall or fence.

It's amazing how much fruit you can squeeze into even quite small patches, and best of all, they're all permanent crops, needing little more than an annual prune and a good generous mulch to produce all the fruit you can eat for years to come.

Sally Nex is a garden writer and blogger and part of the BBC Gardening team.

Read Sally Nex's Gardening Blog posts.

Say what you like, the gods of Ancient Greece were out for a good time and weren’t afraid of the consequences. Take Zephyr, god of the west wind, and his pal Apollo. One day Apollo was teaching a handsome young man named Hyakinthos how to throw the discus. Everything was going well until Zephyr flew into a jealous rage and blew the discus back, dashing out the brains of the handsome young man and killing him. On the plus side, however, a beautiful flower immediately grew from his blood, and Apollo named it Hyacinth in his memory.

Hyacinthus orientalis ‘Blue Magic’, this deep purple variety allows a border shading from white to almost black to be developed

Reality, however, is less Eastenders and more Gardeners Question Time.

Hyacinths originated in the eastern Mediterranean, along the shores of Turkey, and were brought further west by the Greeks and Romans. Homer mentions hyacinths a lot. In the Odyssey, for example, his bestselling blockbuster novel of steadfast love and high courage, the hair of one of his protagonists is described as 'curls like thick hyacinth clusters in full bloom'.

Hyacinthus orientalis ‘Lady Derby’, a single, tightly-packed spike of vibrant pink and white.

More recently, Shelley, Rabbie Burns and even TS Eliot used the perfume or appearance of hyacinths to poetic effect, and who can forget the timeless Hyacinth Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances? She memorably insisted her husband kept two pairs of gardening gloves, one to do the actual gardening and a clean pair in case he needed to wave to anyone.

Which brings us to cultivating hyacinths, something we Europeans have been doing since Leonhardt Rauwolf; a German doctor, collected some specimen plants when he visited Turkey in 1573. In fact, hyacinths have been grown commercially pretty much ever since, and still are in Britain and the Netherlands, where they're also used as cut flowers.

Brown side down, green side up is useful advice when planting almost anything, but not hyacinth bulbs, where the rule is pointy end up. Hyacinth beds should be well dug and loosened to a depth of 1 ft or more, then a good layer of compost added before the bulbs are popped into individual holes 5-6 inches deep and 4-6 inches apart, covered over, pressed down firmly and well watered.

Do this in the autumn, a couple of months before the first frosts are due. About now, in fact. And consider a good, deep mulch in case the sort of badly-organised cold weather we've had for the last couple of years turns up again. Then wait for spring.

Hyacinths can bloom in March and April with a glorious display of reds, yellows, purples, blues, peaches, whites and more, and a fantastic, intoxicating, beguiling, wonderful scent that's at its very best on a still evening.

The smell is so glorious it has been used as perfume for centuries, though nowadays modern technology has come up with a synthetic chemical equivalent. I suspect Homer would not have been impressed.

Of course, the most impressive way to grow hyacinths is in tightly packed beds of hundreds of individual plants as we do with the National Hyacinth Collection, held at Ripley Castle in North Yorkshire.

Hyacinthus orientalis ‘Jan Bos’, a deep rose variety planted outside the nineteenth century hothouses at Ripley Castle

Our bulbs usually flower toward the end of April, depending on the weather: the perfume can be nearly overwhelming in the Walled Garden. And, as every gardener knows, there are always extra bulbs, which we plant in the woodlands for the Castle florists to use for weddings or other events.

The varieties in our formal beds do vary from year to year, but our pride and joy are the rarer and more historic varieties such as Grand Monarque, a gentle hyacinth with soft blue/white flowers shaded with purple and first introduced in 1863.

Then there's the superb Bismarck, a deep blue/violet variety with elongated trumpet-like flowers tightly clustered around the spike and introduced in 1875, and the wonderfully named Grace Darling. A vigorous and impressive late nineteenth century variety named in honour of the great Victorian heroine; the girl who took a small rowing boat out to sea to rescue survivors of the stricken Forfarshire when conditions were so rough she feared the nearby lifeboat couldn't get out.

All three of these heritage varieties, and many others, will be on display at Ripley in 2012.

Hyacinths? Little crackers!

Mike Ward is the business development manager at Ripley Castle.

I generally don't consider a bug that eats a plant to be wicked. Plants are, after all, the food supply for many insects; I'm hardly going to blame them for eating their dinner. No, a wicked bug is one that has caused catastrophic, widespread suffering, or inflicted pain and disease and misery on us. Mowing down the lettuce or boring into the melon vines is nothing in comparison to the assassin bug that bit Charles Darwin, the giant centipede that terrorized a Londoner , or the Brazilian wandering spider that bit a pub chef.

Cabbage root fly

And yes, I'm using the term "bug" loosely to refer not just to insects, but to a variety of creepy, crawling, and slithering creatures that infest not just our gardens, but our nightmares as well.

So for the most part, I'm at peace with my bug-ridden garden. But even ordinary garden pests can be terrifying in their own way. Consider the following:

Aphids

Aphids

Many species of aphids are capable of "telescoping generations" in which a female gives birth not just to her daughter, but her granddaughter as well. Like Russian dolls, one is nested inside the other. Females can carry on like this for several generations with no male involvement at all. This explains why you never seem to see just one or two aphids: their reproductive advantage lets them take over with remarkable speed. What's worse is that some, such as the oleander aphid Aphis nerii, actually gather poisons from their host plants and pack them around their young to protect them from predators. They may be tiny, but they are fierce and determined.

Ermine Moth Caterpillar

The ermine moth caterpillar Yponomeuta padella, is a horrible creature that covers trees and fences with tent-like webs. We have similar species called tent caterpillars in the U.S. and we have a fine old tradition of climbing up on ladders with flaming torches in our hands to set fire to them. Please don't ever do this. Setting a tree on fire is far more dangerous than simply letting the caterpillars run their course.

Snails

Snail

Gardeners here in North America regret the day the brown garden snail was imported from France as a food source. (Were we ever really that hungry? Hadn't we invented the hamburger by then?) Fortunately, we have an ally in our war against the snail: the lancetooth snail Haplotrema vancouverense is a predator, so if both are found in the garden, we can step back and let them battle it out. I know that the decollate snail Rumina decollate, native to the Mediterranean, serves the same purpose. We're starting to import them to California as well. What could possibly go wrong?

Grape Phylloxera

Grape Phylloxera might not infest your garden, but it is a plant pest worthy of the term "wicked": this tiny, aphid-like creature hitchhiked to France in the roots of native American grapevines, which were resistant to the pest. The French grapevines had no such resistance, and this miniscule creature wiped out the vineyards and made wine all but impossible to get in the mid-nineteenth century. Terrifying indeed.

Amy Stewart is a California-based garden writer and blogger.

From the moment I came to Britain the small number of fruit and vegetables available puzzled me. Why had the country lost its own fruit and vegetable heritage? Retailers stocked a few English varieties, but most were foreign.

Vegetable Garden at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons

So drawing on my own French heritage I began to try to rediscover our lost heritage, taste and flavours. It has been an extraordinary undertaking, culminating in an orchard being born at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons.

Our orchard project allows me to put into practice my passion for excellence; exceptional and outstanding taste, locally sourced produced and respect for the heritage of food, with sustainable and environmentally sensitive production. It aims to include some 400 heritage varieties when it is fully complete. The first planting took place in April 2011 when some 800 trees of apple and pear.

Among the older varieties we have planted are four wonderful local British varieties of apple, all cherished as much for their flavour and particular culinary uses as for their beauty.

In their definitive The New Book of Apples, Joan Morgan and Elisabeth Dowle describe the Blenheim Orange, discovered in Oxfordshire in 1740, as having an "addictive plain taste flavoured with nuts" and its texture as "crumbly," while noting that it cooks to a stiff purée, keeping its shape, and so is useful for making apple charlotte. It was found growing against a boundary wall of Blenheim Park by a "local cobbler or tailor, who moved it into his garden," where "thousands thronged from all parts to gaze on its ruddy, ripening orange burden."

Ashmead's Kernel is an 18th century variety whose origins have been discovered by local historians, who credit it to William Ashmead's garden in Gloucester City. The tree, recorded in 1831, was then 100 years old. Its "strong, sweet-sharp intense flavour" is "reminiscent of acid drops." Its "firm, white flesh" makes it "long esteemed by connoisseurs." Though widely planted in the 19th century, it was a commercial flop, because of poor crops and its unflashy colouring that failed to catch the consumer's eye.

We are also planting an old variety from neighbouring Berkshire, Miller's Seedling, raised in the year of European revolution, 1848, at Newbury. Though it has "savoury, crisp yet melting, very juicy flesh" with "plenty of sweetness and refreshing acidity," it has faults that made it almost disappear. First it must be ripe, showing its "pink flushed over cream" colour, and second, it bruises easily. Its third drawback is that it only fruits every other year. Our trials convinced us that it is nonetheless worth the trouble.

The Reverend W. Wilks is another Berkshire apple, introduced only in 1908, and named after a secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society. A prized exhibition fruit, pale cream mottled with light orange and red stripes, it has recently been planted in Japan. It has specialised uses: It cooks to a sweet, pale lemon-coloured purée and makes an almost translucent-fleshed baked apple that scarcely needs sugar!

Maman Blanc's Apple Tart

Maman Blanc's Apple Tart Recipe

The secret of this dish is choosing the right apple, with the right balance of acidity, sugar and a great apple flavour. My favourite apples to use are not as you might think a golden delicious, but cox's orange pippin, Worcester, Egremont Russet, or Braeburn. They will fill your kitchen with a wonderful apple aroma, they will caramelise and fluff up beautifully. Here, we have used apples, but plums, apricots or cherries make an equally delicious alternative.

Ingredients:

• 250g Plain Flour
• 125g butter, unsalted, diced, at room temperature
• 1 pinch sea salt
• 1 medium egg
• 1 yolk

For the apple tart and the glaze:

• 3 Cox's Orange Pippin, Worcester, Russet or Braeburn apples, peeled, cored and cut into 10 segments per apple
• 1 tbsp butter, unsalted, melted
• ½ tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tbsp caster sugar

Method

For the shortcrust pastry dough:

• In a large bowl, rub together the flour, butter and salt using your fingertips until it reaches a sandy texture. Create a well in the centre and add the whole egg and yolk.
• With the tip of your fingers, in little concentric circles, work the eggs into the flour and butter mixture; then at the last moment when the eggs have been absorbed, bring and press the dough together to form a ball.
• Lightly flour your work surface and knead with the palms of your hands for 20 seconds, until you have a homogeneous consistency.
• Reserve 20-30g of dough, tightly wrap it in cling film and store for later. Wrap the remaining dough in cling film and flatten it slightly to 2cm thickness and refrigerate.

Lining the tart ring:

• Pre-heat the oven to 220°C. Place a baking stone or pastry tray in the middle of the oven.
• Place the dough in the middle of a large sheet of cling film 40cm x 40cm, cover with another sheet of cling film, roll the dough out to 2 - 3mm thick circle shape.
• Place the tart ring on the wooden peel lined with greaseproof paper. Lift off the top layer of cling film, (discard) then, lift the dough using the bottom layer of cling film closest to you, and drape into the tart ring. Lift the edges and push the dough into the ring; then, press the dough wrapped in clingfilm into the base of the tart ring.
• Ensure the dough is neatly compressed and moulded into the shape of the ring. This will minimise shrinkage or collapse of the dough.
• Trim the edges of the tart by using a rolling pin.
• Now, raise the height of the dough 2mm above the tart ring. You achieved this by pressing your index finger and thumb and pushing the pastry gently to the top of the pastry case all around the edge of the tart ring.
• With a fork, prick the bottom of the tart. Allow to rest in the fridge for 20 minutes to relax the pastry.

For the apple tart and the glaze:

• Lay the apple segments, closely together, overlapping onto the base of the tart case. Brush with the melted butter, sugar and lemon juice, dust liberally with icing sugar.
• Using the peel, slide the tart into the oven, onto the pre-heated pastry tray and cook for 10 minutes.
• Turn the oven down to 200°C; continue to cook for a further 20 minutes until the pastry becomes a light golden colour and the apples have caramelized.
• Remove the tart from the oven and allow to cool for a minimum of one hour. Remove the tart ring and slide onto a large flat plate.
• Dust with the icing sugar and leave to cool slightly for 30 minutes before you serve.

Raymond Blanc is  the owner and chef at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons,  Oxfordshire.

Darwin may have been fascinated by the way that earthworms manage to pull leaves down into the soil, but sadly they don't manage to work on a fast enough timescale to prevent falling leaves from causing problems in autumn.

Not only will a carpet of leaves bleach patches of the lawn and clog up the pond, but once leaves start to disintegrate on the hard landscaping we have to worry about Aunty Mabel slipping over when she pops out to refill the bird feeder.

Autumn Leaves

Fallen leaves aren't all bad, though - with the help of those earthworms and other soil organisms they break down and feed the soil, and while they're doing so they form a protective layer that prevents winter weather from ruining the soil structure and leaching away all the nutrients. They also provide a top-notch wildlife habitat when they pile up in drifts and under hedges.

Where they won't cause any problems we can safely leave fallen leaves where they are, but while you're raking up the ones that have to go you can do your garden a big favour and turn them into leaf mould rather than throwing them away.

Leaf mould is just compost made entirely from fallen leaves, and making it is a very easy process. Simply pile up leaves in a heap, or create an open-sided cage of chicken wire if you'd like to keep them slightly neater.

Plastic composting sack

In an urban garden it pays to rake them into plastic sacks, tie the tops, poke a few holes in the side and then leave them behind the shed. After a year you'll have something that looks like slightly older leaves. A year later you'll have something approaching chunky compost that makes a lovely soil improver. Use it to mulch around shrubs and trees or to cover bare soil in the winter.

If you have the patience to wait another year, you'll have lovely soft compost that's ideal for sowing seeds and can be used as the base for your own free and peat-free potting mixes. That's the Slow Composting version.

Raking leaves by hand on a beautiful autumn day sounds like a lovely way to pass the time, with the delayed gratification of compost in a year or two. But if you're short on time and want to turbo-charge the process a little bit then spread your collected leaves on the lawn, raise the mower blades and use it to chop them up (leave the collection box on and you won't have to rake them up twice). Chopped leaves rot down a bit more quickly, but the end product is just as virtuous.

So this autumn don't see collecting fallen leaves as a chore, see it as community service - you'll be basking in the silent thanks of your plants, your soil, those earthworms and (of course) Aunty Mabel.

Emma Cooper is a garden blogger and author based in Oxfordshire. She advises the public on home garden composting as a Master Composter, under a scheme run by Garden Organic to encourage recycling, cut waste and improve our gardens.

Come September and October my thoughts inevitably turn to nuts, not just the well known hazels, sweet chestnuts and walnuts, but some of the less common nuts that grow well here – bladdernuts, heartnuts, hickories and acorns from oaks to name a few.

Most start to drop from the trees from early October and throughout the month I’ll try and harvest nuts daily from the ground before too many are made off with by other critters – mice and squirrels being the worst culprits.

Hazel Butler nuts

Many nut trees make large specimens – sweet chestnuts and walnuts for example – and only those with a larger garden are likely to have room for them. Heartnuts and hickories (apart from pecan) also make large trees in time. But there are a number of nuts that can be grown in smaller spaces too.

Juglans regia 'Broadview'

Bladdernut (Staphylea pinnata) is a woodland shrub from mainland Europe growing 2-3m high which tolerates a partly shady position. It bears its nuts inside curious green 'bladders', a few inside each one. The nuts are about 1cm across and have a distinctly pistachio-like flavour. The plants are self-fertile.

Walnuts are fantastic trees in many ways, but all become big trees in time. For nuts it always pays to plant a known variety as it will flower after 4-5 years. Not many varieties are self fertile so if you only have room for one plant Broadview, Buccaneer, Franquette or Ronde de Montignac. If you have room for more than one tree then the newer French varieties Fernor and Fernette are great.

Hazelnuts are another of my favourites. Don't worry about the distinction between filberts, cobs and hazels - treat them all the same. If you grow hazels on a single stem (which requires annual removal of suckers around the base of trees) then you'll have a chance to protect them from grey squirrels who will otherwise take every nut before they ripen.

Grow the single stem 1.8m high before it branches, and from early August wrap the trunk in something squirrels can't climb: the type of hard plastic tree tube guards are made of works (or even thin sheet metal!)

There are some great hazel varieties around, I find Hall's Giant very productive as well as the enormous American variety Butler. You'll need two varieties unless you have wild hazels nearby for pollination.

With all nuts, keep an eye on the weather and get out there to harvest after a storm when many nuts will be down. It is also worth shaking branches if they are small enough just before you harvest to get any loose nuts down.

I used to harvest nuts off the ground by hand, then three or four years ago discovered 'Nut Wizard' harvesters. These amazing hand tools harvest about four times as quickly and also leave your back intact. I have one for hazels and another for chestnuts and walnuts and now use them the whole time during nut harvest.

In Britain, nuts are often quite damp when harvested so remember to dry them thoroughly if you want to store them for any length of time. Dry at temperatures below 40° C so the oils do not spoil and they should store for several years.

Martin Crawford is director of the Agroforestry Research Trust and has spent over twenty years in organic agriculture and horticulture.