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 August

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

Bunny’s Diary • Bunny Guinness recommends a soil inoculant, spectacular eremurus and roses for cutting

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

Sowing & Growing • Once your flowers have finished blooming and their seedheads have ripened, it’s time to collect their seeds so you can enjoy colourful displays again and again in the years to come. Pick a dry, sunny day and gather a few tools for collection and storage, such as this leather handled seed packet storage tin, £25.99. Tel: 0114 2338262; burgonandball.com

NATURE’S WAY • The ecologist owners of College Barn in Somerset have been guided by their subjects’ natural habitats to create a living breathing landscape

Joy in the MOMENT • Patthana in County Wicklow reaches an assured crescendo in high summer, but this is a personal and spiritual garden where natural beauty and an appreciation of the present can be enjoyed at any time of year

The Ideal APPETISER • Sue Beesley’s gorgeous Bluebell Cottage Gardens in Cheshire give visitors a taste of what’s on offer at her adjoining nursery, which prides itself on its sustainability and stocks a range of beautiful, home-propagated hardy perennials

Summer SENSATION • At Stockcross House in the back lanes of Berkshire, big, bold, beautiful planting forms a symphony of colour expertly conducted by head gardener Istvan Dudas

HIGH DRAMA • The dynamic garden at Field House in Cheshire is all about dramatic contrast, with sunshine and shadow, stillness and movement, clipped formality and wild prairie planting of varying heights, and, in the heat of summer, lashings of bold colour

A Shed of One’s Own • Whether your garden room is intended as a space for contemplation and creativity or something more functional, take inspiration from the literary greats

The Life Aquatic • Taking inspiration from the late Beth Chatto’s Water Garden, Åsa Gregers-Warg, who helps care for it, recommends her top ten marginal pond plants

Prickly Subjects • The Eryngium genus is surprisingly diverse and even more surprisingly unstudied. Kathy and Brian Pike have spent ten years researching these spiny plants while building up their National Collection

Here Comes THE SUN • Enjoy the heat of high summer with this exuberant combination of bold stripes, nostalgic ginghams, cheerful sunflowers and delicious treats made from garden-grown produce. This jolly scheme will provide inspiration for your own garden gatherings this month

Double Savings • Employ a mindful approach to using water in the garden and you’ll save money while helping to save the planet. Matt Rees-Warren has practical tips and ingenious solutions for conserving this precious commodity

A Taste of Things to Come • The months of hard work at Thyme in Southrop pay off, as crops reach fruition and late-summer harvests start to appear, with berries, beans and lettuces all ready for picking

Electric Dreams • Fiona Haser Bizony acquired the land for Electric Daisy Flower Farm in 2017 and has weathered the vicissitudes of the...