News - Page 77

Over 80 gardens around the country are opening for the National Gardens Scheme Snowdrop Festival this month, celebrating the beauty of our best-loved early spring flower.

Snowdrop Festival

Some of the gardens are a galanthophile’s paradise with hundreds of different varieties, while others mix snowdrops with other early spring beauties like hellebores, reticulate irises and winter aconites.

At Devonshire Mill in Yorkshire drifts of the double...

Slowly, slowly, the season begins to get into gear as you set about tidying borders and sowing the first seeds ready for the coming year. Here’s your list of jobs in the garden this month:

General tasks:

• Get new borders ready for planting during any sunny, dry spells, clearing away turf and weeds and adding lots of organic soil improver.
• Give paths and patios a good clean hosing off winter detritus and scrubbing away algae and dirt to...

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Celebrate the beauty of butterflies as the glasshouse at RHS Garden Wisley fills with brilliantly- coloured insects for its annual Butterflies in the Glasshouse event (www.rhs.org.uk/wisley).

Butterflies

The huge tropical glasshouse at the garden becomes home to more than 6000 exotic butterflies, free-flying around visitors as they walk through palms, cycads, banana plants and philodendrons.

There are...

Binoculars at the ready: the annual Big Garden Birdwatch kicks off this weekend, when gardeners and wildlife lovers get outside to paint a nationwide picture of the state of our garden birds.

The Big Garden Bird Watch

The initiative, run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, is now the world’s biggest wildlife survey. Last year more than 519,000 people counted an incredible 8,262,662 birds. Their findings have helped build up a detailed p...

The RHS wants to know how you feel about front gardens – and you could help contribute to research into the therapeutic effects of a little greenery outside the front door.

The nation’s front gardens are disappearing at an alarming rate: more than 4.5 million contain no plants, and a quarter are now totally paved over. But there’s been little research into the impact that is having. Now RHS-sponsored PhD student Lauriane Suyin Chalmin-Pui of the University of...