The Ashridge Nurseries Blog

Being a complete novice to hedgelaying, my son (Harry) and I signed up for a competition run by the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt in East Pennard, Somerset. The competition was divided into two classes, the open for the professionals and the novice for the amateur enthusiasts, we were most...

How do you feel about your garden in winter? If you look out of the window and find it dreary, uninteresting – a bit mournful, even – it’s probably because it lacks structure. Good structure is a really important component of successful garden design, and comes in a number of...

Lavender is a herb, a flower, a medicine, a deterrent. Its uses are many and varied, probably more than any other plant I know. Lavender looks great, smells even better and despite being of Mediterranean and North African provenance is a classic English staple of cottage gardens, as well as...

Who doesn’t love snowdrops? They’re small but perfectly formed, utterly captivating and are the first signs of spring. I have just one small patch of them in my south London garden, under a robinia tree, tucked among the wallflowers. I dug them up from my gran’s garden in Wales nearly...

Forgive me for boasting, but I understand how Latin plant names work. Learning about botanical nomenclature is one of my proudest achievements (it’s up there with touch-typing and mastering choux pastry). But I also understand that a lot of people don’t get it at all. It looks confusing. And unnecessary...

There’s no escaping it, January is hardly fun packed. After the jollity and cosy indulgences of December, it hits us full on with its chill, dark days and its unreasonable demands to live life more mindfully, more healthily, less lazily. But it’s a brand new year, and – believe it...

Like so many gardeners, I’m a huge fan of box. Its neat, clipped form brings classic elegance and structure all year round – especially welcome in winter, when the bones of a garden are what really matter. A dusting of frost gives a shapely group of box balls a bewitching...

Christmas presents can be an emotive subject for gardeners. There are always so many things a gardener wants to find under the tree on Christmas morning. But, please, not another fork and trowel set (with obligatory floral design). And no more gardeners’ soaps or hand creams. I have a pile...

I’ve recently planted a beech hedge, which my wife has had in her mind for a while, just 10 days ago. We had an area of mown grass that was not really doing anything surrounded on three sides by borders, with a variety of flowers and shrubs. However, one end...

I love roses. They’re colourful, sophisticated, often gorgeously perfumed and happy as Larry in clay soil. Being a London gardener with little time to garden, this is crucial. A winter project My little pre-Christmas project this year is to plant the climber ‘Bathsheba’ in a pot against the east-facing wall...