From January through June, Matt Collins, writer and Head Gardener at the Garden Museum, will document the subtle and often overlooked scenes of a changing garden. Join us throughout the season as he reflects on the ever-changing landscape of his Hampshire plot. Read part one, part two, part three and part four here.
2 April 2025
The annual jolly to the hazel woods this afternoon, to collect bean poles and bundles of branching twigs to use as supports for the garden peas, beans and clematis. Alistair Hayhurst — the coppice worker who has been cutting the hazel here through the winter — has processed and graded the coppiced wood into piles, and suggested I select what I need. At the centre of the coppice, among the stools of cut hazel, sprawls a spectacular accumulation of pale primroses, bathed in new sunlight where the dense canopy once covered them. It is remarkable what can result from this ancient sylvan practice. At the edge of the wood I bind the bundles and poles and then tie them to the roof of the car: a novel sight when pulling back into the village.
This evening, unable to resist them, I set to arranging the twigs into support frames for the sweet peas, threading twenty or so stems through the horizontal wires on the fence to make a thatch of climbable scaffolding. I then plant out the sweet peas below. Returning hazel supports to the garden is, for me, one of the definitive markers of the new growing season and always a moment to savour.
7 April 2025
Crouched beside the cold frame in full sunshine, thinning cosmos seedlings from two over-sown 9cm pots. The trick is to be ruthless, leaving no more than nine or ten to grow on and expand their roots into the vacated compost. They’ll make stronger plants when they come to be potted on.
10 April 2025
Sunshine for weeks: baking days and cold nights. There are echoes of 2020’s miraculous spring in the weight and brilliance of the blossom this month: first the voluminous cherries, then the apples and pears with their single white, pink-tinged petals. There are buds all over the climbing roses now, and their moment will come next.
Today I watched a bee-fly hovering steadily over the lawn, two feet up. A curious, oddly approachable creature with the eyes of a fly, the balled fluff of a bee and the long proboscis of a hummingbird hawk-moth. I got close enough to see all this while it sculled in mid-air. They favour muscari flowers apparently — a note for autumn bulb planting.
13 April 2025
Last weekend was the Great Dixter Plant Fair, in East Sussex; today, the Garden Museum’s own, which was somehow yet more popular than last year’s, with nurseries like Beth Chatto’s and Hardy’s drawing an ever more enthusiastic London crowd. Between the buzz and the busyness, and catching up with favourite people, I managed to restrain my plant purchasing to a single peony: the wild, pale yellow Paeonia mlokosewitschii (‘Molly the Witch’), bought from Rosie Bose of Glendon Plant Nursery in Kettering. Rosie knows a good plant, and from her, a slow-grower such as this will be worth the investment. The museum pots were blue-lilac with grape hyacinth and polomonium, all filled out in the sunshine and, for once, looking their best at just the right moment.
15 April 2025
Another warm day and a first evening sitting at the garden table. Blackbirds bedding down with characteristic musicality, taking advantage of the dusk quiet to assert territorial voices.
24 April 2025
A night walk before bed, through the village and out along the only wild road left in the parish, adhering as it still does to the sunken, steep-banked and overhung principles of former hollaway. It cuts a single-laned, southeasterly route through Hampshire towards the West Sussex border; following it for twenty miles or so would land you, appropriately, at the doorstep of the 18th century naturalist Gilbert White in Selborne. It is the only lane I know of here that feels truly rural, and to walk it is to imbibe the many centuries of its treading, as it reveals silvery stools of hazel and the ancient gatherings of wood anemone, dog’s mercury and — just beginning — carpeting bluebells. Tonight, surprised wood pigeons flap suddenly from the dark boughs of intermittent oaks overhead; tawny owls call, bats swoop between the hedges and long, lacy strands of spider’s web catch on my face and arms, buoyant on the warm air.
I brought a torch so I am not taken out by a car (people drive wild on the wild road), but needn’t have otherwise: the moon is up and the lane is clear enough; the North Star and Jupiter flicker between the high hedgerows. And there is a continuous froth of gleaming white wildflower — of abundant cow parsley and the low spikes of dead nettle; the last of the blackthorn blossom and the first hawthorn; chandeliers of musky guilder rose and brilliant constellations of greater stichwort, the starflower, Stellaria holostea. Whoever named the plant Stellaria (was it Linnaeus?) must surely have observed the trim white perennial at night, as at this moment the likeness is profound. Scattered in dots and drifts, and blooming at an unusual variety of heights and depths, the effect is an illumination so much like the night sky, each flower ranging in brightness like the glowing embers of a bonfire.
In the cooler air of the village approach there hangs a familiar, favourite smoky scent: somebody is burning cedar wood.
25 April 2025
I’m convinced that opportunistic plants (aka weeds) intentionally place themselves beside garden plants of a similar form or leaf shape, in the hope of going unnoticed. Tonight I spotted a remarkably mature woundwort (Stachys palustris) growing next to my clump of Phlomoides tuberosa; two plants uncanny in their resemblance; one intended, the other a rogue. Of all the weeds local to this area that might drift in, however, few are as welcome as woundwort, with its summer whorls of deep burgundy.
26 April 2025
More potting-on this afternoon: cuttings of Fuchsia ‘Hawkshead’ (from stems subtly snapped from a neighbour’s front garden — a habit), clumps of hollyhock (also from pilfered neighbourhood seed… see!); too many calendula seedlings and those of Leucanthemum — the giant variety that surrounds my parents’ house in Wales, from which I took a few seed heads last summer. The cold frame is now packed full; things will have to be planted out before more can be added in.
The garden is pure thrill at this time of year: always you are observing and editing, observing and editing. Lifting and transplanting self-sown seedlings, stripping away burgeoning leaves overshadowing neighbouring plants; pinching-out stem tips to double the volume of flowers. Even in so small a garden as this, all gaps are earmarked for annual plug-ins — the dahlias, cosmos, lilies and calendula still gearing up in the cold frame. You watch as the climbers slowly and then suddenly green the fences, and Welsh poppies paint the borders with yellow saucers. Bright potentillas tumble over themselves. It is truly unreal how fast things move in April, everything at once; it’s a sprint to keep pace with it all.
Matt Collins is a garden and travel writer, and head gardener at the Garden Museum in London.
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