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 and part two here.
3 February 2025
A flare of lunchtime sunshine, dusting the windowpanes, has pulled me away from laptop deadlines into the garden to tie back the climbing roses. I’ve been meaning to do this for months — an autumn job, really — but to paraphrase the great gardener Christopher Lloyd, sometimes the right time to prune something is when you feel like doing it, and today I feel like doing it, for the distraction if nothing else. With secateurs, a ball of string and a bucket, I tread cautiously between the border perennials and go about the engaging business of selecting vigorous stems to pull down onto horizontal wires. In autumn there is so much more give to the stems, but winter has lignified and hardened them, making the task one of confidence and risk, as you test the pliability of each green or browning shoot, hoping it wont snap before it can be successfully anchored. The more horizontal the rose stem, the greater number of flowering shoots will arise from its dormant buds in spring.
While working, I notice the many nigella seedlings at my feet — seeds cast with zealous abandon by the four and two year olds last autumn. This bodes well for a fuller border this coming year, nigella being one of the best of all filler flowers.
5 February 2025
Cutting back the old and yellowed sedum stems this morning, in advance of new spring shoots, I exposed a small spider, hunched and drowsy in the cavity of a short round stem. Feeling the change — the sudden closeness of the cold — it began slowly to test its legs. In truth, I’ve long known the importance of leaving decaying perennial stems standing throughout the winter months as habitat for invertebrates, but never before seen this principle so plainly evidenced. Clearly, each stem left standing provides another refuge for a wintering creature. Gardeners contend with an ever-ticking clock and, therefore, feel an urge, always, to complete tasks early and to have the work out of the way; in autumn and winter it can be hard to stay the secateurs and delay the big cut back until spring. But the spider is an impactful image; one that will hopefully help suppress my future inclinations to chop.
11 February 2025
A visit today to Charleston House outside Lewes, East Sussex — historic hub of the Bloomsbury group — to catch the Cedric Morris exhibition and to catch up with head gardener Harry Hoblyn. Another freezing day: we huddle over coffee mugs beside Harry’s potting shed and talk of the season ahead. Potted seedlings of annual and biennial flowers — poppies and glaucous honeywort — fill up the cold frames, subverting the grey air with the promise of summer colour. Charleston, under Harry’s nurture, is a garden alive with floral informality, a ‘flower garden’ in the truest sense. There are echoes everywhere of those who once lived, painted and wrote here, not least in the plantings. I’ve always loved the size of the walled garden at its heart; you enter beneath low lintels and are quickly swallowed up by jostling growth, pressed into a box of brilliant spikes and umbels. Now in February, the garden bones are laid bare but the gathering rosettes of hollyhock, foxglove, eryngium and evening primrose foretell the spectacle that is to come. A visit to a flower garden at this time of year does wonders for the spirit. I returned home with thoughts of a last minute seed order.
20 February 2025
I picked the worst day for it, with a sudden rise in temperature bringing dawn to dusk drizzle, nonetheless, the gaping hole in our fence — courtesy of December’s winds — could be ignored no longer, nor the replacement panel stacked against the kitchen window. So out into the wet we went, my little helper and I — he with an armful of toy diggers for the real construction work — and set about excavating post holes and drilling panel clasps, until the thing was sturdy and we were soaked through, cement lining our boots.
A shame, in a way — I’d become increasingly comfortable with the missing section of fence; the openness it gave, and its temporary subversion of our rigidly-allotted quarters. An unstitching of domestic demarcation. In gardens, a sense of enclosure is a curious concept. Walls and fences have been proven to impart a feeling of security and protection, yet implicit within that are the hard lines of seclusion and separation. The artist Derek Jarman — as the only example I can think of — had the confidence and inquisitiveness to make a boundary-less garden, on the coastal shingle at Dungeness. The garden became the landscape, and the more I think of that the more the idea excites me. Then again, his ‘borrowed view’ — to use the garden designer’s terminology — was a desirably stark, aesthetically sympathetic one that ended with the sea. Mine, conversely, would bear the inescapable hallmarks of the semi-detached: a patch of lawn, a child’s trampoline, a golf course.
24 February 2025
The perennial fennel has fluffed out with new growth — I love this stage, before the leaves unfurl and they are like aquatic fronds. Like the hornwort or ‘coontail’ that sways in the current. Today there are divisions to plant: splits of libertia and lovage.
26 February 2025
A two-day hiatus of diminutive temperatures has brought rain, but also intermittent bouts of soul-warming sunshine, breaking buds in its wake. The gathering of green-tipped snowdrops in the sunny border has erupted into a snow-flurry; the dark hellebores have opened their glossy cups. I brought my first flower of spring into the house: a pulmonaria, bicolored in rose pink and gentian blue, a single short stem in a short vase. Snowdrops belong to winter and are best left out of doors, pulmonaria — the lungwort — is for just that: deep inhalations of a returning spring air.
On a run in the evening, in the new later light, there are now narcissus by the stream, and in the glowing hedgerows the rising green of arum and cow parsley. There’s a cold snap on the horizon but the fallow days are done.
Matt Collins is a garden and travel writer, and head gardener at the Garden Museum in London.
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