This is one of the loveliest and coolest ideas we’ve seen in a long time. A chandelier that doubles as a vase? How super.

It’s the brainchild of Polish design practice Gang Design and features two rings of test tubes filled with water that you can then place gorgeous blousy flowers inside.

And look how wonderful it looks when lit up!

And in the winter months, when flowers are in short supply, you can fill it with dyes for another fabulous light show.

Have a look at Gang Design‘s fab website for examples of other wonderful works, including a denim chandelier, and textile USB sticks.

Remember our wonderful tour of the potager garden at Villandry in the Loire Valley, France, this summer? The gardens are actually just as glamorous all year round, so we’ve returned to show you their autumn and winter splendour.

The multi-coloured checkerboard effect is even more in evidence than it was during our summer visit, with huge ornamental cabbage heads providing so much wonderful colour.

The ruby chard is now huge, and looks marvellous in the rich, golden winter sunlight.

One of the crops that was barely in evidence at all when we made our summer visit, save a sea of huge green leaves, was the pumpkin crop. In the autumn, the gardeners leave the ripe pumpkins out on the bare beds to cure in the sunlight, and to make the garden look as bright and cheery as they can.

But the best winter colour comes from the vines which surround the potager. Here they are in their summer fruiting glory, but their ruby autumn colour is still more spectacular.

You can read the full Villandry series here, and visit the Villandry website to find out more about how to visit. All images copyright Villandry.

If you’ve been taking part in the 52-week salad challenge so far, you’ll already know that microgreens are a lynchpin of your salad dishes at present. They are quick to grow, do not require as much light or space as cut-and-come again salads, and have a wonderful kick of a taste.

Some microgreens are well-known, others less so. To help you get a fat crop of tiny leaves that is as varied and flavoursome as possible, here is a near-comprehensive list of salads that you can grow as microgreens:

Amaranth
Basil
Beetroot
Bok Choy
Broccoli
Cabbage
Carrot
Celery leaf
Celtuce
Chard
Chervil
Chia (Salvia hispanica)
Chicory
Chinese mustard
Chinese water pepper
Chives
Coriander
Cress
Dandelion
Dill
Endive
Fennel
Fenugreek
Garlic chives
Hong vit
Hon tsai tai
Italian dandelion ‘Red rib’
Kale
Kohl Rabi
Komatsuna
Lamb’s lettuce
Leek
Lemon balm
Lettuce
Minutina
Mitsuba
Mizuna
Mustard
Orache
Par cel
Peas
Perilla
Perpetual spinach
Purslane
Radicchio
Radish
Rocket
Sage
Savory
Shungiku
Sorrel
Spinach
Spring onion
Tatsoi
Thyme
Turnip
Watercress
Yukina

Warning: While you can grow most salads and herbs as microgreens, you cannot use the leaves of parsnips, as they are poisonous at all stages.

Don’t forget to follow others taking part in the salad challenge on twitter using the hashtag#saladchat. And if you don’t have your own blog but want to write a post about your own experience of the challenge, then use our Your Blogs section.

Benjamin Vogt doesn’t need to work on his garden for much of the year, thanks to his method of planting thick, and planting native. Here’s how he put his wonderful garden in Nebraska together.

By rights, I should be leaving my beetroot seedlings alone right now. They are, after all, only little seedlings, not so much microveg as microscopic-veg, and I’d do better to wait for their true leaves to appear.

But it’s the fifth week of the 52-week salad challenge, and while I have plenty of peashoots, mustard, lettuce and edible flowers to harvest, I don’t have anything bright and loud to set atop all those leaves, to make my salad really trendy. So the young, loud beets have made an early visit to my salad dish.

Week 5

Picking beets when they are only at seedling stage, rather than waiting a week longer for their true leaves to appear means you have a perfect garnish. You still have that sweet, earthy, beety flavour in the tiny plant, and the bright stems look fab as the crest of a salad, or sprinkled at the last minute over a dish of food.

If you wait a week, you’ll get the true leaves, which means juicier salads, but for now, a bright beet will perk up your salad no end.

I served these atop some scrambled eggs that I ate while looking mournfully out of my window at the snow.

The bulk of the salad was made up by mustard microgreens and peashoots. I’ve found that the best time to harvest the peashoots is when they start to show their first few tendrils, before the stems become tough. Mustard is best left as a microgreen until it shows its first two little true leaves, as in the picture below, so you get a flavoursome and light salad.

I scattered the beet leaves over the scrambled eggs right before serving it up, so they wouldn’t become too soggy and lose their crunch, and so that the red juices didn’t turn my eggs pink.

It is really rather splendid to be eating salads that remind me of summer when I can’t even see the grass outside, and I’m quite amazed with how much I am able to grow indoors. The only thing that makes the salad challenge rather, well, challenging, at the moment is that it takes much longer for plants – including microgreens – to germinate and grow, even in rooms where I have the heating on. It’s worth taking note of that, as it means you need to plan further ahead to ensure you have a steady supply of salads each week during the cold months.

This week I sowed

Basil, peashoots, mixed lettuce leaves, mustard, oriental salad mix.

Don’t forget to follow others taking part in the salad challenge on twitter using the hashtag#saladchat. And if you don’t have your own blog but want to write a post about your own experience of the challenge, then use our Your Blogs section.

Florist Ken Marten arranges a beautiful set of hellebores for a client in Holland Park.

Benches or garden seats are an important element in a garden. Somewhere to rest, to relax, to socialise, or to simply have a quick sit-down while you admire your hard work. Without them the garden becomes a place you walk through or view from the window.

When I design a new garden, one of the first things I think about is where seats are going to be put and the best possible position for them in relation to the rest of the garden. In smaller gardens the seating area is usually the main terrace where a table and chairs are set out, normally close by to the house, however in a larger garden, you will find other less formal spots where a bench at least can be placed. Alongside a border perhaps, giving you a wonderful view of summer planting, or my favourite, is in a kitchen garden or near your veg patch, where you can rest your legs, have some tea and gaze at your vegetables and feel pleased with your hard work.

A place to simply watch the wildlife is also well worth considering, particularly if you have the size of garden where you can have some meadow or natural planting.

Seating can be either formal or informal and it is worth thinking about using objects that can double up as seating, such as timber storage benches, or simply large logs, particularly in a woodland setting. Circular seats around the base of trees always look inviting and creates an interesting feature of the tree.

It’s worth considering the moveable and immovable. Creating seating in unusual places can mean literally moving some chairs and a small table or a bench to make use of the best seasonal interest in your garden. Heavy permanent furniture is usually best left for terraces or large weighty benches that take permanent root in the garden.

Whether your seat is a large log or an ornate Edwardian bench, or a wooden seat covered in moss or lichen, a beautiful garden object, set in just the right place, in a perfect setting can look stunning and can add a feeling of belonging to a garden. Using over-sized furniture can add a statement to the garden and in particular using a very large bench against a tall hedge works very well.

Colour is particularly important to me, and using colour on your garden furniture can turn a basic boring wooden bench into something vibrant and interesting. I have seen some wonderful combinations of planting dark Cotinus behind a turquoise painted bench or boldly, a bright red bench set into a darkly green woodland setting.

One of the loveliest things about my allotment so far has been ordering asparagus crowns from Victoriana Nurseries. The reason this is so lovely is that I have never lived anywhere long enough to grow asparagus. You don’t get a crop until the third year of growing, and once established, the beds can last for 20 years, so it’s not a crop to plant when you know you’re going to be on the move any time soon.

But we’re finally sticking in the Chilterns for at least the next six years, and hopefully, if things go to plan (which they rarely do), we could be here for a lot, lot longer than that. So I gleefully ordered five crowns of ‘Jersey Knight‘ and five crowns of ‘Crimson Pacific‘.

The best time to plant asparagus is early spring, in a well-prepared bed. By well prepared, I mean weed-free, as removing perennial weeds from an established asparagus bed is a nightmare. The crowns can get so easily damaged by hoeing or digging around them, so it is worth ensuring that the ground has no suspicious looking roots in it.

You also need to dig in as much well-rotted manure or garden compost as you possibly can. I’ve used four-year-old manure from my local stables by the barrow-load to ensure the plants have all the nutrients they need.

When you’re ready, dig a trench to just a little more than a spade’s depth, and half-fill with compost. Then bring that compost into a ridge in the centre of the trench.

Place your asparagus crowns 18in apart along the ridge, and gently tease the roots out so they rest along the sides of the ridge. Then cover with compost so that the trench is filled. Leave around 3ft between each asparagus trench.

Then it’s time for the waiting game. You cannot cut any spears from asparagus planted as year-old crowns until two years after planting, and even then it’ll only be two per plant. The harvest gets going in the third year: to cut spears before then weakens the plant and means it never reaches its full potential. That’s a while for me to wait. But I’ve got a feeling that the rest of my allotment will more than keep me busy in the meantime…

Fennel & Fern readers can order  ’Jersey Knight‘ and ‘Crimson Pacific‘ from Victoriana Nurseries at a 10% discount. Just click here to visit the site and the discount will automatically be taken from your entire order at checkout.

Miscellanies are fabulous books, but every so often you come across a miscellany book that tugs at you a little more than others. Curious Observations: A Country Miscellany is a wonderful, wonderful book that does just that. Filled with tales from the pages of Country Life, this book preserves in aspic a world that we never ever want to lose: one of hedgerows, glorious country recipes and spring.

Read this extract by Ralph Jefferson, from 21 March 1931:

“The spring we know in England, that shy unobtrusive, hardly discernible spring when we suddenly realise that the miracle has happened once more, that the sober browns and blacks of winter are being displaced by the flimsiest and tenderest of golden green. In the shy recesses of the woodland violets are beginning to show and green spikes are thrusting through last year’s leaves which will soon break into a glory of golden daffodil or purple bluebell.

“Can it be wondered at that our folk abroad when they think of spring at home are filled with a poignant longing to see it all again…”

This book is truly fabulous, and one F&F reader can bag a copy for themselves. All you need to do is subscribe to one of our email lists before 26 February, and you’ll automatically be entered into the draw. Here are the two lists you can subscribe to:

Daily emails from Fennel & Fern

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February is a pretty exciting month. It’s when the colours all start to wake up in the garden, and everything starts getting ready for the year ahead. Here are six bright and breezy plants to get you going. Click on the thumbnails to read more about them.