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

Weekly emails from Fennel & Fern

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.

My plot is ready to plant up, so it’s time to feed the soil in readiness for the first batch of plants. This involves dragging a slightly grumptious husband across the countryside to a stables near the allotment and shovelling a great deal of horse poo into our car boot.

The owners of the livery yard I got my manure from have been stacking their horse manure high into a huge pile for years, and so I was able to dig up four-year-old well-rotted manure that is ready to go straight onto the plot. Fresh manure (the stuff that is steaming away merrily in the foreground of the photo) is fine for the compost heap, but it will burn the roots of any plants, so wait until it has rotted down a little.

Five Ikea bags full of black gold don’t go as far as I’d like, and I’ll have to return to the stables, which is only ten minutes from the plot, every few weeks while I’m planting up the allotment.

But this is what I used this batch for:

These three beds are now planted up with raspberries and hybrid berries. Though they are all bare root plants, I dug large planting holes and filled them in with the manure, and then mulched the soil surface with manure as well. This weekend I planted: ‘Valentina‘, which is a pink summer-fruiting raspberry, ‘All Gold‘, which is a yellow autumn-fruiting raspberry, and the trusty autumn-fruiting ‘Polka‘, all from Victoriana Nurseries. I’ll be sorting out the system for supporting these berries in the early spring before they get going, but it is likely to be a hazel trellis between sturdy poles rather than stretched wires, for reasons I will explain in another post.

I also planted Japanese wineberries, tummelberries, tayberries, gooseberries and rhubarb.

I am still cutting out new beds in the plot. I do this by digging an outline of the bed, and then lifting the turf in squares to join the turf pyramids at either end of the plot. These will eventually rot down over the coming year to produce a lovely loam. I’ve built them as pyramids because that’s the strongest shape, hopefully preventing them from falling over.

I love being at this plot. This weekend I had six red kites swirling overhead as I dug, and a troupe of robins nibbling away at the worms in the manure. There wasn’t a single soul apart from me on the allotment site. Just me, my thoughts, and the birds.

By the way, if you are keen to improve the soil on your plot or in your garden, you should take the seven day better gardener soil challenge at some point.

Garden designer and author Dawn Isaac created this wonderful garden for her family. She tells F&F readers how it came together.

About eight years ago I looked out of my home office and asked, quite politely in the circumstances, if I could help the two complete strangers who were in my front garden, rifling around through the compost. “We’re just trying to find the drugs we threw over your hedge”, they replied.

That was when I decided it might be time to leave the gritty urban life to those more suited to its ‘edginess’.

We moved to Cambridgeshire a year later to an end of terrace house that appeared to have stolen everyone else’s garden.  However, despite the fact I’m a garden designer I didn’t seriously tackle the garden until the autumn of 2007.  This was mostly because I wanted to create an ideal “family” garden and I really needed to have the family before I began.

The plot itself is just under a third of an acre and was originally a grassed area with various random outbuildings, a surfeit of conifers, duck pond, geese pen and an interesting array of garden rubbish.

The revised layout has a large lawn at the centre, because the children will always need a decent space for certain games.  In a rare case of forward planning, I even ensured it would be able to accommodate a marquee for over 100 people, because, you never know when you need to have a really big party!

In the corner of the lawn we sunk a trampoline which is surrounded by a slightly raised turfed ‘donut’ shape making it almost impossible to spot as you come into the garden.  I used the natural slope of the land to create a play area that sits lower down so it doesn’t have to be in constant view if you are trying to pretend your life doesn’t revolve around school runs and tantrums for the evening.

There are two outside dining spaces.  One is positioned for lunchtime dining and kids drawing/crafting where it will eventually be shaded by a quartet of apple trees (at the moment these look more like sticks with ideas above their station, but give it time…) whilst the other is under a gazebo (a revitalised iron structure found at an architectural reclamation yard) designed to be close enough to supervise children at play but also to catch the last rays of sun.

Growing veg was always on the agenda, but like everything else in this garden, I wanted it to be attractive as well as practical.  I settled on a simple grid with nine raised wooden beds but with each surrounded by clipped
box hedging to give good year round structure. For practical reasons this sits next to the greenhouse and shed.

The garden is also filled with loads of areas for the kids to play and explore.  The two older children have their own gardens which they designed themselves and which they add to each year with new features and plants. There is also a well used hammock, playhouse, swing, large sandpit, log walkway and, the most recent addition, a mud pie kitchen area added behind the shed. We also try to add new features every year – some permanent, some temporary – such as a dinosaur tyre garden, climbing bean teepee, wildflower border, sunflower alley, rainbow cutting garden and scented hopscotch.

The hard landscaping is simple and designed to tie the garden into the house.  The Cambridgeshire handmade bricks used to rebuild the old piggery building in the garden as a home office were also used to edge paths, lawn and create a seating area.  York stone was used on the side passage towards the house as well as edging the driveway, whilst the drive and paths were mostly created with Breedon Gravel.

I didn’t have much of a budget for planting so I was limited to some leftovers from my Chelsea show garden, refugees from my London backyard and a few stock plants, key shrubs and trees.  To bulk up the borders, I rely heavily on self seeding and spreading plants such as lamiums, cornflowers, violas, verbenas, forget-me-nots which I think are perfect for the family garden – they fill a space quickly, have seeds which the children love to collect and also are prolific enough that you don’t have to wince every time one is squashed by a ball or a rampaging toddler who has very little concept of “a path”.  Some people raise an eyebrow at the number of plants I have which can be classed as “toxic” or “harmful” but I feel that teaching the children about these and how to be careful is an important part of an outdoor education.

The garden is still very young and I’m excited to see the yew hedges eventually reach the “tall and stately” phase and for the apple and plum trees to give more than a token piece of fruit, but there is also something rather fitting about a family garden that grows up alongside the children.

You can buy a copy of Dawn’s book, Garden Crafts for Children, here.

Queen bumble bees are the first to emerge at the end of winter and some of them are in a poor state. The ones we see in the gardens here may be covered in mites and all of them are looking for a good feed. Very early flowers with simple petal shapes can make it easy for these charming bees to get the energy they need.

Winter aconites are up first. They are laden with pollen and open wide in sheltered areas where the sun reaches them. If they like your soil they will grow anywhere within the arc of a tree canopy. Aconites rarely venture beyond the shadow cast by an overhanging branch. Ours multiply by seed, sometimes we harvest them by hand but more likely they will get spread about by the strimmer.

Crocus tommasinianus is a good early crocus and, again, laden with pollen. This bumblebee is gorging herself in our cottage garden. The first time we tried these crocus the mice ate almost all of them but the few that survived have now multiplied. Once established the mice seem to leave them alone and in light grassland they can create good drifts.

A good lungwort for our alkaline soil is Pulmonaria rubra ‘Redstart’. Again the flowers are a simple shape so that insects can reach the nectar easily. It makes a good foil to snowdrops and may flower on and off into late spring. This year it has been flowering since November. On a sunny day the honey scent given off by the snowdrop drifts means they are working hard to attract insects for pollination.

As the spring progresses these surviving queens will be essential for the new generation of bumblebees in our garden and the flowers I have planted will have contributed far more than just their beauty in late winter.

To see all these plants in flower at Easton Walled Gardens, visit their website.

It’s official: the hardest month of the 52-week salad challenge is nearly over. January was always going to be tricky, especially as I only had a few salad plants overwintering on the balcony. But now the indoor salad garden is starting to become rather marvellously potent.

Week 4

This week it has been the turn of the peashoots, with their lovely, soft, intense foliage.

One of the problems with starting seed for outdoors on a windowsill at this time of year is that it puts on lots of lush, slightly leggy growth months before you can plant it out. That’s why I advise gardeners to really time their sowings appropriately.  But with salads like this, all that wisdom goes out of the window. These peashoots will never reach the stage where they need to support themselves, as I am about to harvest them. Lush, soft, leggy growth is much better than tough, robust stems if you’re serving a salad.

Here are the plants, growing in the windowgrow in my spare room. I’ve sown them from a packet of dried peas that I bought from the local supermarket, rather than wasting good shelling pea seed on a salad.

I harvested them today, and served them with more mustard leaves and chard in a salad with Parma ham and olives. Perfick. So perfick, in fact, that peashoots are one of my favourite salad leaves in the world.

This week I sowed

Mixed salad leaves, mustard, peas, basil and garlic chives.

The salad challenge

VP at Veg Plotting, who started this wonderful 52-week salad challenge, has posted a round-up of the challenge in January here. It includes what she has learnt, along with links to some of the blogs written by those taking part.

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.

Come now, there must be room for at least one witch hazel in your life. There are plenty to choose from, from soft pale yellow to deep, raunchy crimson. And the scent of those raggedy flowers: surely that’s enough to make you plant at least five of the bushes?

Here are some of the most beautiful witch hazels out there:

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘All Gold’. Image by Kew

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Orange Peel’. Image by Kew Gardens.

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Diane’. Image by Kew

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Carmine red’. Image by Kew 

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Harry’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis vernalis. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis ‘Rochester’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis mollis ‘Princeton Gold’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Freuerzauber’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Livia’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis vernalis ‘Christmas Cheer’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Westerstede’. Image copyright Anne Tanne

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Rubin’. Image copyright Anne Tanne

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Hiltingbury’. Image by Chris Kreussling

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Strawberries and Cream’. Image copyright Bob Gutowski

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Palida’. Image copyright Anne Tanne

If you’re not smitten by now, you have a heart of stone. There’s an additional teaser on how this plant smells so utterly incredible, and how to care for it here.