Launched by the RHS four years ago, National Gardening Week (yes, it is a thing) is now the country’s biggest celebration of gardening, with thousands of families, gardens, charities and organisations getting all green-fingered.
New this year, the first ever National Open Gardens Day will take place on April 17. So there’s no excuse not to visit some of the UK’s most beautiful gardens – most of which usually charge entry or remain closed to the public – for free!
And what better way to celebrate this beautiful weather than planting a few sunflowers? (With a glass of Pimms to hand…)
SP publishes a few books for the horticulturalists among us, including Caroline Deput’s The Joy of Allotments: An Illustrated Diary and Jenny Joseph’s Led by the Nose: A Garden of Smells.
The Joy of Allotments by Caroline Deput
“What makes the allotment my place? It’s a mix of meditation, therapy and exercise, a place for me and my thoughts. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in this book – what it feels like to tend an allotment. Frankly, I view growing vegetables as a bit of a bonus.”
Follow a year on Plot 19 through Caroline’s beautiful diary of colour illustrations and share her eternal optimism (often misplaced) as she keeps her allotment sufficiently weeded, watered and hoed to grow vegetables with the alluring names of Lady Balfour, Bull’s Blood and Hurst Green Shaft. From spring, where she plants with high hopes, to summers spent harvesting her first crop, follow Caroline’s charming year.
As a little treat for National Gardening Week, here’s Caroline’s thoughts on April…
Led by the Nose: A Garden of Smells by Jenny Joseph
Not since Laurie Lee or Flora Thompson has a writer captured the smells and moods of the English countryside in the manner of Jenny Joseph, author of the perennially popular Warning: When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple.
The memoir depicts a year in Jenny’s garden through the sense of smell, capturing the feel of each month and the flow of the gardening year (the chores to be done, the joy as your garden blossoms). In her writing, Jenny Joseph combines an eccentrically loveable personality with her own individual outlook on life. The book’s unfolding of Jenny Joseph’s personality is just one of its many delights.
“A treat for the sensual gardener.”
– Alan Titchmarsh
For a list of National Gardening Week events, click here.
To buy a copy of The Joy of Allotments, click here.
To buy a copy of Led by the Nose, click here.
Take Home a Souvenir! 