The English Garden

Enjoy over 60 beautiful gardens a year with The English Garden. Every issue features country, city, cottage and coastal gardens, with advice on how to recreate them. Be inspired by articles written by the country's top garden designers and discover the best plant varieties for your garden, chosen by expert nurserymen and plantspeople.

CONTRIBUTORS

Welcome

THE ENGLISH GARDEN

This Month • Our guide to plants, people, gardens and events, tasks and shopping in October

People to Meet • Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Out & About • Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month

Bunny’s Diary • Bunny Guinness cares for cuttings and celeriac and sows the seed for a new perennial meadow

Beautiful & Useful • New plants, books, tools and creative designs, plus shopping inspiration

Divide & Conquer • Once tired clumps of perennials have finished flowering, autumn is the time to reinvigorate them by division. This practice also creates more new plants for your garden, so it’s a win-win situation. The key tool you’ll need is a sturdy fork (or two) such as the Hawkesbury border (right, £38) and digging (left, £45) forks from gardentrading.co.uk

AFTER PARTY • At Norfolk’s East Ruston Old Vicarage, the show doesn’t stop when summer ends. Every autumn, Alan Gray and his husband Graham Robeson coax from it a colourfully ebullient last hurrah

Out of This World • Designer Jack Wallington has replaced the container-based neon jungle in his tiny London back yard, with something more permanent but equally eye-poppingly fantastical and immersive

Breaking FREE • Paul and Pauline McBride’s acclaimed naturalistic planting at the eight-acre Sussex Prairie Garden is an inspiring demonstration of this wild, loose style of gardening, proving that it’s eminently possible here in the UK, even on heavy Wealden clay

THE LANDBefore Time • A magical anachronism, where box blight and box-tree moth are yet to strike, the garden of Lower House in Cusop Dingle is the intricate work of artists, with lustrous topiary at the heart of a space that softens outwards with a wild and graceful beauty

In The ZONE • Garden designer Sean Walter of The Plant Specialist has applied a grid to this robust garden in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, to create structure across a series of sheltered zones united by immersive, prairie-flavoured planting

Mellow Fruitfulness • Chief harvester at the organic kitchen garden of Audley End House in Essex, Duncan Gates recommends ten historic fruit trees for delicious autumn crops

Magic Wands • Persicaria are suddenly everywhere. Adored by garden designers, they’ve become a must-have plant, but there’s good reason for the surge in popularity. Robust, low-maintenance, and boasting a four-month flowering period, these pretty perennials live up to the hype

The One & Only • No retiring wallflowers or shrinking violets allowed here. As the name of this Cheshire Flower Farm – ‘Just Dahlias’ – suggests, Philippa Stewart focuses solely on these stunning seasonal showstoppers for cutting fresh or drying

Late Starters • Adjust your mindset and think of autumn as a time of new beginnings. The cooler, moist conditions make it the perfect time to get trees, shrubs, bulbs and perennials in the ground for a happier, healthier start

Season Finale • In the last of our series on the kitchen garden at Thyme in Southrop, head gardener Victoria Bowsher harvests and stores winter squash and considers hardy brassicas and green manures

Natural Selection • Every one of Emma Stothard’s woven willow pieces is inspired by nature, and the individual characteristics of the willow withies she chooses give each...