Garden

Squirrel Knutsford felt he lived a good life. He had a drey in the roof of a warm block of flats on Plymouth Grove. From there it was just a small leap to the branches of a tree, a scramble down the...

Aconite There is a deep blue aconite coming to the end of its flowering in the garden at present. It is almost the same shade of blue as the cravat worn by John Ruskin in the portrait painted of him in 1879...

Charles Dickens is in the garden somewhere. Well, we know roughly where he is; he's among the dahlias at the front of the house, somewhere in among these. We know that because there is a variety of dahlia named after Charles Dickens....

We have strawberries growing in the front garden. Unlike Lady Ludlow in Elizabeth Gaskell's novella, the decision to plant strawberries was not prompted by a wish to show our aristocratic genes. We are told in Chapter 3 of My Lady Ludlow, that...

Sir Joseph Paxton has returned to the garden. To be accurate it is the rose named after him that has returned. Here he is (with his small green admirers!) The rose was planted in the garden because Elizabeth Gaskell met Sir Joseph...