- Herbs - love them - their variety, ability to add that crucial missing part to a dish, the fragrance on a hot summers day, or that in winter you can go out and rub along a rosemary plant or pick some sage - I've been growing a wider variety lately and in 2012 had my very own herb stall at Kedleston Hall - something I want to develop.
- Growing your own - can't beat picking something fresh from the garden - I have my favourites and some that I struggle with - why oh why won't my celeriac grow well?
- Composting - strangely addictive - nuff said
- Sweet Peas - possibly my favourite flower, always seem to have stuggled with them until 2012, a mega year, I think my homemade comfrey fertiliser did the trick!
- Cottage garden plants - a bit Barbara Cartland, but you can't beat a big blousy in your face cottage garden - a jumble of colour and fragrance
- Wildlife (not slugs) - organic gardening, growing plants for a wide range of critters, native plants and growing plants that attract as much as possible
- Auriculas make me go weak at the knees
Where does this love of gardening come from? Well some of my earliest garden memories are visiting my lovely Great Aunt Dot, she had the kind of 1930's long garden with old knarled fruit trees, a bit overgrown but with lovely plants such as poppies, flag iris, bluebells, crimson peony and more - I remember walking with her and being fascinated by it. Growing up I was lucky to have a greenhouse and veg plot, and famously my first real triumph was a glut of courgettes - my brother still talks about the summer of courgettes with everything. My dad loves to garden and this is one of the things we share now in life. Somehow once I turned 17 I lost the plot - literally - moving around and not having a garden, working too much, going out a lot and being a bit nomadic I longed for a garden to potter in.
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