Get a head start on your 2025 gardening journey and enjoy a vibrant and productive space for the year to come.
Despite frosts continuing to creep in, days are actually starting to lengthen once more, so spare a thought for your spring garden and the promise that it brings.
Discover how to introduce invigorating fresh fragrances to your outdoor space and learn which winter-ready plants you can get in the ground now to provide much-needed colour.
For those dreaming of summer harvests, we’ll dip our trowels into the world of fruit planting, and explore the invaluable world of ground cover plants – those stalwarts that can be planted almost anytime, offering low maintenance beauty throughout the seasons.
Get Growing NOW For Fragrant Rewards Later
Welcome a sensory boost to your garden with unbeatable fragrances. Despite most species enjoying a winter slumber, there is no reason why you can’t get planting now.
Daphne are fragrant delights and can be planted right away, rewarding you later with their perfume.
Where better to start than Daphne ‘Eternal Fragrance’, and yes, the clue is in the name! A sweet and heady fragrant shrub with semi-evergreen foliage through most winter conditions. Compact and flowering on new growth, so blooms just keep coming through summer, all the while releasing a sweet aroma.
You needn’t settle for just one flowering Daphne either, thanks to the adorable blooms of the summer-flowering ‘Pink Fragrance’. Packed with just as much fragrance and long-flowering prowess, but instead with playfully pink flowers.
Or, how about something a little bit different? Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’ is very first in the species to have blue-green, spine-free leaves. Plant now to see late summer sprays of buttery yellow blooms, followed by blue berries that are delicious to the birds of your garden.
Great for a pot, the flowers of this compact shrub have a notable honey-like scent.
Enchanting Flower Colour to End Winter and Start Spring
Gardening is not a passion reserved for the warm summer months. It is a year-round affair, in fact early year gardening feels so rewarding! Even now, at the height of winter, you can get planting with established plants to reap the rewards of diverse flowering displays later in the year.
On top of that, with a variety like our Hellebore ‘Double Ellen’ Collection, you can plant now and see beautiful blooms in a matter of weeks! You’ll be able to enjoy blooms in spring 2025, even if you missed the bulb planting window of last September and October.
Hellebores are real treats for plugging that gap in the flowering calendar that few others compete with. Erupting with blooms from the tail end of winter to the early calls of spring, with this collection you’ll get a range of vibrant to dark flowers, and they’re hardy and easy to grow, ideal for any garden and gardeners – even for those with less time on their hands!
Juicy Raspberry Growing – Short Canes vs Long Canes
Raspberries really are some of the juiciest and most rewarding fruits you can grow in the garden. Sweet and tart flavoured, with such versatility in what you do with them! Gobble them down fresh from the plant or take them into the kitchen and to create mouth-watering preserves or puddings.
Established raspberry plants can be planted anytime from November to March, if ground conditions are not frozen or waterlogged.
When you come to purchase, raspberries are available as short canes or long canes. The former are cut back on arrival to a shorter height, so will need an extra year of growth before you can start to pick the yummy crops, but often are often premium varieties and lighter on the purse strings.
Long canes, meanwhile, are supplied more established than their shorter counterparts and will fruit the very first summer after planting, reducing the amount of patience you’ll need to have!
Low Maintenance Gardens
An underappreciated feature of most of our gardens are ground cover plants. From Phlox and Sedum to Periwinkles, the choice is almost endless, and so many of these thrive in our gardens.
Ground cover plants help to suppress pesky weeds by blocking sunlight from reaching unwanted seeds. They also retain moisture in the ground, keeping the soil moist for longer, so less frequent watering for you!
A great example are evergreen heathers, check out the ‘Four Seasons’ Collection, offering colour to the garden throughout the year. Plus, you can get them in the ground now to give them a head start!
