BBC Gardeners' World March 2021

Join us… Due to demand, we’ve added extra dates to our gardens of Somerset bespoke GW reader holiday this September. Join us on 6-10 or 19-23 Sept, to enjoy the county’s best gardens and food. See p88. Save… Get your copy of Monty’s The Complete Gardener, worth £27, when you subscribe. Pay just £26 for six issues and Monty’s book, while stocks last. See p167. Listen… Season 2 of our magazine podcast launches on 4 March, with lively chat from Monty, Alan and many more. Find all new episodes, plus season 1, at gardenersworld.com/podcast Win... Enter our exclusive competition to win one of six limited-edition ATCO lawnmowers worth up to £399 – the total prize value is worth more than £2,300. Turn to p21 for your chance to win. Learn... Boost your gardening skills by joining a GW Mag…

The gentle thrum of a bumblebee at work is the reassuring sound of summer – but for how much longer? Eleven of the UK’s 27 species of bumblebee are extinct or highly endangered. Add to this, 76% of butterflies in long-term decline and 97% of natural flower-rich habitats, such as meadows, lost since 1940. One in three mouthfuls of food depend upon pollinators, so without a thriving population, plant diversity will wane, pollination of crops will drop while, close to home, gardeners will see less success growing food. It’s time to act together. With this issue – our 30th anniversary edition – we call upon every gardener to Put Pollinators First. In our 30 years of publishing, there has never felt a better moment for gardeners to work together for the biggest…

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the spring”Aldo Leopold I know I might be pushing it, given the way that this month can easily turn nasty, but I think we can tentatively begin to greet the spring. To celebrate I have decided to introduce this column using the medium of dance. This is quite a tricky thing to do in print, but I think it is important – we are emerging from a long and generally miserable winter without much joy and I, for one, am looking forward to feeling a little bit of movement in my hips and some rhythm in my feet. Let us all chassé together into springtime. STAR OF THE MONTH Narcissus ‘Tête-à-tête’ A tango I think.…

One of my earliest memories is of looking at the shelf in the back of the coal bunker to see how the hyacinths were coming along. My dad had put a shelf in there, in the dark, specially for my mum to line up a few bowls of forced bulbs. It was a lesson in patience, and in managing disappointment – sometimes it went wrong. But when it worked…! “Let’s put some more in,” I’d beg. It was the fragrance, really, and the deep dark colour of those rich blue flowers. Back then I thought they only came in blue, as those were the only ones my mum grew. Now I know a little more about them – that’s a botanic garden training for you – and every winter I cheat:…

Sooner or later, lead times for publications such as this make a fool of everyone who has ever written for a magazine of any kind. While modern technology has meant that I am now writing this in the middle of January rather than in December as I had to do for many years, in these days of tiers, lock ins and lock downs – not to mention the dithering of politicians trying to do the right thing but desperate not to be thought unpopular – mean that it is unwise to predict what will happen next week, let alone in two months’ time. That, however, is not going to stop me trying! Many gardening trends over the past 10 years or so have been based upon a general sense of uncertainty…

I have an allotment in a London borough and the council is proposing to put up the rent for my plot by nearly 400 per cent. They say the increase in rent is to cover improvements in administration and for infrastructure projects, like toilets, on site. Long waiting lists mean councils can put up their rents, pricing the poorer people they were intended for out of the market and letting gentrification take over. The bulk of the increase I’m expected to pay is made up of an ‘out-of-borough surcharge’. Many London boroughs now impose a similar surcharge. Given that our site sits on the borough boundary, this will impact a significant number of my fellow tenants. I’ve had my plot for 18 years and am utterly heartbroken at the thought of…