BBC Gardeners' World January 2021

Grow... Get your veg-growing year off to a flying start with our Grow Your Own special, on sale 21 January at £8.99, with five packs of veg seed. Get your copy at major stores. Win… Enter our competition to win a Corsican cruise worth £7,200, courtesy of CroisiEurope. Travel in comfort and safety in a king-size, ocean-view cabin. Find out how to enter on p40. Explore… Discover the beautiful gardens of Somerset this September with our GW Magazine guided tour – led by magazine regular Sally Nex. See more at gardeners world.com/somerset Save… Our award-winning app lets your read your copy on the go. Save 50% at bit.ly/GW-digital. Find us in the Readly app on Apple or Google, or with a monthly subscription to Apple News+. Save even more... subscribe in print today and receive five months of…

How different are the resolutions we’re making for 2021 compared with last year… chasing bucket lists and cramming the diary feels an odd way to live now. In their place are slower pleasures and a shared appreciation that small things bring as much joy as big ambitions. Through 2020, we all experienced delight at the slowly unfurling flower, the blackbird singing, green shoots breaking through. These, and more, brought us immeasurable hope and optimism, nourishing us when the world looked bleak. And what a pleasure to welcome new gardeners to this world, as gardening emerged at the heart of a national conversation around wellbeing. Health is also at the heart of many of the conversations we’ve been recording for our new magazine podcast – just the thing for these winter nights. As…

STAR OF THE MONTH Galanthus nivalis I might be in danger of giving you too much information here, but every January, when the little shoots of snowdrops start pushing their way through the cold dark soil, I do a little dance of joy. It is not a full blown fouetté ballet turn or a merengue, but more of a shuffle with a twist. I need to be careful while doing this lest I incur the ridicule of my family or slip over in the mud and do myself a mischief, but it is worth it as something as life affrming and comforting as a snowdrop deserves a suitably enthusiastic welcome. There is room in every garden for snowdrops: they can be tucked in every corner or even in pots and containers. Plant as…

There are 460 different heucheras available to British gardeners. Yes, I counted them all! But I also went back to see how many were available 30 years ago, and the answer is just 34. We’ve been flooded with new varieties, 17 new ones last year, but heucheras also had a burst of popularity back in the 1950s and 1960s when they were an important cut flower crop. These days, it’s their beautifully coloured or patterned foliage that catches our eye and, even now, new colours, patterns and leaf shapes are still appearing. And the choice of leaf colour is simply astonishing – it’s almost become rare to find a variety with green leaves. So how to choose? Well, it’s simple – just pick the foliage colour you like. Check the description carefully…

I was asked the other day, if I was to start Longmeadow again would I do anything differently? Without hesitation I said, “everything”. This is because all the really significant design plans and planting were done over a quarter of a century ago. I have no regrets at all about that, but I now have wholly different influences and factors affecting my life. Unless you have a designer in to do it all for you, almost all gardens evolve with time. Sometimes this is because you get initial ideas a bit wrong or learn more about the place and how your desired planting fares, find new inspiration, or just get bored and want a change. Money and fashion influence all of us. When I made the series The Secret History of…

Peat-free gardening is not the distraction – confidence is. People aged 25-45 years are scared to garden because they are raised with a fear of getting things wrong. This demographic is also the most open to environmentally sound suggestion. I run a gardening business and every customer I work with has no issue at all with regenerative, sustainable horticulture – they just don’t know how to do it! I supply plants from peat-free nurseries and locally made peat-free compost. When it comes to those in manufacturing and retailing, we require transparency more than ever. Their responsibility, from the top down, is to wind up environmentally harmful practices. Be open and honest: tell the public what the problem is and how they are addressing it. Advise a timescale for wrapping things up…