The English Garden

Enjoy over 60 beautiful gardens a year with The English Garden. Every issue features country, city, cottage and coastal gardens, with advice on how to recreate them. Be inspired by articles written by the country's top garden designers and discover the best plant varieties for your garden, chosen by expert nurserymen and plantspeople.

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The English Garden

This Month • Our guide to plants, people, gardens and events, tasks and shopping in March

People to Meet • Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Out & About • Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month

Bunny’s Diary • Bunny badger-proofs her garden, enjoys crops of wild garlic and considers soil analysis

Beautiful & Useful • New plants, books, tools and creative designs, plus shopping inspiration

Vegetable Medley • Crisp lettuces, flushed turnips, bulbous beetroots and armfuls of legumes – a bountiful vegetable harvest is a treat for both the palate and the eye. Woven from Italian linen and bearing a vibrant produce-inspired pattern, this showstopping tablecloth is the perfect canvas for your spring settings. Large potager tablecloth, £235. thesette.com

FIRST Light • A private garden took a back seat to the commercial one in the early years at Broadleigh Bulbs in Somerset, but in the capable hands of Lady Christine Skelmersdale, it’s now an early spring spectacle as thousands of bulbs glow beneath mature trees

A Breath of FRESH AIR • Perched above the Kentish Weald, the exhilaratingly windswept garden at Knowle Hill Farm is designed to blow away the cobwebs. While a dense shelterbelt permits brightly unseasonal planting, Elizabeth Cairns’ collection of specialist snowdrops pierces the gloom and lifts the spirits – and that’s to say nothing of the spectacular view

Another DIMENSION • To enter the garden of Balmoral Cottage in Kent is to step into an enchanted dream, where dizzyingly delightful topiary casts a spell across the magical space conjured up by Charlotte and Donald Molesworth

The Future’s BRIGHT • Lit up by early bulbs in March, the garden at York Gate in West Yorkshire is not set in aspic despite its classically Arts & Crafts good looks. Its gardeners are busy adapting its planting to embrace the future while honouring its past

The Joys of SPRING • Layers of magnificent bulbs, evergreen structure and specimen flowering trees, provide a dazzling spring display that Anna Vinton has sympathetically developed since her arrival at Stoke Albany House in Northamptonshire 44 years ago

Reasons to be Cheerful • Turn your back on winter and enjoy an early taste of spring with some of the best displays of snowdrops and daffodils from around the country

Early Arrivals • Get ahead with seed sowing, by choosing varieties you can start indoors now, says Dea Fischer, who, as senior gardener at Oxburgh Hall, is doing just that

Fur Babies • Long before their buds burst, some trees and shrubs develop delightful catkins, many clad in the finest silken coats. Phoebe Jayes selects some of the best varieties to grow in the garden

Plants for MARCH • In the final part of a series looking at the most covetable plants of the season, Philip Clayton focuses on fine selections to fill an awkward time of year with colour

Something Special • Val Bourne looks beyond the usual single golden standards to a host of rare and noteworthy daffodils that will lend a particular presence to your garden each spring

Ahead of the GAME • All gardeners are itching to get going as soon as there’s the slightest hint of spring in the air. Here’s how to cheat the weather to get ahead and steal a march on spring without putting your precious plants...