SeeHow is the perfect Valentine’s Day gift! But really, it is more than just a ‘gift of flowers’ – it is a promise of year-round garden colour. SeeHow works visually, showing the whole lives of 140 plants – January through to December. Anyone can use it – from complete beginners to gardening professionals. A picture really is worth 1,000 words! For easy searching, the plants are arranged in a colour library - white, pink, red, purple, blue, green, yellow and orange. But the user can re-arranged them any way they like. And there is a Plant Index too!

Dungeness Headland – a vast bank of flint shingle on the Kent coast, covering over 20 square kilometres, reaching out 3k into the English Channel towards France. Surprisingly, for what can appear at first glance to be a shingle desert – perhaps even an industrial wasteland – it is one of the most environmentally diverse places in the UK.

Who doesn’t love visiting grand gardens! They are places where it is possible to enjoy lavish planting and landscaping on an epic scale. We are lucky in the UK to have some superb gardens that push the boundaries of garden design and that make fantastic days out. This blog describes three of them.

Dieticians talk about ‘eating the rainbow’. By this they mean eating as wide a variety of different coloured fruit and veg every day if possible, to benefit from the phytonutrients they contain. Phytonutrients give the veg their colours and contribute to our physical well-being. In a similar way, growing the rainbow can also be beneficial, contributing to our mental well-being

Over the years I have tried to capture plant chaos with my camera and I thought I would share some images. The idea behind these photos is that they do not look ‘at’ the plants, but rather they look ‘into’ the world of plants. It is only by looking into the picture that we really see the true beauty of nature itself and we see that underpinning all that chaos is ‘order’!

Many of us grow at least one rose, for the simple reason that for size, beauty, repeat flowering and elegance, they really have few rivals. They are a welcome sight everywhere, reliably providing some of the most colourful blooms in the garden plant … and many are fragrant too. But if you don’t grow roses, it is still possible to enjoy them at RHS and NT gardens as well as many other public gardens and parks throughout the UK.

In the film, ‘Back to the Future’, Doc Brown invented the ‘flux capacitor’, which he said was what made time travel possible. In its own way, this is what SeeHow does too. By selecting SeeHow plantsticks and arranging them by flowering season, with springtime at the top and wintertime at the bottom, a garden ‘colour-calendar’ is automatically created.  The user can then explore alternative plant combinations, creating particular colour ‘moments’ in their garden. The colour-calendar will show the garden’s future and its past … in effect, a window in time. There really is nothing quite like it!

Any external space, no matter how small, is better than none at all. I can’t imagine living many floors above the ground with no possibility of stepping out into fresh air. I remember one balcony that was so narrow that when sitting with my back to the building wall, my knees would touch the balcony railing opposite. And yet, right through the afternoon, it was in full sun and I spent many an enjoyable hour squeezed into the space enjoying the breeze, the warmth, the sounds and the view.

The Vine is the Friend of the Bad Architect

I came across the above statement over 40 years ago, as a student studying architecture. It stayed with me as it is loaded with confusing meanings. Today it seems rather old-fashioned but never-the-less, every now-and-then, it still pops back into my mind, triggered subconsciously … and I end up pondering it all over again!

Outside, the rain is hitting the windows in great sheets driven by the strong gusty wind. Today – Friday - it is coming from the south. Earlier in the week the wind was driving in from the north, straight across the sea, carrying a lot of rain to this part of Aberdeenshire. Living right on the coast, we are in the front line. The sea was a boiling froth crashing over the rocks and reefs nearby. Who would want to be a fisherman! And yet yesterday, in between the shifting weather patterns, there was flat calm once again, a beautiful blue sky in the afternoon and people were out walking bare-foot on the near-by Banff beach. On such moments the wild weather is easily forgotten and it feels like this could easily be the best place to live in the world!

Although SeeHow began life many years ago as a drawing board ‘aid memoire’ to help me quickly see when plants would flower, it soon became my go-to tool for understanding the entire lifecycle of each plant. With this came an appreciation of the importance of plant structure and foliage types – how these evolve over the calendar year and which together establish the character of each plant. These elements are mostly green.

Having written about Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in my last blog, a week ago I unexpectedly found myself standing in a landscape created by the man himself – Audley End estate in Essex. Part of the grounds had been taken over by the BBC Autumn Fair and Flower Show – a three day event – and SeeHow had a marquee there. I recognised Brown’s fingerprint as soon as we arrived on the edge of the estate. The main road cuts across the north side. Originally it was set in a cutting, but over the years the level has been raised and cars now have an amazing view south towards Audley End House beyond the small lake. The road to the show hops over the western end of the lake on a bridge designed by Brown as part of the estate ‘make-over’ – smaller, but not dissimilar in terms of visual impact to the bridge crossing the mouth of the Deveron River by Duff House Royal Golf Club, close to where I live.