Do get the National Garden Scheme’s yellow book
Use it to find some local gardens to visit for inspiration and to see what grows well.
Do give growing from seed a go
Every gardener should experience the thrill of it and the associated benefits for health and wellbeing. As my wife explains in her book, The Well Gardened Mind, “Gardening is about setting life in motion and seeds, like dead fragments, help us recreate the world anew.”
Do get to know your soil
It’s essential to work with what you’ve got. Too often people see improving soil with compost or manure as a panacea, whereas good drainage is by far the most important thing. Many more plants die of poor drainage than they do of drought and almost none die from lack of nutrients.
Do discover who else is living on your plot
See if you can improve the variety of wildlife in your garden over time. If you have the resources, do a biodiversity survey and then repeat it in a few years’ time. At Knepp there are 35% more invertebrate species than when we started the garden three years ago.
Do experiment
Make sure you embrace both the successes and the failures. There are bound to be small failures in every project! One learns in the sharpest way when doing flower shows. I recall doing an over-complicated water system in a Chelsea garden about 20 years ago and made a mental note never to do anything like that again.
Do visit plant fairs
…and/or the Plant Library at Serge Hill (which holds more around 1500 different varieties of mainly herbaceous plants) to seek out plants beyond the everyday. Variety is key, just as it is with food; it’s astonishing that we only regularly eat something like 0.1% of the edible plants that are available. –
Don’t view plants in isolation
Consider how they will work together as a community throughout the seasons.
Don’t use plastic
Try and avoid any materials that are going to look tatty in a few years’ time and will end up being thrown away.
Don’t think short-term
Nature will generally balance things out, so resorting to drastic short-term measures such as using pesticides is rarely a good solution to a problem in the garden.
Do become a Friend of the Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity and Health
It’s a great way of learning more about plants and meeting others who share your enthusiasm.
