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 June

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

Jim’s Garden Diary • This month, Jim Cable plants nemesia for summer scent, starts hardening off tender and half-hardy crops and flowers, and pots on his chilli collection

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

Kitchen Aid • Aromatic rosemary, flavourful stems of chive, and sweet basil leaves are kitchen staples that will bring a dish to life. Planted in elegant and tidy pots and placed on a sunny windowsill they will create a thriving kitchen herb garden you’ll turn to again and again. Burgon & Ball herb pots in buttermilk, £19.95. Tel: 0345 5480210; annabeljames.co.uk

Shaping HISTORY • Layer upon layer of history has built up over half a millennium at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk, the revolutionary planting changes made by the recent incumbent, revered designer Xa Tollemache, now being respectfully adapted by her daughter-in-law, Sophie

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS • Rachel Hannyngton enjoys a two-way conversation with her beloved garden at Home Farmhouse in Norfolk, a place of connection and spirit

Improving on PERFECTION • When Fi and Ed Troughton took on the late Irene Mackie’s superb garden at Kirkside of Lochty in Angus, they had a hard act to follow. But by nurturing its design, softening boundaries and adding a little extra winter interest, they have slowly but surely made it their own

WHERE THE Wind Blows • Perched high on a ridge overlooking the Shropshire Hills, Windy Ridge has withstood the rigours of its situation, growing up with the young couple who bought it 38 years ago into a beautifully structured and mature garden filled with year-round interest

Time Casts A SPELL • Few things are as fine as the roses of Kiftsgate Court reaching their enchanting summer crescendo, but the effect is all the more magical when you realise that many of them were planted a century ago by members of the incumbent family

Life to THE FULL • A sense of luxuriant excess permeates the rose-filled garden of florist to the royals, Paul Thomas. A swoon-inducing haze of scent and colour belies the hard graft originally needed to restore this Cotswold garden to its former glory as part of a splendid Edwardian landscape

Dining OUT • Set a table out in the garden to enjoy a meal while making the most of the long summer evenings. Three expert entertainers offer their styling tips to help make it an event to remember

Fast Friends • Reinvigorate tired borders in the post-spring lull, with colourful, fast-growing flowers. Robyn Booth, senior gardener at Packwood House has ten to suggest

An Old Flame • Rekindle your romance with old roses, whose charms are often neglected in favour of newer, repeat-flowering types. Greg Loades explores their headily fragrant world and suggests some of the best ones to grow for an ephemeral but truly luxuriant high-summer display

The Right STUFF • At the walled garden and nursery of Eggleston Hall in County Durham, Louise Curley explores the wealth of special plants propagated on site, which are all hardy enough to thrive in the exposed conditions of...