Thompson & Morgan Gardening Blog

Our gardening blog covers a wide variety of topics, including fruit, vegetable and tree stories. Read some of the top gardening stories right here.

Propagation, planting out and cultivation posts from writers that know their subjects well.

Featured Gardener: Leigh Johnstone

by | Jan 13, 2025 | | 0 Comments

Leigh Johnstone, also known as beardygardener, standing in front of a trellis, surrounded by plants.

Image courtesy of @beardygardener

The link between nature and wellbeing is often discussed, but award-winning garden designer Leigh Johnstone, aka @beardygardener, makes positive mental health a central theme of all his projects. Crafting gardens that specifically soothe and restore, this popular Instagrammer explains how the act of gardening has helped him to find clarity and ground himself when times are tough. Find out how this inspirational mental health campaigner uses his horticultural knowledge to help others…  read more…

Eight ways to save money with a gardening group

by | Dec 19, 2024 | , | 0 Comments

gardeners in a community garden group

Community gardening groups have many benefits
Image: Shutterstock

Gardening groups are a wonderful way to connect people in a meaningful, shared endeavour. Nurturing plants as part of a team can offer physical, mental, and social benefits as well as helping you to learn new skills.
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Featured Gardener: @gardenwithjonny

by | Dec 9, 2024 | | 0 Comments

Jonny Hincks of @gardenwithjonny in front of garden shed.

Image courtesy of @gardenwithjonny

You don’t need a huge garden to enjoy a gorgeous lawn, beautiful flowers, specimen shrubs, high-yielding fruit trees and a place to grow veg. Popular Instagram gardener @gardenwithjonny demonstrates how he achieves all this and more, by sharing the inspirational outside space in which he hangs out with his family, friends and very chilled pet cat! Find out how this fun-loving, firefighting, fitness-fanatic got interested in gardening…

read more…

How to care for Christmas house plants

by | Dec 2, 2024 | , | 0 Comments

White Christmas cactus from T&M

If you’ve filled your home with festive house plants for the Christmas holidays, you’ll want to know how best to care for them. With just a little special attention, these indoor plants will last long into the new year and beyond. Here are some top tips from our horticultural team. 

In the meantime, browse our full range of house plants for inspiration.

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Hyacinths masterclass: best expert content

by | Dec 1, 2024 | , , , | 0 Comments

Hyacinth ‘Berries and Cream Mixture’ from Thompson & Morgan

Hyacinths create fabulous colour displays with powerful scent
Image: Hyacinth ‘Berries and Cream Mixture’ from Thompson & Morgan

If you want to force hyacinth bulbs indoors to enjoy their flower, scent and colour over the winter, here’s a selection of expert advice from our favourite bloggers, YouTubers and Instagrammers. These independent posts and videos give you step-by-step advice on how to make these spring-flowering bulbs bloom early. You’ll also find information on growing them in water, and getting your hyacinths to flower again, year after year.

read more…

How Lizzie Schofield wants to inspire the next generation of gardeners

by | Nov 26, 2024 | | 0 Comments

Lizzie Schofield potting shed

Image courtesy of Lizzie Schofield

Lizzie Schofield of @cuthbertsbrae_garden said she was ‘on cloud nine’ after scooping The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024 at this year’s Garden Media Guild ceremony. Sponsored by T&M, this fiercely contested accolade celebrates the ease with which Lizzie delivers interesting horticultural advice while encouraging everyone to try new things.

Living in the north-east of Scotland, Lizzie is a proud ambassador for Scotland’s Garden Scheme and a television presenter on BBC Two’s Beechgrove Garden. Here’s what she had to say about her love of gardening and winning the GMG award…

read more…

Best plants for Christmas gifts and decorations

by | Nov 21, 2024 | , | 0 Comments

hibiscus festive flair

Christmas is a time to be thankful and show people you care by exchanging thoughtful gifts. Whether you’re decorating your home for a festive get-together or looking for the perfect present, our seasonal selection of gorgeous houseplants brings the spirit of Christmas to life. Featuring rich reds, glossy greens and elegant whites, these indoor plants add colour, scent and joy throughout winter.

What better way to spread goodwill than with the surprise delivery of a festive houseplant gift? Here are 10 highlights from our Christmas gift range…

  1. Long-Flowering Christmas Cactus
  2. Fragrant Jasmine
  3. Vibrant Daffodils
  4. Rose ‘Deep Pink’ (RosAroma™)
  5. Hyacinth In Lit Glass Bowl
  6. Hibiscus ‘Festive Flair’
  7. Anthurium ‘Black Love’
  8. Amaryllis ‘Jolie’
  9. Phalaenopsis ‘Circle Blue’
  10. Azalea Standard

1. Christmas Cactus

christmas cactus

Arguably the best Christmas-flowering house plant, this Christmas Cactus boasts elegant trumpets of snow-white flowers and beautifully contrasting bright-pink stamens. This easy-to-grow variety offers a fantastic floral display from late November into January. And if you’re going away over the holidays, it copes well with neglect.

 

2. Fragrant Jasmine

fragrant jasmine on hoop

Artfully trained onto a hoop, this fabulously fragrant Jasmine forms a luscious living wreath. Filling your home with an exotic perfume, watch as its delicate pink buds open into a snow-white halo of star-shaped blooms.

 

3. Vibrant Daffodils

narcissus tete a tete

 

Daffodils aren’t just for spring! These perfectly prepared Narcissus ‘Tete-a-Tete’ bulbs are carefully forced and delivered just as they’re ready to bloom – the buds will unfurl just days after entering the warmth of the home, guaranteeing a bright and joyful display with which to welcome the new year.

 

4. Rose ‘Deep Pink’ (RosAroma™)

rosaroma rose deep pink

 

Rose ‘Deep Pink’ is delivered in bud and ready to display in a smart zinc planter. Vibrant, fuchsia-coloured blooms quickly smother the plant, releasing the nostalgic scent of rose to delight the senses. This beautiful plant makes a wonderful gift or a joyful decoration for the holiday season.

 

5. Hyacinth In Lit Glass Bowl

hyacinth lit in glass bowl

 

A Christmas favourite, this trio of pristine white Hyacinths add festive sparkle to any home. Presented in an elegant glass bowl filled with twinkling fairy lights, this heavily scented display makes a striking table centrepiece or creates a welcoming glow in a window.

A gift that keeps giving, you can plant these bulbs out into the garden after flowering to enjoy for many years to come. Read our hyacinths masterclass for expert tips.

 

6. Hibiscus ‘Festive Flair’

hibiscus festive flair

 

For weeks of exotic colour, the scarlet blooms of Hibiscus ‘Festive Flair‘ simply can’t be beaten. Delivered in bud, the flowers unfurl into lavish tropical flowers that measure up to 15cm across and last about 6 days each. This show-stopping plant can re-bloom many times each year indoors, and may be moved out onto a sheltered patio during the warm summer months.

 

7. Anthurium ‘Black Love’

anthurium black love

 

With deliciously dark and glossy heart-shaped foliage, Anthurium ‘Black Love’ also boasts long-lasting burgundy spathes. Not only does this gloriously gothic houseplant make a stylish centrepiece for the Christmas table, its unusual colouring provides sultry glamour, all year round.

 

8. Amaryllis ‘Jolie’

amaryllis jolie

 

Fabulously festive, the rich red trumpet-shaped blooms of Amaryllis last for weeks, making a magnificent Christmas decoration or gift! Presented in jewel-coloured honeycomb sleeves, Amaryllis ‘Jolie’ arrives ready sprouted, with each plant bearing two or three striking stems. Read our article on how to grow amaryllis bulbs for tips on what to do when they finish flowering.

 

9. Phalaenopsis ‘Circle Blue’

phalaenopsis orchid circle blue

 

If you’re looking for an unusual Christmas gift that will last far longer than a bunch of cut flowers, this Phalaenopsis ‘Circle Blue’ is a wonderful way to show someone special how much you care. The sensational sapphire-blue blooms are trained onto a hoop that sits neatly on a shelf or mantlepiece. Watch our house plant care video for tips on how to get the most from your orchids and other winter-flowering plants through the colder months.

 

10. Azalea Standard

azalea gold white
With bright, long-lasting blooms and glossy dark-green leaves, this standard azalea looks like a festively decorated tree! Choose between elegant white or bright red-ruffled flowers to decorate your home over Christmas. When spring arrives, plant your hardy evergreen azalea outside where it will continue to flower year after year.

 

Houseplants are a thoughtful gift that offer years of enjoyment. Read our article on how to care for festive houseplants to get the best from your display. If you’re looking for more inspiring presents, browse our full Christmas section. Delivered with a personalised gift card, and only one P&P charge regardless of how many gifts you send, T&M has you covered.

Lead image: Hibiscus ‘Festive Flair‘ from T&M

Featured Gardener: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

by | Nov 12, 2024 | | 0 Comments

If you’re looking for gardening inspiration, Instagram is a veritable treasure trove of tips! We recently chatted to the robin-whisperer behind @aoifes_allotment_adventures who has transformed her plot into a vibrant space for wildlife and her local community to enjoy and share. Find out more about Aoife and her fascinating journey here…

Read more: Featured Gardener: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

What first inspired you to start gardening?

Vertical growing allows Aoife to make excellent use of her space.
Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

After a challenging career in the fast-paced industry of super yachts, I returned to England with a deep desire to reconnect with nature and grow my own food and flowers. Those early memories of helping my father in the garden and living in the English countryside never left me. After waiting over 1,000 days I finally secured an allotment. Having had very little growing experience I discovered this brilliant corner of Instagram full of wonderful gardeners and allotments, and everyone has been so supportive. It was all so inspiring and I was determined to create a haven for people, pollinators, and wildlife.

The Lottie has a stream gently rippling past and a road beside it that brings a steady flow of passers-by, and it’s a true joy to share this with those curious about the unusual plants and flowers grown here. It’s incredibly rewarding to see how an allotment space can spark genuine interest and excitement.

What are your favourite things to grow?

Aoife with her colourful harvest and bustling vegetable patch.
Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

My sensory allotment is an everchanging mix of vibrant colours and experimental crops, incorporating perennials, biennials and hardy annuals for year round interest with a variety of pollen and nectar sources.

There are scented flowers like lilies and fragrant sweet peas, fascinating textures such as velvety Senecio candidans Angel Wings and strawflowers that are crunchy to the touch. I have a massive dahlia addiction, it’s just fabulous to have such colour even in November. I’ve fallen head over heels for Californian poppies and am growing lots of different foxglove varieties too. 

I’ve discovered I love growing from seed. Some of my favourite vegetables are in the curcurbit family. Smallest are the Cucamelons which I adore, and then there’s the tromboncino squash. Not only is it delicious, but it grows to over a metre long and is such a fantastic conversation starter.

What are your proudest achievements?

A variety of climbing squashes, cucumbers, beans, giant sunflowers, poppies and dahlias.
Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

One of my greatest joys has been developing my vertical growing spaces.

I’ve created a hazel stick and hemp net 5-metre wall of sweet peas that fills the air with their stunning perfume, and I’ve constructed colourful arches with a variety of climbing squashes, cucumbers, beans and giant sunflowers. It’s all about reusing and recycling on this plot.

Harvesting my first ever homegrown veg to give to friends and family was a massive moment for me. I’m also super lucky to have won the trust of my feathered friend RicRobin. He’s such a cheeky chap full of song and has brought up 6 broods with his mate Ruby. Very little gardening gets done when he’s in a chatty mood!

What are your future plans? 

Aoife is no stranger to growing show-stopping flowers.
Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

Next year, I’m using my new greenhouse to bring a Mediterranean flavour to the allotment by growing grapes, passionfruit, and beautiful bougainvillea. There’ll also be a variety of different melons and heirloom tomatoes, inspired by my time abroad. I’ll be expanding my butterfly bed too and growing more edimentals for both people and pollinators alike. It’s going to get even more colourful next year.

Grow like Aoife

Ric Robin and some bright edible harvests.
Image: @aoifes_allotment_adventures

If you want to buy some of the products Aoife grows, here’s a quick shopping list:

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about Aoife from @aoifes_allotment_adventures. If you want to read about other inspirational growers, check out our series of #tmfeaturedgardens over on Instagram.

Why Alex Smith thinks YouTube is one of the world’s greatest achievements

by | Nov 8, 2024 | | 0 Comments

Ahowcasing four bowls filled with different natural materials on a table outside in daylight. The bowls are arranged neatly, with a scale placed in the center of the image, creating a balanced and organized display of the materials."

Image courtesy of Alex Smith

Alex Smith, the voice behind @AlexGrowsFood YouTube Channel and website, has been shortlisted for Gardening Video of the Year Award 2024 at this year’s Garden Media Guild Awards ceremony. As one of this year’s sponsors, we were keen to find out more about Alex and his journey to this coveted shortlist! Here’s what he had to say…

Tell us how you got into gardening?

Bird's eye view of a garden featuring three chairs and a table on a patio, with a grass patch bordered by evergreen plants and yellow flowers.

Alex’s first patio garden
Image: Alex Smith

I was one of those outdoorsy people who was really good at indoorsy things and got trapped at a desk and spent 12 hours a day on a screen. I still walked everywhere, cooked everything from raw ingredients and had a vague pipe-dream of starting a small farm. But it wasn’t until the second year of the pandemic, when I had a garden and the time to start experimenting, that I properly started trying to grow food in some not very food-safe plastic tubs.

In the summer of that year, I got really ill and ended up spending all my time in that little patio garden and discovered so much about plants and insects. Later I decided that, if I was going to be ill, I might as well enjoy it. So I moved and rented a large garden (with an expensive house attached). Growing my own food then suddenly became a part-time job.

What’s been your greatest gardening achievement?

A patch of lawn has been freshly dug, with a shovel standing at the front, overlooking a large, green garden in the background.

Alex painstakingly created ‘no-dig’ beds in his new garden using cardboard and compost
Image: Alex Smith

I moved into that house in late February and I was physically unable to do much at the time. I remember spending pretty much every day trying to get the garden ready and only just about having it done for the start of May. It was a lot of unpacking to free up the cardboard, and then trying to find a cheap(ish) source of compost for the no-dig beds, and then making the beds with arms that barely worked, and these intense dizzy spells when I bent up and down too much. It was slow going!

I couldn’t drive, so I was cycling across town with bags of compost heaped on the pannier rack and sets of stakes strapped to either side of my bike with bungees, straddling them like I was John Wayne. I think I grew a few hundred kilos of veg that year but it was all won in the late winter and early spring.

How has a garden or landscape influenced you?

A garden with abundant vertical space, filled with lush green plants, and netting protecting one of the plants in the foreground.

Alex likes to make use of the vertical space in his garden
Image: Alex Smith

My gardening style is really just a mix of everything I’ve basked in online, plus the sad realisation that I have compacted clay soil and live in a very windy area. That, and being quite ill when I started gardening, led me to try to grow pesticide-free food, which meant I learnt about the destruction of soil biology and how it lowers the nutrient density of your food and makes your garden less resilient to both wet and dry weather. The combination of these things really pushed me towards ‘no-dig’ as a method of growing.

My first garden was too small even for that, and it was written in my contract that I had to keep the lawn the size it was so, after stealing as much as I dared to create slightly wider beds, I did a lot of vertical growing, especially on the patio area, in plastic tubs and in grow bags – and still do.

How has using social media impacted your gardening journey?

Social media is incredible. Instagram was my gardening diary in my first year of growing and you could quite literally feel the excitement transmitted between the accounts you’d follow.

YouTube is where I learned the most, as really it transferred a tonne of confidence which written instructions never quite achieve. YouTube is probably one of our greatest achievements, it’s such a great educational resource. It’s part of the reason I made my own channel – @AlexGrowsFood – I really wanted to give back and to leave some record of what I’ve done. Last year I was proud to win the GMG Garden Video of the Year Award  – I literally went from a YouTube zero to creating award-winning content in about 8 months! Now I spend my time making little films about gardening and I’ve even started doing some freelance social media editing on the side.

What’s your single, most important piece of gardening advice?

A woven basket filled with a variety of tomatoes, both large and small, with green tops still attached.

A huge tomato haul
Image: Alex Smith

Both you and the plant want the same thing – to grow fully formed (and delicious) fruit! So trust that the plant knows what it’s doing and that the garden will find a way to create something magic.

My unpruned summer fruiting raspberries have just put out an even tastier second round of fruits and I still get tonnes of marigolds, nasturtiums, sunflowers, rocket, chard – you name it – from letting things go to seed and decay over winter. If you’re short on time, just focus on keeping the bindweed and couch grass at bay and trust that your plants can do their thing without you. It’s not necessarily optimal, but it’s much much easier.

If you were stuck on a desert island and could only take three plants – one practical, one beautiful, and one unusual, what would they be?

A potted marigold plant with multiple blooms in shades of yellow and dark orange, surrounded by lush green leaves.

French Marigolds are edible and loved by pollinators
Image: Marigold ‘Bonita Mixed’ Seeds from T&M

A tropical island is going to be frost-free, and maybe even blight-free, so I’d take a tomato plant, probably a cherry like a ‘Sungold’ and hope that there are other plants there that I can turn into supports and that it rains at some point!

The beautiful plant is tough… I’d probably take some French marigolds because I try to grow them everywhere. They last most of the year and, for me, they signal the start and end of the growing season – maybe they’ll be perennial on this island.

My unusual plant is an even more arbitrary choice. I really like the coppery bark on a Prunus serrula and I definitely don’t want to live somewhere without trees so I’d probably pick that. That choice would probably change week-to-week, but I definitely want a tree.

What’s next?

Alex behind the scenes, wearing a blue zip-up jumper and holding soil in his hands while filming a YouTube video; a camera slightly out of focus is capturing the scene.

Alex making a video for his YouTube channel
Image: Alex Smith

I’ve been saying it for a few years now, but I expect that I’ll move house soon which means finding a new garden or plot of land so my plan for the current patch is a bit light. Instead I’m focusing on things that I can take with me so I’ve started studying for a horticultural qualification – it turns out that there’s a lot more to gardening than no-dig veg beds and companion plants, including learning Latin ad nauseum…!

I’m also trying to tie-in my physics & software background so I’ve started creating some free gardening software tools for people (and myself!) to use over on my Alex Grows Food blog which will hopefully be out in time for people to use next year.

More about the Garden Media Guild Awards

Each year, the Garden Media Guild celebrates talented gardening professionals with a selection of highly-contested awards. The shortlists include authors, journalists, photographers, vloggers, podcasters and gardening influencers.

This year, Thompson & Morgan is proud to sponsor ‘The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024’. This special award is for “the person that has made outstanding first steps in the world of garden media, demonstrating talent and potential in his or her field.” Find the full list of GMG awards here.

Why Melanie Taylor has more than 50 roses in her garden

by | Nov 8, 2024 | | 0 Comments

Melanie, wearing a pink coat and glasses, stands surrounded by plants with red petals and white flowers in a colourful garden.

Image courtesy of Melanie Taylor

Melanie Taylor of Hazelwood Plantscapes has just been shortlisted for a Garden Media Guild Award sponsored by T&M – The Alan Titchmarsh New Talent of the Year Award 2024. 

Following a change in career from the tech sector, Melanie has spent the last two years retraining in horticulture and garden design. Here’s what she had to say about her love of gardening and the inspiration behind her career change…

read more…

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