Recently in gardening Category

Chelsea Flower Show - a place to see fabulous gardens, mix with the green-fingered crowd, buy great garden products, indulge in a bit of celebrity spotting and, eeer, see women in bikinis.

Among the haul of photos my colleague Jodie came back from the show with was this one. I think I might have to visit the show myself next year.

You can see nearly 70 photos from Chelsea (of plants, gardens and people with all their clothes on) in this gallery.

And if you're so minded, you can see a photo of someone at Chelsea with even fewer clothes on - which The Metro published.

This definitely falls into the category: Don't try this at home.

The picture was snapped in Cambridge, New Zealand, by Bart Dinger who happened to spot this perilous pruning manoeuvre.

I've been to Chelsea Flower Show a couple of times (not because I've got particularly green fingers, but because I managed to wangle a free press ticket) and it was fantastic. I even got to meet Charlie Dimmock.

It's on again this week and, as in previous years, the NFU will be exhibiting there and there'll be lots of opportunities to watch the action (maybe action is the wrong word when it comes to gardening... perhaps highlights is a better term) on the BBC.

I like Alan Titchmarsh when he's presenting gardening shows - although he did begin to annoy me intensely during that spell when he popped up on just about every programme on BBC1 regardless of what it was about...

Philippa Vine, who I've mentioned before in connection with the super recipes she writes for Farmers Weekly, is well known for something else too - her family's famous Bluebell Walk. If you fancy seeing some of this year's bluebells and you're in or near Sussex, it's well worth a visit...

I doubt if Rosie Boycott would have ever had snails on the front page of The Independent when she was editor there. 

They're on the front page of the Telegraph today, though, in a piece that will make grim reading for gardeners. The proliferation of the snail population.

I love the quote from the bloke at the Royal Horticultural Society. With a job title like "principal entomologist", I was expecting him to say something complicated and scientific - not that 'there is a whole array of ways to beat the snails, from stamping on them to cutting their heads of with secateurs'.

Horticulture is big news this week, as it's the Chelsea Flower Show.

I'm not patient enough to make a good gardener - but I do like looking at nice gardens when somebody else has done all the graft.

I last went to Chelsea three years ago (the Flower Show, that is, not to see the football team - it was about six years ago when I last did that) and loved it - although it seemed as much about design and architecture as gardening and, like everything else these days, it was rather hijacked by celebrities.

Anyway, if you're interested, there's lots of coverage around today about the Show, which opens to the public tomorrow.

The Times has a variety here, while if you want to see a short clip of designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd have a look here (she sounds like a female Prince Charles!) and for the official show site, have a gander here.

Meanwhile my battle with the slugs in my small and rather unimpressive garden continues...

OK, as contests go, it's not an epic (it's hardly Foreman versus Ali) but this one made me smile. The Times have pitted a swanky strimmer against a sheep. Which would do the better job on your garden?

It's dangerous to walk barefoot, I was always told as a kid.

Hidden dangers were around every corner: broken glass on sandy beaches, sharp pieces of flint in hay meadows, blunt objects big enough to break toes.

No one ever expressedly warned me about slugs. I'm squeamish as far as slugs are concerned, so imagine my horror - my revulsion - when I went into the garden last night and felt something squash beneath my foot, something slimy, something alive.

Should be grateful for small mercies, I guess: at least it wasn't dog mess!

I thought it was just me.

I was convinced every slug in the county had converged on my garden, but now I hear I'm not alone.

Experts think this could be a record year for the slimy pests, and estimate there could be 15 billion out there (quite how they estimate this, I've no idea.)