| Where memory meets evidence |
| Episode VI When the Calendar Stopped Working The gardener’s diary that nature no longer reads. |
| There is something wonderfully reassuring about an old gardening calendar. January has its jobs, February has another set, spring arrives, and everything begins moving, summer brings mowing and watering, autumn brings leaves and cutting back, and eventually winter closes the garden down until the whole process begins again. Generations of gardeners have worked this way, and for good reason. The calendar gives structure to a year that might otherwise seem bewilderingly complicated. The trouble is that the garden does not own a calendar. Increasingly, I find myself looking at what the diary says should be happening and then looking at the garden in front of me and finding the two do not necessarily agree. The calendar might cut back. The garden says wait. It might say spring has arrived, while the soil remains saturated and cold. It might tell me autumn is approaching while the lawn is still growing enthusiastically. It may be officially winter while weeds continue appearing as though nobody has bothered to tell them. I did not suddenly discover this when I became a professional gardener in 2022. By then I was already conscious that the seasons I remembered from earlier decades did not seem to fit quite so comfortably into their traditional compartments. Nor would I claim that British weather was once perfectly predictable. It plainly wasn’t. Gardeners have always dealt with late frosts, wet summers, mild winters, droughts and years when everything seemed to happen at the wrong time. Local conditions have always mattered too. A sheltered walled garden in Sandwich can behave very differently from an exposed garden only a short distance away. What feels different to me now is how often the old expectations seem to require adjustment. I am increasingly reluctant to regard any part of the gardening year as entirely predictable. Jobs start earlier, continue later or are postponed because conditions are wrong. Mowing can begin earlier and continue later. Weeds appear for longer and seem able to exploit almost any mild opportunity. Plants sometimes flower surprisingly early, only to find themselves caught by another change in the weather. Insects emerge and become active at times when the plants and conditions around them may not be following quite the same timetable. As working gardeners, these changes are not abstract. They affect what we can physically do. Heavy winter rain can make ordinary gardening tasks impractical or positively damaging. There is little sense in walking repeatedly across saturated soil simply because a job appears on the schedule. Lawns can become too wet to work on without causing damage. Borders can become waterlogged. Soil structure can suffer if you work it at the wrong time. Then, sometimes remarkably quickly, the problem changes. Instead of excessive water, we can find ourselves dealing with heat and dry ground, struggling to work comfortably as plants begin to show signs of stress. The summer of 2022 stands out in my mind as a key moment in this change. It was certainly not the first unusual British summer, but as a gardener it felt significant. The UK experienced exceptional heat that year, including the first recorded temperatures above 40°C, and the conditions brought home how different professional gardening can become when familiar summer weather moves into something much more extreme. Since then, repeated periods of heat and dryness have made water, shade, plant choice and the timing of work increasingly prominent in conversations I have with clients. That does not mean every summer from now onwards will be exceptionally hot, any more than a succession of wet winters means Britain has lost the possibility of a dry one. Weather still varies enormously. The important difference is that gardeners increasingly have to prepare for a wider range of conditions rather than assuming the season itself will tell us what is coming. Water is a good example. Water harvesting was once something many garden owners might have regarded as environmentally admirable but optional. I increasingly see it as practical garden infrastructure. During the winter of 2026, we will actively encourage more clients to think about water butts and alternative watering systems. It can seem slightly absurd to discuss saving water while standing in a garden saturated by winter rain, but that is precisely the point. The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of water throughout the year. It is having water when the garden actually needs it. Planting choices are changing for the same reason. During hotter periods, I increasingly lean toward plants that can tolerate lower water availability, while the other side of the equation is choosing plants and designing borders that can cope with wetter winter conditions. Those requirements do not always sit comfortably together. A plant that enjoys dry summer conditions may thoroughly dislike sitting in wet soil through winter. Gardening therefore becomes less about finding a plant described as “hardy” or “drought tolerant” and more about understanding the complete set of conditions in which it will have to live. This will force us to reconsider some assumptions about the traditional English garden. That does not mean ripping everything out and replacing our gardens with something unrecognisable. Hydrangeas, lawns, herbaceous borders and familiar garden plants are not suddenly going to disappear. But the way we arrange gardens, manage soil, capture water, create shade and choose plants may have to change. The garden of the future can still look English without being managed exactly as an English garden was managed forty or fifty years ago. Perhaps nowhere is the changing calendar more obvious than the lawn. Grass is an extraordinarily useful seasonal indicator because a gardener can’t ignore its behaviour. When it grows, somebody eventually has to cut it. Milder periods can extend growth at either end of the traditional mowing season, while hot, dry conditions can do precisely the opposite in summer and leave lawns parched or scorched. Then prolonged wet conditions bring another set of problems altogether. The old idea of a clearly defined mowing season increasingly feels more like a general guide than a rule. Weeds are even less respectful of tradition. Give them suitable conditions, and they grow. A date printed on a calendar means nothing to them. Mild periods extend their opportunities, and from the gardener’s point of view that means the supposedly quieter months are not necessarily as quiet as they once appeared. There can be something faintly ridiculous about standing in a winter garden pulling actively growing weeds while the gardening year insists that everything is dormant. Plants themselves can be equally rebellious. Daffodils appearing earlier than expected are an obvious example because everybody recognises them as heralds of spring. When familiar plants begin flowering outside the period we instinctively associate with them, people notice. Yet early flowering is not automatically good news. A plant responding to a mild spell cannot consult the forecast. If colder conditions return, tender new growth or flowers can be caught out. The same problem can ripple into the wildlife that depends on those plants. Insects respond to temperature and other environmental cues too, and not every species responds in the same way or at the same speed. This is why I increasingly distrust gardening advice that begins and ends with a month’s name. I still value gardening books, including old ones. They contain an enormous amount of accumulated horticultural knowledge, and it would be foolish to dismiss it simply because conditions are changing. What I question is the idea that an instruction written for March must automatically be correct because March has arrived. The knowledge may remain sound even as the timing shifts. The garden in front of me gets the deciding vote. If I were training somebody to garden today, I would tell them to observe the garden first, then consult a reliable, up-to-date source when they need more information. Look at the soil. Look at the plant. Look at what is flowering and what is dormant. Notice whether insects are active. Feel how wet the ground is. Look at the forecast. Ask what happened during the previous week and what may happen during the next one. Only then decide whether the job written in the diary still makes sense. That sounds obvious, yet gardening has accumulated an extraordinary number of date-tied instructions. Sow this in February. Prune that in March. Cut something else in autumn. Stop mowing at another point. These instructions help because beginners need structure, but the danger comes when that structure replaces observation. Working across more than eighty gardens makes that particularly obvious. They do not all enter spring on the same morning. They do not dry at the same rate, suffer equally during heat or respond identically to heavy rainfall. As I explored earlier in this series, every garden tells a different story. Microclimates, soil, shelter, planting density, aspect, maintenance, and how clients use and water their gardens all affect what happens within them. This also creates one of the more difficult parts of professional gardening: sometimes what a garden needs and what its owner wants are not quite the same thing. Clients understandably see gardens aesthetically. Something looks untidy, so they want it cut back. A lawn looks long, so they want it mown. A border looks messy, so they want it cleared. Often they are completely right. They are paying us to maintain their gardens, after all. But sometimes the correct answer is not yet. The ground may be too wet. The plant may be better left alone. Extreme heat may make a particular task unwise. Wildlife may be using what looks like an untidy area. Occasionally the most responsible gardening decision is to wait. That can be a surprisingly difficult thing to sell. People generally notice a garden when something looks wrong. They don’t necessarily notice the hundreds of quiet biological processes happening while it looks perfectly ordinary. Professional gardening therefore involves compromise. We have to respect what clients want while also explaining what the garden will tolerate. Sometimes gardening well means doing something. Sometimes it means resisting the temptation to do it simply because it’s on the list. Even the traditional expression “putting the garden to bed for winter” feels different to me now. I still understand what it means, and there are certainly winter preparations worth making, but I no longer imagine the garden neatly shutting down. With wetter conditions, I am increasingly thinking about protecting borders and soil, drainage and how planting will survive prolonged moisture. At the same time, mild spells can keep other parts of the garden unexpectedly active. Winter has not disappeared; it simply does not always behave like a closed season. Another interesting change is happening among clients themselves. More of them are beginning to recognise that the weather is affecting how they garden. Not everybody does, and attitudes vary enormously, but conversations about water, plant resilience and changing conditions are becoming easier because people can increasingly see the effects in their own gardens. A scorched lawn, struggling hydrangea or saturated border makes an environmental change considerably less theoretical. That may be where the gardening calendar of the future will begin. Not with January. With observation. The traditional calendar will remain useful. I don’t think we need to ceremonially throw our gardening books on the compost heap or pretend previous generations knew nothing. Quite the opposite. Their accumulated knowledge gives us an invaluable starting point. But a starting point is what it should be. Local weather matters. Microclimates matter. Soil matters. The condition of the individual plant matters. What happened last winter matters, and increasingly what happened during the previous summer matters too. A gardening instruction without those considerations is incomplete. If you took away my calendar, weather app and gardening books tomorrow, I would not stand helplessly at the garden gate. I would do what I already do. I would start at the beginning and work my way to the back. I would look. I would remember what had happened there before. I would notice what was growing, what was struggling, where the soil was wet, where it was dry, what needed attention and what would be better left alone. I would use the knowledge I’d accumulated through years of observing plants and gardens, and if I encountered something I didn’t understand, I would research it. Perhaps that is what gardeners were always supposed to do. The calendar has not become useless. Nor did gardeners of previous generations live in a world of perfectly obedient seasons. British weather has always been variable, and any gardener who has worked outside for long enough knows that nature has never paid much attention to our plans. What is changing is how confidently we can assume traditional timing will fit the conditions outside. That requires a different kind of gardening: adaptable rather than rigid, observant rather than automatic, prepared for excessive water as well as too little, and increasingly willing to choose resilience over convention. The gardening year still exists. Spring will follow winter. Summer will become autumn. Plants will grow, flower, seed, and become dormant according to the biological signals they receive. But perhaps we have spent too long expecting nature to read the same calendar we do. So when the calendar says cut back, and the garden says wait, I know which one I am going to listen to. The garden. It is the one actually standing outside. |
| About our writing & imagery Most articles are grounded in our real gardening experience, observations and reflections. AI may assist with research, drafting and editing, but the experiences, opinions and editorial direction are our own. Featured images may include our photography, original AI-generated visuals or, where stated, images credited to others. All published content is reviewed and shaped by Earthly Comforts before publication. |
