No Time To Garden

Well-known garden presenter and writer Anne Swithinbank gives an excellent new take on gardening for those short of time. Not half an hour a week or even half an hour a day but half an hour whenever the time presents itself to carry out a task in the garden. A whole new philosophy is found within these pages, requiring the reader to take several steps back and not look at the garden as one enormous, on-going chore, but to regard it with a more relaxed mind. Rushing around trying to do everything at once results in things being half done. Focussing on accomplishable tasks such as sorting out an overgrown shrub is easily achieved in half an hour and will induce a sense of well-being at a job well done at the end of it. Small transformations such as grouping a collection of pots together can give a whole new look to a corner of the garden in half an hour or less. Planting a bag of tulips in the Autumn for a Spring display, will repay you a hundred times over in terms of time when they flower. Planting up a dark corner with ferns will reap long-term benefits with hardly any time exerted at all. Anne aims to help the reader create a garden that will require little maintenance and can be enjoyed rather than laboured over. Her solid, down-to-earth advice is reassuring and she positively encourages neglect in some instances thus assuaging the guilt. An excellent book for those wanting to relax in the garden whilst at the same time having a visual feast that requires little or no maintenance.

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Anne Swithinbank is one of Britain's best-known gardeners, broadcasters and garden writers. She trained at Kew and was Glasshouse Supervisor at the RHS Garden at Wisley. She has presented many popular television gardening programmes, including Bloom, Gardens of the Caribbean, and Gardeners' World. She is also a regular panellist on Gardeners' Question Time. A prolific gardening correspondent for a number of national magazines and newspapers, she is also the author of six books, including The Conservatory Garden (for Frances Lincoln).

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Planting basics; seasonal maintenance; planting projects; easy-care plants; the living garden.

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