Read about Dr Chris Gibson's bioabundance surveys for the Chattowood housing development.
Weekly catch up with garden & propagation
POSTED 15th January 2026
Propagation Team
This week the team have found themselves surrounded by seeds.
Propagation expert Emily has spent this week sowing seeds for the year. The majority of the seeds were collected from Beth’s garden last year, and cleaned and stored until we are ready to use them.
Emily begins by sowing the seeds into fertile fibre, before covering them with a 6mm layer of gravel, which acts like a big winter duvet, helping protect the seeds from frost. Once sown, the trays are placed into our seed tunnel, which is essentially a large cold frame.
With the ground less frozen this week, it’s been all go for our stock bed team, Miya and Sean. Miya has been working on epimediums, ferns and grasses, while Sean has focused on planting new stock plants and carrying out maintenance jobs. Epimedium x warleyense was just one of many plants propagated this week - an attractive barrenwort with evergreen foliage, tinted red when young and small peachy-orange flowers with yellow spurs. The species name warleyense is derived from Warley Place, the home of the famous gardener Miss Ellen Willmott.
Meanwhile, Mel and Kathy have been giving our shade plants some TLC, while Rob, Tina and Kirsten have been busy working on our general and dry plants. Each winter we give our plants a full health check, handling every single one. This includes checking the roots, looking for any forming buds, and topping them up with a fresh layer of bark.
Pete has been out and about with Ned, putting up new bird boxes around the garden in preparation for the spring and summer breeding season.
Garden team
Our second week back at work has delivered us a very mixed bag of weather, from 34mm of rain on Tuesday, some beautiful frosty mornings and clear skies, and grey overcast damp that lingers all day. The weather has at times dictated what we are able to do in the garden, with frozen lawns and borders out of bounds, but we have managed to push on despite the rain!
We began the week in shade bed 3, accessible from the back path, continuing the cut back ahead of emerging spring bulbs. We don't chop and drop in this bed as there is so much leaf drop here from surrounding trees that are already providing a lovely thick mulch.
Instead we gathered the cut material to make more habitat piles. We start by making a simple three pole teepee tied at the top to which we add bigger sticks and logs as the base, then continue to build up the layers with grasses, ferns, cut foliage and leaves. These are great to try at home making use of these materials, plus they are brilliant for wildlife.
The weather changed midweek to cold with heavy frosts, so we moved on to pruning. First Mattie cut the Parthenocissus henryana on Beth's wall back to a framework. We are looking forward to it busting into leaf again soon.
We then moved into the wood and began pruning three huge laurels, shrubs we cut every two years as they quickly outgrow their space. We cut them hard, lifting the crown a little and removing the bulk of the crowding foliage to re-establish a pleasing shape and letting more light in for surrounding plants.
This process again produces loads of material so another dead hedge was created to take all the materials, so nothing is wasted and all is reused to ours and wildlife's advantage.
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