Welcome to the second year of our series of blogs featuring the photos and sightings of wildlife in the garden (and outreach sites like Chattowood and the Meanwhile Garden) by our staff.
Weekly catch up with garden & propagation
POSTED 5th February 2026
Propagation Team
This week we’ve seen just as much preparation as propagation, now that 2026 begins to pick up speed. From catkins to cuttings, let’s explore what the team have been up to.
Pete’s packing system has been hitting record speeds. Online orders have been craving snowdrops with this week's favourite being Galanthus 'James Backhouse'.
Midwinter sunlight and warmth cast across the stockbeds, offering a glimpse of what’s to come in the months ahead.
We are always looking to improve our knowledge as a team. Earlier this week we grabbed our pen and paper, rushed outside and then swiftly inside into the warm to complete our staff plant ident.
Mattie has been getting surgical preparing and potting root cuttings.
Out with the old and in with the new! Emily spruces up the shop with some gorgeous display pots. The hanging catkins of Corylus avellana (hazel) and the bright red winter stems of Cornus alba (dogwood) become focal points. With soil on our hands and a warm drink within reach, we look ahead with quiet anticipation.
Garden Team
The first week of February has brought yet more rain so the team has been wrapped up against the elements as we headed to the Gravel Garden to begin cutting back for spring.
We estimate this process to take two weeks so we thought it would be interesting to show our method and thinking behind each step.
We started with a typical part of a border, roughly two meters square with a variety of elements to look at. Our first step is to clear the 'clutter' from the space to reveal the picture below. We cut the Stipa tenuissima back to a low mound of around 2/3 inches, remove dead flower stems from perennials like hylotelephium to uncover the new emerging buds and sheer old origanum stems back to the existing low spreading foliage.
Next we rake away all the fallen leaves (mainly oak from surrounding trees) and the remaining debris, to keep clear any open spaces for new seedlings and emerging plants and bulbs to push through.
The next stage is where the detailed work begins. We'll remove everything that definitely shouldn't be here, in this example hairy bittercress seedlings, a likely blown in single tanacetum plant and a rogue origanum self seeder. This is weeded out to stop it spreading beyond the main clump at the front of the border and because it's likely an untrue form from the parent, which we want to preserve.
Next we edit the space. Here we have a large patch of the beautiful Bupleurum falcatum so we lightly thinned them to give a bit of room to each and removed a couple the had seeded into the stipa. We also dug and replanted a young Euphorbia myrsinites into a better position in a new gap. The final job is to top up with gravel, shaken onto the bed by a shovel to fill any exposed gaps.
This section took around 25 minutes in total. Some areas may take more depending on the work needed like pruning of shrubs or quantity of self seeders to be picked through for example. But it shows how intricate we need to be across the large area of the Gravel Garden, to paint the picture you'll hopefully enjoy in the months to come.
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