Anna Pavord

Oct 26, 2024 | thetimes.com | Anna Pavord

Optimism is the gardener’s most important tool. This year has been trying in many ways. Slugs. Slugs. Slugs. Rain. Rain. Rain. But next year, I am already persuading myself, will be different. Better. Little can be done about the weather and it was quite a cosmic joke that the drought of last summer was followed by one of the wettest summers on record.

May 4, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Anna Pavord

Tomatoes freeze brilliantly, losing none of their sharp flavour in the process. Having learnt this, I now grow a lot. The best tomato tip I have been given is not to peel them before you freeze them. If you do, they all stick together in the bag in a lumpy frozen mass. Leave them in their skins and they still roll around together in the bag like marbles. If your recipe needs skinned tomatoes, just hook out a few frozen ones and run them briefly under a cold tap. The skins slip off like silk.

Apr 20, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Anna Pavord

The first tulip I ever grew was a big, square-shouldered knockout called ‘Gudoshnik’. It was a lucky fluke, because the bulbs were a present from someone who, like me at that time, knew nothing about gardening. The luck lay in the fact that no one flower of ‘Gudoshnik’ was like another, so I had a magnificent opportunity that first spring to admire their complexity: pale creamy yellow, but feathered, speckled and streaked in myriad ways with contrasting reds and oranges.

Mar 23, 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | Anna Pavord

There’s a moment, in early spring, when you want to shout, in the mode of Cecil B DeMille: “Cut. Hold it there.” The garden is sprouting some nice stuff, some of which we had forgotten we ever had. Bittercress has not yet run completely out of control. It will. As the memory of a hideous winter begins to fade, we are content with the now. If that contentment is to continue, we need to think about the months ahead and set up a few plans to plant for the summer.

Feb 13, 2024 | gardensillustrated.com | Anna Pavord |Jason Ingram

Colour is in the back of my head,” says master designer and plantsman Piet Oudolf. “Not on my tongue – I don’t speak colour.” We are talking about the grandiloquently named Oudolf Field, which opened on 14 September 2014 as a thrilling adjunct to the Hauser & Wirth art gallery on the outskirts of Bruton, Somerset. I’ve been asking Piet about the palette of plants he chose for the site, and how he arranges them. “Colour is so short,” he goes on.