Diarmuid Gavin: How to set your gardening resolutions for 2024

First, a look back at my gardening highlights of 2023. For the first six months of the year, I worked in Newtownabbey, just outside of Belfast. My project involved designing a public garden that would celebrate the coronation of Britain’s new king and queen. And once the design was complete, I had to gather a team to build it.

It was quite the undertaking, turning a disused bowling green into a visual spectacle in just five months. The centrepiece was a three-storey metal pavilion, topped by a huge crown set in a native Irish wildflower meadow.

As with many of my public gardens, it had a quirk — every 15 minutes, topiary trees danced to the tune of Morecambe & Wise singing Bring Me Sunshine! It made the royal couple laugh when they opened the garden in late May.

A detail from that garden became my favourite planting from the year. I wanted planters for the centrepiece of some circular gathering areas and figured that a few huge dishes would do the job.

I couldn’t find anything big enough so eventually, through sheer desperation, I used the end of a milk tanker, shearing off the dish shape, adding draining holes and planting with hundreds of ivies, ferns, astilbes and alliums. It was delightful!

Within a month of the garden opening, we had 100,000 visitors… all in all, an amazing experience!

Garden resolutions are great — making lists in the winter months that set out a number of aims you’d like to achieve in your plot will help focus your efforts.

My gardening goals for this coming year once again revolve around my own plot. The winter is a great time to take stock and make decisions about what should be done, and I hereby resolve to get my planting just the way I want it!

I’ve just acquired a series of huge multi-stemmed tree ferns. With the help of six friends and neighbours, and two mechanical diggers, they’ve been manoeuvred into place and are awaiting their new year’s fronds!

Some are over 12ft in height… I can’t wait to see the difference they make to the overall garden when in full plume.

A resolution we should maybe all consider is to continue the move to gardening with our whole environment in mind. We add thousands of tonnes of nitrates and phosphates to our plots in an effort to green up lawns and produce plumper fruits and ever-brighter flowers. Much of this material leaches into waterways and depletes the water of oxygen, destroying aquatic habitats.

If we rely on natural feeds and remedies, lessen our interventions with weedkillers and poisons, and relax our ambitions for Wimbledon-quality turf, we’ll help the soil, the birds and the bees.

So let’s be careful when we shop in the garden centre — there’s an increasingly good range of chemical-free feeds, mosskillers and weedkillers out there.

Whether you’re a novice or experienced gardener, there are tangible benefits to spending time outdoors, nurturing and tending our plots, or even developing an indoor garden filled with pot plants on a windowsill.

So if you’re gardening on a country estate, in a semi in suburbia or in a city flat, make 2024 the year when the colour green banishes the blues away.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Plant of the week

The winter clematis, C. cirrhosa, blooms from November to February, providing colour and scent midwinter as well as welcome nectar for insects. The best-known of these is ‘Freckles’, with large creamy scented flowers spotted, or freckled, inside with red. It’s evergreen so works for all-year screening, for example growing up a trellis. Plant in a sunny, sheltered spot, preferably with some companion planting at the bottom to cover the bare lower stems. Enjoy the bronze-tinged foliage in winter and silky seed heads that follow in spring.

Reader Q&A

Q: A neighbour has done a lot of pruning this year on their side of the fence, leaving me with a lot of bare space and less privacy. Can you recommend something quick-growing and evergreen that I can plant? — Dave

If your site isn’t too exposed, how about a clump-forming bamboo such as Fargesia. Clump-forming bamboos don’t send out runners: they just get thicker and bigger, eventually forming a dense screen. Once planted, make sure it gets plenty of water, and that should do the job. Another shrub that might be suitable is Prunus laurocerasus, with its sturdy stems and glossy green leaves, but this will need restrictive pruning once it has achieved its optimum height.

​Submit your gardening questions to Diarmuid via his Instagram @diarmuidgavin using the hashtag #weekendgarden