The English Garden

Enjoy over 60 beautiful gardens a year with The English Garden. Every issue features country, city, cottage and coastal gardens, with advice on how to recreate them. Be inspired by articles written by the country's top garden designers and discover the best plant varieties for your garden, chosen by expert nurserymen and plantspeople.

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THE ENGLISH GARDEN

This Month • Our guide to plants, people, gardens and events, tasks and shopping in September

People to Meet • Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Out & About • Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month

Things to Do • Extending the season is the name of the game in September, as Jane Moore gives topiary a final trim, cuts back the wildflower meadow and shapes lavender

Beautiful & Useful • New plants, books, tools and creative designs, plus shopping inspiration

There Goes the Sun • No flower sums up those heady dying days of late summer quite like the sunflower. With their huge turning heads fringed with beautiful sun-ray petals, they’re an iconic symbol of the season that you can carry into the cooler months of the year when you wrap yourself in this snuggly cotton throw. Sunflower quilted throw, £210. Tel: 01778 560256; sophieallport.com

Wild WEST • The Atlantic coast is both a blessing and a curse at Dominic Black’s outrageously eclectic Cornish garden where just about anything goes. It’s filled with temptingly tropical treasures from across the globe – all arranged in the style of a cottage garden

At your LEISURE • Offering a gentler sense of romance once the heady rush of summer has subsided, Iford Manor in Wiltshire basks in the gentle glow of autumn allowing a relaxed opportunity to explore its soft planting and Harold Peto’s fascinating design

Only CONNECT • At a windswept sloping garden, starkly divided by a vast retaining wall, in Derbyshire’s Hope Valley, designer Phil Hirst undertook a grand project of reunification, using harmonious hard landscaping softened by pretty flowers to bring the site together

Feast for the EYES • The gorgeous five-acre gardens at Goldstone Hall in the North Shropshire countryside have been developed by the same family over 50 years, and key to their appeal is the attractive and productive kitchen garden where flowers and edibles jostle side by side

Hit REFRESH • An established but ailing garden on the edge of the Trossachs was ripe for revival, and what the storms had started, Iain and Ruth Howieson continued, clearing decrepit trees and renewing the garden’s structure with colourful herbaceous planting

All the Greats • A selection of ten classic plants from Sissinghurst, as chosen by head gardener Troy Scott Smith, who works to preserve the garden’s heritage

Multiple Choice • Step into the colourful world of salvias, a diverse genus of 950 species and hundreds of hybrids. Constance Craig Smith gets advice from William Dyson of Dyson’s Salvias on shrubby and New World types for maximum summer flower power

THE OLD WAYS • In the specific conditions of Wildegoose Nursery in Shropshire, Jack and Laura Willgoss are keeping traditional horticultural skills alive, propagating their own plants using a range of techniques to provide a choice but resilient offering

TICKLED PINK • Head gardener Brian O’Reilly explains how he creates the beautifully colour co-ordinated pink-themed borders at Ballynure House in County Wicklow

EASY DOES IT • How do you go about adding outdoor lighting to a well-established garden without wreaking havoc in the process? We speak to the experts, who reveal some ingenious – and relatively disruption-free – solutions

LAST HURRAH • Say goodbye to...