Planting The Joys Of Spring

Never mind the New Year sales, Naomi Slade is straight on to the next hunt: plants for a very special winter garden

- Naomi Slade

THE FUN thing about this job is that every now and again, just when I’m least expecting it, something new drops out of the sky. So when the Shows Team at the Royal Horticultural Society got in touch a little before Christmas and invited me to recreate the Winter Garden of their flagship garden at Wisley, at the Early Spring Gardening Show in London, it was a pleasingly interesting day at work. With a book on snowdrops and a longstanding interest in winter gardening, this sort of thing is just up my street, but at short notice and on a limited budget, I had to find some plants in a hurry.

So to settle my jangling nerves, I paid a visit to uber-nursery Hortus Loci between Reading and Basingstoke. Supplying all the major shows and many of the most high-profile garden designers, there is pretty much no plant that these chaps can’t find.