How to garden in January
Will you be taking up gardening this year? Plus: garden jobs to do and not to do this month, snowdrop walks, a new book, and the first of my recommended dahlia collections to buy right now
Welcome to this New Year’s Day edition of The Gardening Mind: I’m Jo Thompson, a garden designer, sharing all the gardening lessons I’ve learned along the way: how to design your garden, gardening how-to tips, visits to inspirational gardens and flower shows, plant advice, and much more. If you’re thinking about taking up gardening, we’d love it if you came and joined us:
A very, very Happy New Year to you, and here’s to some very, very happy garden days in this 2025
If you’re new to Substack and wondering what on earth to do and how on earth to go about finding it all, I’m holding a Zoom for Gardening Mind members - you can find time and date details at the end of this post. It’s for paying members - and my aim is to deliver a lot for your monthly £6.50. Zooms, design tutorials and courses, planting designs, access to the Chat which is basically our WhatsApp group.
In the meantime, do have a look at some of the Gardening Mind offerings - for example, if you want to design a small garden, you can find ideas here. If you’d like to understand how to design a border, you can find our Border Planting Design course here. If you’re interested in plants and planting design, there’s a whole library to browse through at your leisure. In the upcoming Zoom, I’ll be showing you where all this information is and how to access it easily.
Let’s turn the whole thing on its head and declare that this is the great thing about winter and gardening: that if it really is too revolting out there, we can stay inside, snuggled up by the fire/radiator/warm dog, and do some planning instead. We can check out inspirational books, pore over the rose catalogues, look at plant suppliers’ websites, all in a very laid-back way rather than thinking that there’s a whole lot of stuff that we absolutely must do.
This week, for those of you who have joined us on your gardening journey and are here to become more familiar with the basics, I’m sure you’re itching to do something:
Here in The Gardening Mind, I aim to have something for everyone, and just because some ideas/methods are easy, it doesn’t mean that they should be ignored. Think of the perfect roast chicken or the foolproof pasta with tomato sauce recipe that students are sent off to university with: the simple ones are sometimes the best.
If you’re new to gardening, at this point you might like to have a browse through all of the How To Garden section: it’s set out like a cookery book as I take us through the superskills necessary to create a garden, removing the mystery that seems to fog up gardening. Have a look at these:
Today’s What To Do/What Not To Do is a monthly feature here on The Gardening Mind, and, in the magical world that is Substack, I’m totally thrilled to have teamed up with the brilliant
, creator of The Time Foragers’ Club , who has taken my thoughts and interpreted them beautifully for today’s main illustration - isn’t she fabulous? Isn’t Substack fabulous?Remember, if you’re new to The Gardening Mind, and you’re wondering where on earth to start with it all and how to find everything, do go and have a poke-around here.
I’m not making any New Year’s Resolutions
Just like last year, there are definitely no resolutions here - see this Chat - though I’m thinking that some of you might be wanting to get out into the garden. If you’re reading this in the UK, however, you yourself might be wondering when on earth you’re going to be able to get out there: the mud, the wind, the rain…
But: let’s not get downhearted, let’s turn the whole thing on its head and declare that this is the great thing about winter and gardening: that if it really is too revolting out there, we can stay inside, snuggled up by the fire/radiator/warm dog, and do some planning instead. We can check out inspirational books, pore over the rose catalogues, look at plant suppliers’ websites, all in a very laid-back way rather than thinking that there’s a whole lot of stuff that we absolutely must do.
Let’s continue to garden gently, garden kindly, in a way that makes us feel good. Let’s congratulate ourselves on what we’ve learned and achieved - and if you’ve still got lots of things on your Gardening To Do list, why not view it as a list of excellent pastimes, rather than a boring old list of things that just need be got through? A Gardening To Enjoy list, if you will.
Your messages on Chat and Notes1 show The Gardening Mind community is a truly wide-ranging one, not just geographically, but also in terms of interest and experience. We’re made up of readers new to gardens as well as people who have gardened pretty much forever, professionals, amateurs, second-careerers and people who are thinking about dipping a toe or two in. I absolutely love how you’re all so supportive of each other - thank you, and long may it continue.
January is a month of contrasts
The grey days are definitely a staying-in and planning time, but then, right at the point when we’ve really had enough of all of that staying in, the skies switch on their blue. And as soon as this happens, as soon as there’s just about enough blue for a sailor’s trousers, it becomes a bit easier to push ourselves out there, soaking up all that Vitamin D, as well as that Vitamin N(ature), breathing in the fresh air, blowing the cobwebs away. Whichever of these ways you use to describe Nature’s reward for stepping out into the cold, it’s a fact that the blue sweeps away the grey and hope flies back in. In these wintry days, we take the optimism where we can find it.
This week, we’ve got a To-do list as well as a not-to-do.
I’m also going to be taking a first look at the summer bulb catalogues as they start appearing through our letterboxes, and I'm drooling over a few beauties in particular - by the way, you can also find some more summer bulb ideas from previous years here and here.
The new book has arrived
You might have seen on Notes that I’ve received my copy of my new book, The New Romantic Garden, and I’ve got that funny feeling you get when you hold something in your hand that you worked on forever and can’t quite believe that it’s become An Actual Thing. If you’d like a copy, please do think about pre-ordering it. Amazon loves a pre-order - it means the book then gets put under book buyers’ noses when they’re buying for their shops - and your pre-order helps push it up the lists. Thank you so much if you already have!
I’ll be giving glimpses into it over the next few weeks - the idea was to get right under the skin of making gardens with atmosphere, with soul. And yes, there really is a chapter on fairies at the bottom of the garden.
So, what is there to do in the garden this week?
I can tell you exactly what I’m not doing: