Let us look forward to a year of garden hope, hope for just the right amount of rain, sunny days that don't make you perspire too much when digging, soft winds that blow weed seeds over your garden but not onto it, pests that think your plants are too boring to eat and flowers by the hundred for every month of the year.

Anticipation is one of the great joys of gardening. As I write in early January many of our plants are invisible, only a resting root, tuber, bulb or rhizome, they await the magic call of Spring as do we. There is just a whisper of it with the Arum leaves, white blotched and dark green and the Celandines that some fear but we adore for the hint they give of the warmth to come. I do embrace the winter, clear leafless views across the fields hidden later, collecting logs with all their different wood fragrance, and digging. When my Grandfather ran Southview Nurseries here in the 1940s the whole two acres of land was hand dug, then all we sold was grown in the open ground, now virtually all we grow is in pots. I do mix all the potting compost myself which from February onwards is about 1 cubic metre per week. But I do dig the garden.

Turning the soil like the turning of the year is a concept that has been with us for thousands of years. The scent of earth freshly dug or ploughed is to me now as it must have been to gardeners and farmers in the first century. Then the Roman writer Columella wrote of cultivations, ploughing in the dung to feed the land and produce abundant crops. So must we when planting new ornamental plants make their 'menu' rich and aromatic. We have used most soil enrichments over the years, from the wonderfully beery spent hops, alkaline spent mushroom compost and our own composted garden waste. All have been good in many ways but still beyond these well rotted farmyard manure seems to produce the most lasting nutritious diet for our plants. Feed the herbaceous border perennials, well and they will repay you with a bounty of flower over a long period, and they will also be less susceptible to pests and diseases.

We shall again be selling plants at Hartley Wintney Market (Wednesdays 10am-2pm in the High Street) on most Wednesdays from April to July and in September.

Our Grandson Thomas is four and a half years old and strenuously sweeps around the packing shed, he is now the 5th generation of our family to work and play on this little bit of Hampshire. The rain has stopped, the sun is out and I must go and 'play' with some plants.