Plants

Try this tulip combination from Parham House

There are some 10,000 tulip bulbs to be planted at Parham House in West Sussex this autumn in readiness for a spectacular display next spring. A display that not only has to look good in the garden, but also provide ample cuttings for the fine, Elizabethan house. “There’s a 100-year-old tradition of cut flowers here at Parham,” says head gardener Tom Brown, “with flowers chosen specifically to complement the decor in each room of the house.”

Sonya Patel Ellis promotes the beauty of dried flowers by creating herbaria with a traditional wooden herbarium press she made herself. She has produced a collection of more than 100 pressed and mounted plant and flower specimens, collected over the course of a year from her garden in east London.

November is the time to indulge in some luscious planting, with the memory of warm autumn colours still fresh in the mind. The inspiration for this scheme came from the flowers of Goeppertia crocata ‘Tassmania’, which reminds me of burning torches.

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Annual vegetables sown, grown and harvested in a single season are a fairly inefficient way of growing food if you think about all the effort it takes and the hours you spend cultivating the plants, only for them to be pulled up and composted at the end of the season. By contrast trees and perennial plants will provide you with crops from year to year and more time to enjoy your garden.

Try using cobnuts in the recipe below for granola with dried, white mulberries. If you don't have your own crop, many farmers' markets sell them at this time of year - or you can use hazelnuts as an alternative.

The blaze of colour that autumn brings is a delight and it's worth venturing outside to see it, whatever the weather. Here, head gardener Mat Reese suggests some of his favourite places to visit to see the seasons colours at their best. 

The Orchard at Gravetye Manor dates back to the 1890s when the charismatic garden writer William Robinson first moved to Gravetye. The sheltered, two-acre, south-facing slope is quite protected from frosts and cold winds and warms up in the summer to ripen some amazing fruit. Here head gardener Tom Coward gives his top tips for growing apples.

Robert and Heather Copley are growing liquorice root on their farm near Pontefract. If you eat the root straight from the ground and chew it slowly, a fresh taste somewhere between sweetness and salt emerges.

Everybody loves the romantic idea of a meadow – running freely through long grasses and waving cornfield flora, possibly wearing a loose shift of broderie anglaise, before throwing yourself down in a field and chewing on a grassy stem while watching grasshoppers hop and crickets chirp. Perhaps in the distance you can see the weary (though ruggedly handsome) farmhand plodding home with scythe on shoulder and empty cider flaggon bumping against his moleskinned hip. Sounds marvellous, doesn’t it?