Not the best specimen but...

If you've got a light space for it, the Maidenhair Fern is a very lovely plant to live with.

Some years a plant's flowering goes unnoticed - last year this Clematis armandii right outside my office was one of them. Maybe it wasn't so prolific, or other things stole the limelight. Or maybe it's been such a long cold and depressing winter that the sight of it flowering right now, with its delicate scent, suggests that Spring is not so far away after all. HURRY UP!!!

I almost fell off my Boris bike admiring the intricate and lovely weave of branches making up these box trained Lime trees in Hyde Park this week. Almost without doubt better without the leaves....

Poor old yellow.

The shrub Mahonia is to gardens what a DFS L-shaped sofa is to interiors: low on elegance, kinda no thanks. For most of the year, the spiky leaves of this spreading mass allude to swathes of supermarket car park shrubbery. And when in flower.... who likes yellow? Very few of the garden world, as far as I have learnt. Yet this brash, heavy blob of spikiness - whose flowers look like they’ll honk of Body Shop white musk - throws out the sweetest lily of the valley scent at this time of year. If you own one, bring some flowers into the house; if you don’t, stick your hooter into its bouquet in the nearest front garden that is unaffected enough to own the shrub. Next thing you know you'll be wanting to lounge on their leather...

It's not all that bleak...

Crossing the Bayswater Road this morning with my dog felt oddly like the walk of shame – I put this down to the fact that one has just crawled from beneath a very large and heavy stone containing the sum of December’s festive activities. It’s odd how 10 days with family can make it all feel a lifetime ago – and how different a place can feel in so little time. A good sort of different, however, was seeing these cheery little critters poking their faces out in Hyde Park. The uplifting sight of snowdrops; lighter evenings; a small terrier on my lap as I write this – is it so bad after all?