If you're a real couch potato just looking out of the window can give you that inspiration for next season. Start with your garden structure. Is it lush, berried and scrummy, or can you see the neighbours washing line? No bare fences please, we want to see variegated hollies, Sarcococca and Hellebores complementing the climbing winter clematis Almandii for foliage and flower. That irritating neighbours window can be hidden with an evergreen tree such Quercus ilex (evergreen oak) or softened with the Himalayan Birch Betula jacqmontii.



If you are lucky enough to have a house full of kids, think out of the box about what they want to keep them interested outside. A swing or a slide would be the predictable easy option, while a living woven willow structure becomes Gollom's cave, a crater on the moon and somewhere to get away from Mum and Dad. Try Salix vitellina easily woven into a den, crocodile or animal of your choice.

Grow your own is all the rage, and it's fun to sit down on mass and design your own vegetable garden. Spuds are easy, and if you have sandy soil, root vegetables are a must. Be trendy, experiment with the huge selection of Mediterranean vegetables that come to your table fresh colourful and within ten yards of your back door.

It seems an awful long time off but lose yourself in your colour schemes. Think chocolate with Huchera ‘Chocolate Ruffles' while the wonderfully fiery Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff' burns brightly alongside the ever so hot Crocosmia masoniorum. And if that doesn't warm you up go back to the mulled wine! A prosperous New Year from Tony Richards.

Another area you might want to look at after the winds of February have died down is fencing. We do seem to spend a suprising amount of time replacing fencing that hasn't been around that long. Most companies guarantee there fencing for 25 years and it has been dipped into a medium that prevents all those little bugs having it for breakfast. The only problem is that on the face of it, it doesn't work. Quite often the panel is in perfect nick but the post is rotten through and will snap against the concrete pad and come off in your hand. It is so long ago since the fence was put up no one can quite remember where it was bought, and any accompanying paper work is long since thrown away and so the guarantee is obsolete.How anoying for the client and a waste of good natural resources.

One of the major problems seems to be the fencer cutting the bottom few inches off during installation. It's like taking the lid off the sandwich box in a goat enclosure, the soil microrhiza have a field day and before you know it, all strength has been eaten out of the post. The treatment seal has been broken and the critters get to work.

If you do need to shorten a fence post, put the cut uppermost at the top of the fencing and treat twice with a preservative. You can sleep well in the knowledge that in 25 years time those posts will be going strong.