Andrew Staib

Giving your garden the Spring it deserves April is the busiest time of the year so there are lots of Shoulds in April. You should have cleared the last of the Winter debris and now begin sowing and planting in earnest. You should be thinking of planting up Summer bulbs and bedding. You should be putting down the last of your mulch on beds to prevent Spring weeds. You should be thinking of buying in some colourful plants for the late Spring and Summer. BUT- You should also, like an enormous bath sponge, be soaking up the beauty of nature. [...]

Leonardslee Gardens To Open Again The greatest woodland garden in the UK is set to reopen in West Sussex with an excitement for nature lovers akin to Willy Wonka opening up his doors. With spectacular displays of Azaleas and Rhododendrons, Leonardslee is world famous. Andrew Staib, principle garden designer for Glorious Gardens Sussex, goes on a tour of the gardens with Head Gardener, Ray Abrahams. For 8 years, the 240 acres of Leonardslee has been a neglected place. But when Penny Streeter bought the property and gardens in 2017 work started immediately. Last year Ray Abrahams was brought in to [...]

Brightening up February February can be a joyless month in the garden. Andrew Staib from Glorious Gardens takes a look at plants that will light up your garden. February is a tricky month. Sometimes clear days have us running out to turn over the soil and dig in some compost, other days have us sheltering indoors looking out of a rainy window. If you are one of those gardeners who don’t start visiting their local nursery until Spiring and then buying the flowering plants you see, you will miss out on the January and February performers. We can embolden our [...]

How can an ancient Chinese philosophy of life help us appreciate our gardens this January? Most simply, the theory of Yin and Yang describes a world being made up not of opposite and opposing forces, but an experience in life where events and things are actually connected, sometimes complimentary and more often interdependent. So Winter is not the opposite of Summer but they are two sides of the same coin that transform into each other and rely on each other. One is not bad and the other good, but that they are two experiences that we can bring ourselves into [...]

What’s it like to run a small garden nursery? Garden designer Andrew Staib talks to Garden Sage Nursary about the joys and difficulties of running their own nursery. It was a great leap of faith three years ago when Ed Nugent and his wife Josie decided to set up their own nursery in Hassocks. It was 2015 and they knew both they were in the shadow of two large commercial garden centres and despite a life time working in retail horticulture, they had never had to put their own savings into such a venture. It was a risk that has [...]

Designing your garden this Autumn Autumn is the best time to design your garden, to give it a re vamp and to rigorously look your outdoor space and make some creative changes. As we have had such a warm Autumn so far you can still see the echoes of Summer planting, late summer and Autumn growth i going strong, and as the weather gets colder and as you clear away more and more of this year’s debris, the underlining lines and shapes of the garden will reveal themselves. We beg our own garden design clients to start the garden design [...]

Designing your garden this Autumn Autumn is the best time to design your garden! You can still see the echoes of Summer planting, late summer and Autumn growth is still often going strong, and as the weather gets colder and as you clear away more and more of this year’s debris, the underlining lines and shapes of the garden reveal themselves. We beg our own garden design clients to start the garden design process in the Autumn! If you start now you can have all the time you need to spend the Autumn assessing what worked in the Summer, what [...]

Using Bulbs in your Garden Design Now is the Time to plant Bulbs! Nothing heralds Spring with greater brass band fanfare than bulbs. Just when you thought the world would never again turn to the sunnier side of the universe out come the bulbs. Most try to get up and out into the light before the trees have come into leaf so you can make maximum advantage of this by trying to plant bulbs in combination with other ones. This year why not be a bit bolder in your choice of bulbs and the amount you plant. Below are some [...]

Sussex Prairie Gardens- The wild west on our doorstep Decades ago, when Pauline met Paul, a Scotsman tending the Commonwealth War Graves in the Somme, she not only met the unequivocal love of her life, but their union began an adventure into the horticultural world of Prairie flora that has dazzled the south of England for the last 10 years. With 35,000 plants it is Britain’s largest Prairie or ‘Naturalistic’ gardens. They travelled through Europe designing people’s gardens until a billionaire businessman in Luxembourg commissioned them to design his garden. He took on board Piet Oldorf as an advisor, the [...]

Gardening on Clay soils -Make clay your best friend. When I visit people in their gardens for a design consultation they often look at me with despair in their eyes, and apologetically admit they have Clay Soil. For most people clay soil is the bane of their gardening lives, limiting the type of plants they can grow, flooding in the Winter and cracking up in the Summer. But do not loose hope! There are ways to work with clay and get the best out of it, as well as skirting round the problem. What actually is clay? You know if [...]