Guides · Garden year
Your garden in April
3 of the 32 species in our plant database ask something of you in April. Everything else in the garden can be left alone, which is half of what a calendar is for.
Most monthly garden advice is written for nobody's garden. It says "prune shrubs" in a month when pruning half of them costs you next year's flowers. What follows is the April row of our own Garden year: each job attached to the plant that asks for it, from the same database the Dossier is built from.
April, plant by plant
| Plant | What April asks of it |
|---|---|
| Lavender (Lavandula × intermedia 'Grosso') | Trim the lavender back by a third, never into old bare wood. |
| Cotton lavender (Santolina chamaecyparissus) | Clip the santolina into a dome before it starts into growth. |
| Garden mint (Mentha spicata) | Lift and split the pot before it fills with roots. |
Every job here comes from that species' own entry in our database — the same rows that build the Garden year in a Dossier.
The whole-garden job
- 01Weed once, properly, before anything sets seed.
What not to do
- 01Do not feed everything by default. Most established shrubs need nothing.
- 02Do not cut a spring-flowering shrub now. Prune it after it flowers.
Next month: May. A Dossier includes all twelve rows, written on your plants — and on the first of each month we email you that month's three jobs.