Guides · Garden year
Your garden in March
6 of the 32 species in our plant database ask something of you in March. 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 March 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.
March, plant by plant
| Plant | What March asks of it |
|---|---|
| Olive (Olea europaea) | Prune the olive lightly: open the centre, take nothing thicker than a thumb. |
| Panicled hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata 'Limelight') | Cut last year's stems back to a pair of fat buds. It flowers on new wood. |
| Autumn moor grass (Sesleria autumnalis) | Shear the whole block to 10 cm in one pass. |
| Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra) | Cut the old foliage away at ground level. |
| Yarrow (Achillea 'Terracotta') | Divide every third year; the middle of an old clump dies out. |
| Soft shield fern (Polystichum setiferum) | Cut last year's fronds off before the new croziers unroll. |
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
- 01Top-dress the beds with 3 cm of compost. Do not dig it in.
What not to do
- 01Do not dig compost in. Spread it on top and let the worms do it.
- 02Do not plant in a dry spring week without watering in properly.
Next month: April. 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.