It’s winter. I’m not a great one for curling up by the fire with a seed catalogue. Ten books instead: three I reach for at work, three worth reading for the writing alone, and four I look at with deep-seated envy.

Horticultural, edible, cultural and shoppable, and once a residential college for women gardeners, run by the formidable Beatrix Havergal. Allow several hours, and take a pcinic.

A garden is better for having peaks and quiet times. What flowers in the cold months, what is going on under the leaf litter, and the best argument I know for doing almost nothing in the garden in winter.

Most people are surprised by how long a garden takes and by what it costs. Here is one Surrey garden from first phone call to the third year of aftercare, seven manholes included.

The first National Trust property I have visited where the garden, not the house, is the point', Ludwig Messel’s Grade II listed garden, a ruin kept as a gothic folly, and a rock garden with more attitide than most.

Having done Villandry, Chaumont and Chenonceau, I went looking for a hidden gem on the other Loir. Not quite hidden, but the unpublicised organic kitchen garden was worth the pidgin French.

Remember the rewilded beaver garden? It went to a mental health chaity in Buckinghamshire. Where Chelsea’s best show gardens end up, and who finds £250,000 a garden once Project Giving Back stops after 2026?

It is very easy to visit Richmond Park regularly and miss this altogether. Deer kept out, azaleas kept in: the National Collection of Wilson 50 Kurume azaleas, at its loudest in late April.

when you come across a lawn of crocuses in their tricolour array of white, yellow and purple it can stop you in your tracks

Twelve months, twelve photographs: a brutal January on Wimbledon Common, Wakehurst in February, the ancient laurel forest in Madeira, Sarah Price at Chelsea, and the year I finally learned to design gardens in 3D.

The only reasonably sensible list for gardeners: no cashmere pyjamas, no pink suede gauntlets. Felco, Showa, Silky Fox, a day out with lunch, and one bespoke cedar greenhouse for the ambitious.

Smaller and far easier to walk than Wisley, and a corrective to my southern view of gardening up north. Salvias Amistad, Black and Blue, and Hotlips all thriving in North Yorkshire.

I did not expect to like it. 14,000 perennials, 120 metres of beech hedging and 60,000 bulbs later, it is the best argument I know for planting a garden that peaks in autumn.

The chateau and the historic grounds are the reason to go. The festival gardens are walk-through rather than roped-off, which I like, but do not arrive expecting Chelsea standards.

It’s been a few years since my last visit to Ham House. The garden has a strong French influence: formal avenues of trees radiating out from the house and the garden is divided into a number of smaller, though still very large by modern standards, walled areas.