Put away your spade and dig out some gardening books

It’s tempting to want to garden in January. The sun comes out, everything sparkles and you feel that pull. However, gardening now can be problematic.

If the weather has been wet, even walking back and forth over a bed can cause problems. Wet soil compacts easily. Digging will ruin the soil structure as it will smear any clay particles together. If you must do some work, lay down planks or boards over the soil to spread your weight.

You may think that digging is a good activity to keep you warm, but turning the soil over exposes a layer that had been toasty and warm below the frost line to the cold you’re trying to warm up from. All the lovely life in the soil is not best pleased by this. Worse still, the cold layer from the top will now be buried and insulated, and will take even longer to warm up in spring.

If it’s too cold to dig, it’s also too cold for cutting back. It may be tempting to think you can start to neaten things up, but the insects living in your old stems, seed heads and leaf litter still want to be tucked up for winter.

Of course, the weather in your bit of the world may be unseasonally warm, and it’s tempting to think you can pretend it’s going to stay that way; but it won’t. Cutting back dead stems and clearing away fallen leaves on the bed just means exposing both the soil and perennials to the hard frosts that will come.

Still, I understand the longing to get back into nature, so I suggest a good walk in the sun; perhaps a visit to a national collection of witch hazel (hamamelis) to enjoy their heady fragrance, a wander through a snowdrop garden and then home to the fireside, a deep hot bath or the sofa, blanket and a good gardening book. Not a practical or technical one, but words that will lift the imagination and allow you to get swept up in someone else’s space.

Charlotte Mendelson’s Rhapsody In Green is just that, a wonderful musing on gardening in a tiny space. Elizabeth And Her German Garden, by Elizabeth Von Arnim, captures the longing we all have to garden perfectly. Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden is fierce, witty and often provocative on the author’s likes and dislikes in gardening. Morville Hours, by Katherine Swift, allows you to enjoy all the pleasures of gardening a huge space with none of the work. And I still dip into The 3000-Mile Garden: An Exchange Of Letters On Gardening, Food, And The Good Life, by Roger Phillips and Leslie Land: the writers’ evolving friendship is touching and funny, but it’s the goldmine of gardening detail that I return to.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is still one of the best reads for that lovely moment when winter finally slips away to reveal spring. If it feels too indulgent to read again, find a small person to read it to and fall in love all over again with its touching tale of rescuing a neglected garden.