The Michael Griffiths

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Michael Griffiths
🌿 Gardening made easy
📖 Author of ‘The Easy Garden’
✂️ A garden you’re proud of, minus the hard work
📩 Enquiries: [email protected]
👇 Get the book
https://geni.us/TheEasyGarden

21/08/2026

Olive tree looking a bit wild? Here’s what to do now 🫒

They put on a lot of growth over summer, and the temptation is to get stuck in. But this isn’t the time to prune hard. If you cut into thick wood now and you’ll push out soft new growth just as the weather turns, which is exactly what gets damaged over winter.

What you CAN do right now:
✂️ Suckers at the base and shoots on the trunk, rub or snip them off, they’re stealing energy from the top
🍂 Dead, damaged or crossing branches, fine to prune now.
🫒 Light shaping, snip back the wayward shoots spoiling the outline, but keep it light
🌬️ Thin the middle a little so light and air get through, olives don’t like a congested centre

Save the structural stuff for spring, when it’s got a whole season to recover.

And if yours is in a pot, get it up on feet. Sitting in wet compost all winter is what spoil your olive tree, not the cold.

20/08/2026

If our summers are going to feel like this, we may as well garden like it 🌴

Five plants that give a proper tropical feel — and all of them cope with a British garden:
🍌 Musa basjoo — the hardiest banana you can grow. Gets to the size of a small tree, and it’s happy in a pot or in the ground, full sun or part shade
🌴 Phoenix palm — big, dark green fronds and a stout trunk. In a really hot summer you’ll even get drooping bunches of creamy yellow flowers
🌿 Dicksonia antarctica — an incredible evergreen tree fern, and one of the few that actually wants the shade. That thick mass of roots forms the trunk, with long fronds unfurling from the top
🧡 Canna lilies — height and fantastic foliage for the middle or back of the border. Tender perennials that flower June right through to October
🔥 Red hot pokers — not technically tropical, but they absolutely give the vibe. Fiery colours, a long season, and stunning planted en masse
Big leaves, bold colour, proper drama. Plant them together and the whole thing reads as one lush, jungly border rather than five separate plants 🌿

👇 Would you go tropical — or is it too much of a leap for a British garden?

Follow for planting ideas that actually work over here 🌿

18/08/2026

If you’re not taking rose cuttings right now, you’re missing the best window of the whole year 🌹✂️

This is the cutting sweet spot, the semi-ripe stage. Soft enough to root quickly, firm enough not to rot before it does. Softwood wilts, hardwood takes months.
This is the middle, and it’s where your success rate lives.
🌿 Find it with the bend test — the top of the stem is really bendy softwood, no good. Move down until it’s not rock hard, but nowhere near as whippy. That’s your piece
✂️ Angled cut above a bud at the top, then move down 4–6 inches and cut straight across below a bud at the base — so you always know which way up it goes
🍃 Strip the leaves, keeping just the top two and cutting those in half
🪴 50/50 compost and grit, cuttings pushed in around the edge of the pot
💧 Water them in, then cover with a clear plastic bag to hold the humidity
Come autumn: roots. Next year: free roses, exact copies of the one you already love 🌹
But this window doesn’t hang around — go and find that stem this week.

👇 Which rose would you clone if you could only pick one?

Follow for the right jobs at the right time 🌿

14/08/2026

Don’t delay, gardeners, now’s the time to prune your lavender 💜✂️

Leave it too long and you end up with a leggy, twiggy plant that never really recovers. If yours is brown and going to seed, that’s your signal.

Here’s the only rule that matters:
🚫 See that brown, woody stuff at the base? That’s the old wood, never cut into it. Lavender won’t reliably regrow from old wood, and that’s how plants get lost
✂️ Anything with new green growth on it, you can cut, as long as you leave some green growth below your cutting point
🌿 Take it in a bunch, cut, and aim for a nice compact dome (a shrubber does it in seconds if you want to be quick)
❄️ It’ll put on a little growth afterwards, that’s deliberate. Leave it. That’s what protects the plant through winter
Do it now and you’ll have a tight, compact plant ready to push out fresh growth in spring 💜

👇 Be honest, is yours a neat little dome, or is it a little wild?

12/08/2026

Water butts don’t have to be ugly 💧

After the summer we’ve just had, now is the perfect time to set up rainwater storage — and it’s genuinely easier than people think. All you need is a diverter kit:

📍 Move your butt into position and make sure it’s level (this bit matters more than people realise)
🔩 Most come with pre-drilled holes — if not, make one and secure the connector and tap
✂️ Cut the downpipe and fit the diverter in line with the top of the butt — that way when it’s full, water flows back into the downpipe instead of overflowing everywhere
🌧️ Connect it up… and the next time it rains, it fills itself
Then the fun bit — add a small water feature, a few aquatic plants, and you’ve got rainwater storage that actually looks like part of the garden 🌿
Free water, better for your plants than tap, no restrictions on using it, and one less thing to worry about next summer.

👇 How many water butts have you got — and after this year, are you adding more?

Follow for the jobs that make next year easier 🌿

10/08/2026

Plant these once and they’ll come back every single year 🌸

These are my go-to perennials right now — long-flowering, loved by pollinators, and about as low-effort as gardening gets. From soft drifts at the front to proper height at the back, these five have it covered:
💙 Nepeta ‘Persian Blue’ — flowers for months, tough as anything, and permanently covered in bees
💜 Scabious — those pincushion flowers keep coming all summer, and pollinators adore them
❤️ Achillea ‘Cerise Queen’ — flat crimson heads on strong stems, and it thrives in poor dry soil
🤍 Aquilegia ‘Spring Magic’ — early colour when the border needs it most, and it self-seeds happily
🌸 Lupins — the big statement at the back of the border, and you can’t beat those spires
The best bit? No replanting, no starting again each spring. They just get bigger and better every year 🌿
If you’re planning your borders this season, save this one — your future garden will thank you 📌
👇 What’s YOUR favourite perennial right now? I’m always after more

Follow for planting that does the hard work for you 🌿

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