Given that the current round of very wet and dreary weather is forecast to continue for some days yet, we doubt that anybody is going to be doing much in the garden this week. We see our peers giving advice in other publications that this is the time to tend to your tools, oil the handles and sharpen the blades.

Bah, humbug. Good gardeners have generally learned to look after their tools all the time and not just in winter. Novice gardeners generally learn quite quickly that cheap tools are not worth having, especially as far as secateurs, spades, forks and trowels go. Buy quality and look after them. Don’t leave your metal wheelbarrow full of debris out in the rain or it will rust. We speak from experience here.

• If you are suffering from cabin fever, get out your gardening books. You can at least use winter to gather fresh ideas and gain some inspiration.
• When the weather is really bad, real gardeners have a shed where they hide away and sow seed and repot their treasures.
• It is fairly early, but Mark has been pruning his grapevines which are under cover. Cut back all last year’s growth to one or two strong buds from the main trunk and thin out weak stems. Drastic but necessary. In moments of creativity or boredom, you can weave creations from the grape prunings. In the past, Mark has made some most attractive teepees for clematis by splitting giant bamboo lengths into four at one end only and weaving lengths of grape vines to hold the lower ends asplay. We need to refine the process of anchoring them to the ground (they tend to blow over) but they look a great deal more folksy than the cheap metal supports you buy which then rust out.
• Think about a hierarchy of flowers. Doing a random net search on myself (as some of us do in moments of boredom), I found a new piece on the Yahoo d*hlia chat room accusing me of having no more class than a petunia. Moi? The irony of a d*hlia fanatic accusing me of having no taste or class does not escape me. But what did the poor petunia do to warrant having such aspersions cast upon it? While I quite like petunias, I did feel that my first love of magnolias might rank slightly higher up the social scale of flowers than the dreaded d*hlia.

Geoffrey Charlesworth wrote in 1988:

What do gardeners do in winter? They accumulate fat.

Oscar Wilde gave us memorable dialogue in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Cicely: When I see a spade, I call it a spade.

Gwendolen: I am pleased to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.