Victoria Summerley: Town Life

The first two weeks of March can be a miserable time for gardeners. A brief spell of sunshine, warm enough to penetrate jacket or jeans, will lure you outside in search of early flowers or spring chores. Then the weather will laugh in your face, fling hail against the window and your garden will become a quagmire for another fortnight.

It's easy to become despondent, especially if you have a project you want to get on with, such as moving a shrub, reorganising a border, or sorting out that awkward corner where nothing seems to do well. Gardening magazines and programmes are all very well, but they don't always bear much relation to one's own idiosyncratic plot.

I'm not talking about really radical changes, which might be best handled by a qualified garden designer with a hard landscaping team in tow, but the sort of tweaks most gardeners want to make when they emerge from winter hibernation. At times like this, I've found, it pays to surf, not turf. Some of the best ideas can be found on the internet.

A good place to start is at the Flower Arranger's Garden (www.thegardener.btinternet.co.uk), the website of Chrissie Harten. As the title suggests, Chrissie is a flower-arranging expert (she writes and teaches) and a passionate gardener. She has the same knack as the late television presenter Geoff Hamilton for making you feel that throwing up the odd summerhouse or two or reclaiming a 50ft stretch of weed-infested land is a mere stroll in the park.

Her enthusiasm is so infectious that before you know where you are, you're eyeing your own backyard in a speculative sort of way and wondering whether you too could build a pond or fling together a pergola. I built my pond after looking at Chrissie's site. (I built my own website too.)

As well as a tour of her garden, Chrissie's site is worth bookmarking for its links to other gardening sites. There's www.turning-earth.co.uk, for example, about a small garden in Yorkshire. Like Chrissie's, this is a real gardener's garden, full of ideas that don't cost a fortune, and that are detailed in masses of pictures and diary entries.

What attracted me to Turning Earth was the author's passion for recycling - creating things out of odds and ends that are lying around, rather than spending megabucks on a garden makeover. There is the Millennium Shed, for example, an old outhouse converted into a gazebo, built around the time of that other, far more expensive. Millennium shack, the Dome.

Another invaluable feature of personal garden sites is that they tell you about the failures they've had, so you can avoid making the same mistake. Experience of invasive species, voracious insects and plant diseases is detailed in language that is easy to understand.

Unlike many blogs, there's something very innocent and non-egotistical about garden sites: less of the me, me, me and more of the mow, mow, mow. Unless, that is, you happen to stumble upon the Garden Blethers website, which is just mad, mad, mad. It's written by Patrick Vickery, who is based in the highlands of Scotland. The entries are slightly surreal, like a Bill Forsyth film (Gregory's Girl, or Local Hero), and they're very funny - my favourite is the Chainsaw Blether, though the Heron Blether runs it close. Have a read at www.geocities.com/gardenblethers/. Blether is a Scottish word meaning talk, or chatter.

Part of the charm of looking at amateur gardeners' efforts is that their ideas are usually on a domestic, inexpensive scale. But the professionals can inspire too. If it's too cold and wet to visit real gardens, take a look at the commercial photographic libraries such as the Garden Picture Library (www.gardenpicturelibrary.com).

Here you can browse through hundreds of garden photographs, sorted by categories, such as city gardens, cottage gardens, water gardens and so on, to make life easier. Derek St Romaine's Garden Photo Library (www.gardenphotolibrary.com) works in the same way.

But don't sit too long at the computer. The whole idea is to inspire you to get outside and get on with some gardening.

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