Its mid-January and this time last year we were still knee deep in snow and it was impossible to know which plants were alive and which weren’t. This year is very different - a quick walk round the Floral Hall outside gardens this afternoon revealed the first spring bulbs in flower – including Iris histroides ‘Katherine Hodgkins’, snowdrops and crocuses. Pink hellebores, Helleborus orientalis, are flowering in the walled shrub border, as are pink pulmonarias, and the green hellebores, Helleborus argutifolius, are also in flower. The witchazel Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Arnold Promise’ is covered in yellow flowers and is smelling gorgeous, as is its slightly more modest red flowered cousin Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’. Other winter flowering shrubs are also now performing, such as the Christmas box Sarcococca humilis, Viburnum bodnantense and Corylopsis pauciflora.
What is more surprising is that a late spring flowering shrub – Exochorda ‘the Bride’, has a few flowers on it, and some lovely pale pink schizostylis are also in bloom.
Inside the Floral Hall, in the tropical house, temperatures are controlled and flowering plants maintain more predictable flowering patterns. Thus at this time of year we have Strelitzias (Bird of Paradise plants) flowering, Hibiscus plants, Thunbergias and a fabulous Pyrostegia with its lovely orange trumpets.
We have potted up this year’s supply of Regal Pelargonium cuttings. We have 20 different varieties of these sumptuously coloured and unusual plants, and they will be available for sale from mid February.

It’s the second week of November and the dahlias in the outside gardens at the Floral Hall are still in full bloom and looking fantastic. Any day now a hard frost will knock them down and blacken them but for now visitors can continue to enjoy their vibrant colours. We have had lots of compliments on the two standard Cotinus ‘Grace’ we planted last year – their leaves are just glowing with colour and they set off the dahlias to perfection.

We haven’t got all the bulbs in yet – the mild weather has allowed some of the late flowering annuals to keep going. Any day now we must make a brutal decision to pull up all the lovely marmalade yellow rudbeckias in the central display border to allow us to plant white allium bulbs deep in the ground. They are huge white bulbs and will be combined with Tulip ‘Esther’ and white foxgloves to follow on.

We have a mystery predator which has been digging out tulip bulbs in our wooden tubs. It is digging very deep, neat holes and I can only guess that it must be a squirrel but we have wondered if it’s a pine marten because of the strange droppings around which combine berry seeds and remains of small birds.

The gardeners have been tackling major renovation work inside the Tropical House, including re-gravelling the 50 square metres staging on both sides of the building which holds all our potted plants, and was last done over 18 years ago. Three tonnes of old gravel has been removed by hand and recycled in other parts of the garden and the sides and legs of the staging re-painted. Fresh polythene and capillary matting were then laid over the grid of the staging followed by three more tonnes of fresh gravel. It was hard work but was the effort was worth it as the plants look really lovely on their new fresh gravel.

Good things to see at the Floral Hall this month are the first of the orchids flowering in the Tropical House, some lovely Cymbidium orchids flowering in our No 4 greenhouse, luscious hibiscus flowers and some beautiful Bromeliads flowers ranging from red to orange to pink and purple.

It’s easy to feel a bit sad in October – it can feel like the end of something when really it’s the beginning. At the very point that you are cutting back tired, dead stems of herbaceous plants, you can see the fresh new growth at the base waiting to burst forth , at the point you prune back shrubs with faded yellow leaves, you see fresh, fat buds lower down the branches already forming for spring. What can look like a scene of death and destruction is really the very opposite – new life and new hope hidden by the old clothes of summer.

The fact that there is still so much growth and activity going on is a good indicator that it is also a good time to plant shrubs and herbaceous plants. The soil is still warm and moist and putting plants into the ground now will ensure that their roots can get established into the soil before the ground starts to freeze. Many people are inspired to plant in the spring, filled with energy as the days lengthen and warm up, but going to a garden centre now, and buying what looks good at the moment eg Sedums, rudbeckias and shrubs with good autumnal leaf colouring, will ensure that your garden continues to provide colour and interest late into the autumn.

Planting bulbs is another great pleasure and another new beginning at this time of year. You need to plant a lot – always more than you think you need (or can afford), but the back breaking effort of getting them into the ground is offset by the anticipation and reward of the most stunning flowers and colours, from the quiet pleasure of crocuses, snowdrops, muscari, pushkinia and Iris reticulata in February and March, to bright shows of daffodils and tulips in April and May.

Good things to see at the Floral Hall in the Tropical House this month are the first of the orchids flowering, the Gingers flowering, the many different varieties of Hibiscus, and some lovely plants from the Bromeliad family – Aechmea fasciata ‘Primera’, which we have potted up for display on the staging.

In the outside gardens the dahlias are still looking amazing, and there is a lovely Gentian, Gentiana acaulis, flowering in big blue clumps in the Rockery border. The trees are just beginning to turn and the Davidia involucrata and the Parrotia persica are looking particularly good.

Over the October school holidays we will have many plants for sale from violas and pansies and wallflowers for outdoor containers, to unusual houseplants and cacti and succulents.

This is one of the most important months of the year. Planning and planting now will make all the difference to how the gardens will look next year. The spring bulbs – tulips, narcissi, crocuses, muscari and puschkinias will be arriving any day and all but the tulips should go straight into the ground. Its better to hold out as long as possible before planting tulips to avoid the disease Fire blight, but equally if we had waited beyond the end of October last year we would not have got them into the ground before the unusually early frosts hardened the soil.

In a public garden like ours it is crucial that the visitor is always greeted with colour – both inside the greenhouses and outside in the borders. This year we have used dahlias, gladioli, fuschias, cosmos and annual rudbeckias to lengthen the flowering period in the various display borders, whilst the herbaceous border is continuing to look vibrant and rich due to the fantastic variety of Helenium that we use – Sahin’s Early, in combination with Helianthus ‘Loddon Gold’, Echinops ritro and Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’. We cut back many of our herbaceous perennials around the time of the Chelsea Flower Show (‘the Chelsea Chop’), and this method ensures that we have continuous flower colour until October, as well as reducing the need to stake our borders. Another herbaceous plant that really earns its place in the gardens at this time of year is Geranium ‘Rozanne’ – my all time favourite with blue purple flowers that keep appearing from the end of June to October.

By the end of the month many of our trees and shrubs will really start to display beautiful autumn colour – particular favourites of mine are Cotinus ‘Grace’, Cornus ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’, Cercidiphyllum and of course the wonderful Acers. We did lose one of our loveliest Acers to the cold winter last year – an Acer palmatum - the bark just cracked and peeled off, killing the tree. I am crossing my fingers that another superb specimen which lost half its bark, will be able to make it through the next winter.

There is also lots of colour and vibrancy inside the glasshouses. The tropical house as ever is filled with lush leaves in many shades of green and purple, which set off all the rich tropical flowers such as ipomea, thunbergia, gingers, oleanders and mandevilla.

Our display greenhouse is also looking resplendent – fuschias, begonias and geraniums compete with oleanders, heliotropes and lantana to provide an exuberant display of flowers in purples, reds, oranges and pinks. Many of these plants are for sale and we also stock some herbaceous perennials and shrubs for sale.

I often forget to mention the Cactus House in my blog and I shouldn’t because it really is the jewel in our crown. Many visitors comment that it is the best Cactus House they have ever visited as it is so beautifully laid out and the split levels and slopes have allowed mature specimens of Opuntias and Euphorbias to grow to their full heights, providing excellent contrasts for aloes and kalanchoes. We are so lucky to receive help from the Inverness Cactus Society, in particular, Robert, Fiona, Walter and Rita, who carry out pruning, replanting and provide expert advice.

We are now into July – for a brief time we have a respite from sowing seeds and potting on plugs and the key word for our gardeners this month is watering. Ironically today, at the time of writing – it is pouring with rain – but even on rainy days hanging baskets and containers may need watering.

This is the time of year when the planning and work in the autumn and spring is coming to fruition at the Floral Hall. We fed our outside borders with compost and manure in the autumn and the perennials are growing richly and lushly; we sowed seeds of annuals such as Cosmos, Larkspur and Calendula in February and March the they are just be coming into flower now; we planted up dahlia tubers and lily bulbs in March and they are now rewarding us with big blooms in rich colours.

The herbaceous border is about to undergo a transformation – the pinks, blues and purples of early summer are soon to be replaced with the hot colours of high summer – red, orange and yellow from Heleniums, Rudbeckias and Sedum, whilst our rockery is still glowing with the pinks and oranges of helianthemums. The duck has also chosen to sit on her second clutch of eggs in the rockery – she has laid them in the middle of a Hebe and is apparently unpeturbed by curious visitors.

Inside there is lots to see – many of the Cacti are flowering in the Cactus House - Hibiscus, Thunbergia, Bouganivillea and Plumbago are all flowering in the Tropical House, and our display green house is still full of lovely geraniums, fuschias and container and annual bedding for sale. We also have some perennials for sale – mainly those plants which grow successfully in the Floral Hall gardens and which we know are hardy enough to survive a Highland winter.

The trainees at our project for adults with learning disabilities have been trialling a new crop – cut flowers. So far the bunches that they have produced have looked beautiful and sold immediately

This year, for the first time, there are a series of summer activities available for children through the summer holidays. Information about these activities is available on our website.

June is a lovely month. The borders in the Floral Hall gardens are lush and green and the first herbaceous plants are beginning to flower. At this time of year it is purple, pink and blue which dominate the colour schemes outside and these colours are well set off by the golds, greens, silvers and purples of young leaves on trees, shrubs and grasses. June is also the best time to see the alpine plants flowering on our Scree border – helianthemums, phlox and alpine asters clashing happily in shades of pink, yellow and orange.

The annual treat in the garden every June is the birth of the first clutch of ducklings, hatched by our proud and protective, resident mother duck. We currently have nine ducklings who at the time of writing are swimming in the small pond in our rockery garden – very sweet in the sunshine.

We also have some new residents in the pond in the sub tropical house – 5 new baby Koi carp which are currently too nervous of the bigger fish to come out of their hiding place under ferns hanging down into the water.

Other good things to see inside are the carnivorous plants, some of which have grown 30cm since being planted in February; the many different Hibiscus plants with flowers ranging from apricot to rich rococo red, and the climbing vines – purple Ipomea and red and yellow Thunbergia.

We still have plenty of plants for sale ranging from herbaceous plants to annuals and houseplants, herbs, vegetable seedlings, strawberries, tomatoes and hanging baskets.

April was so busy at the Floral Hall that the blog didn’t get written so there is lots to catch up on in May.

Our Carniverous plants display, set up in February, has been really exciting to watch develop as none of our small team of gardeners has had any experience of growing Sarracenias, Sundews and Venus Fly Traps. We have given the plants a boggy environment, with full sunshine, and we only water them with rainwater. The Sarracenias – whose jug shaped leaf traps are like the heads of cobras, have sent up tall flower stalks with unusual lime green flowers on them and the Sundews are successfully trapping midges.

In the Sub- Tropical Glass House the bananas are ripening, the Hibiscus plants have started to bloom in a variety of shades from deep red to orange and pink, and we are tending a crop of baby peaches.

Outside, the tulips in the Herbaceous Border have been looking fabulous – a bold, clashing mixture of reds, pinks, orange and yellow. Now the alliums are preparing to take over, and they will work well with huge clumps of geraniums that will flower from late May to July in shades of blue and purple.

Our working greenhouses, cold frames and outside staging are also packed with plants, many grown from seed, waiting to go into various borders to provide a long season of summer colour – Echium ‘Blue Bedder’ for the raised beds, carmine red Cosmos for the Central Show beds and Larkspur and Mallow for the Cottage Garden Border.

Our large ‘No 4’ Greenhouse is looking lovely – it is packed with plants for sale – Regal Pelargoniums, Fuschias, Impatiens, and many basket and container bedding plants. There are also many perennial plants for sale – examples of those plants we grow in the various borders through the Floral Hall gardens.

We also have a range of vegetable and herb seedlings, grown by the trainees at our Project for Adults with Learning Disabilities.

Finally we have a new guest at the Floral Hall – she is called Lucy and is a Bearded Dragon Lizard from Australia, kindly loaned to us by Nick Martin.

Jobs to do this month

• Plant up hanging baskets
• Keep newly planted trees and shrubs well watered
• Stake perennial plants
• Lightly trim box hedging
• Check plants for pests and diseases

For many years, as a jobbing gardener and designer, the plants that I loved most were herbaceous perennials – those are the reliable flowering plants that come up in British gardens in the spring, produce flowers in the warmer months, and then die down completely in the autumn, their roots providing underground food and storage organs over the long winter months.

But then I came to the Floral Hall and discovered whole new worlds of plants to love – tropical plants from Costa Rica, Madagascar and Asia, and desert plants from South America and Australia. The more I work with these amazing and beautiful plants the more I want to go to their countries of origin and see them growing in the wild.

And now there is a whole new group of plants that I am finding out about and falling for as we have set up a new habitat at the Floral Hall for carnivorous plant species. We already had some lovely carnivorous plants at the Floral Hall – the pitcher plants (Nepenthes), much beloved by our younger visitors, whose long, jug shaped leaf tips trap insects and dissolve them into a delicious fly soup, but these are tropical plants and need the hot steamy atmosphere of the tropical house. Our new carnivorous plants – sundews (Drosera spp), venus fly traps and sarracenias, are the types that grow in acid peat bogs throughout Europe and swamps in the deep south of North America. We are growing them in a cooler area of our glass houses – the unheated link between the tropical house and the cactus house, where we hope we can create the right bright and boggy conditions for them to thrive.

There is so much going on inside the glasshouses that it is easy to forget that spring is trying to assert itself outside in the gardens. Tulip bulbs continue to push their way up through the soil despite more sleet and snow and the pretty, tiny ornamental cherry trees in our raised beds – Prunus kojo-no-mai, are covered in buds.

Many visitors ask about the flowering plants that grow in our outside gardens and we are now selling a range of these lovely herbaceous perennials that are reliable and hardy for our tough Scottish winters. If you have a greenhouse or some form of protection you can also buy summer bedding, tomato plants and a variety salads, grown by our adults with learning disabilities and on sale for very reasonable prices.

It’s a great privilege to be a gardener at the Floral Hall and I am grateful for every day that I have the opportunity to come and work here. To be able to watch bananas ripening in the middle of January; to pick mandarin oranges when the ground is white and frozen outside; to look at heartbreakingly beautiful orchids flowering for weeks on end through the winter when they are so far from their native homes of Brazil and Costa Rica; to work amongst so much spectacular tropical greenery and colour in the heart of the Scottish Highlands – these are unique experiences and ones we never take for granted.

Outside in the gardens most plants are still brown and bare but the Witch hazel is covered in pale flowers like narrow crinkled ribbons and looking and smelling absolutely beautiful.

There are other signs that spring is on its way – the green tips of daffodils and crocuses are pushing through the ground and despite the frost and snow the first weeds are appearing alongside the dwarf irises in the Alpine borders – demanding attention from the gardeners.

The guided school tours that we offer during the spring and summer months provide local school children with a chance to learn about the different environments that plants grow in across the world, and how plants adapt to suit their environment. However we are aware that most visitors to the Floral Hall are not provided with the same opportunities to understand about the wide variety of species that we grow here.

To try and remedy this situation, this year we are aiming to provide more information by providing interpretation boards on tropical rainforest plants, desert plants and carnivorous plants, and fact sheets on individual plants. We also aim to provide planting plans to provide more information on the plants growing outside in the herbaceous and mixed borders.

We will also be increasing the amount of plants that we grow for sale and, in addition to our usual daily sales, are planning two special plant sale days to sell the plants that are grown by the attendees at our Garden Project for adults with learning disabilities. More information about these plant sales will soon be available on the website.

Surveying the crisp white snow covering the outside gardens at the Floral Hall today it is hard to visualise the bright colours of the borders in the height of summer last year. It is even harder to believe that in 6 weeks time the first of the spring bulbs should be appearing – dwarf irises and snowdrops first, then a mass dwarf narcissi bulbs planted this autumn, and then, if all goes to plan, layer of brilliantly coloured tulips in all the beds in April and May, which we raced to get into the borders before the end of October. In some parts of Britain it is possible, and indeed advisable, to leave tulip bulb planting until December as late planting avoids the danger of tulip blight. If we had followed that advice at the Floral Hall our spring display would have been without the 1500 tulip bulbs we planted because of the early snow.

Although winter has come so soon, and the snow and ice appear to be interminable, the knowledge that bulbs will unfailingly fight their way through frozen ground to mark the spring is the vision that I hold on to see me through the darkness of these short days.

As a gardener I miss seeing colour at this time of year but at the Floral Hall we are very lucky to be able to get a ‘colour fix’ every day from the vivid, tropical flowers in the tropical house. At the moment we have species of Strelitzias (Bird of Paradise plant) providing orange and purple; we have glorious varieties of Thunbergia – some with stunning red and yellow flowers, others with purple flowers; and many different Hibiscus varieties ranging from deep red and orange flowers to apricot and pink. All these flowers are set off by the lush green leaves of a great range of tropical plants, vines and palms.

The ever reliable Mandarin tree is carrying a good crop of mandarins and there are lemons, limes and guavas ripening on other trees. I am also delighted to see a fresh young bunch of bananas beginning to ripen.

The trainees at our Garden Project – our project for adults with learning disabilities – are busy making natural Christmas decorations such as wreaths, table decorations and garlands, from materials that they have collected in the gardens. They are also making sure that the birds don’t go hungry by filling up the bird feeders with nuts and seeds and making fat balls to hang in the bushes.