I’m not one for new year’s resolutions – except when it comes to my garden

I don’t love gardening to-do lists – they make it feel too much like work – but I do think there’s value in thinking about what you’d like to do with your garden this year. Perhaps you haven’t been out in it for weeks, or maybe just for a few minutes here and there, to add the sprout leaves to the compost bin. But while January might be the sleepiest time in the garden – perhaps a snowdrop swelling somewhere, but otherwise fallen leaves and perennials tucked well beneath the earth – it’s still the start of a new year.

I have never been a huge one for new year resolutions, but I make gentle exceptions for my garden. Gardening is a practice that exists in the temporal space of hope. At this time of year, we imagine warmer days and flick through seed catalogues (if you want something more substantial, I recommend Katharine S White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, a collection of the New Yorker fiction editor’s columns reviewing 1950s seed catalogues). The whole horticultural year unfurls before us: what will we do with it?

Last year wasn’t, all told, a big gardening year for me. I wrote a book and the baby became a toddler who liked to stack flower pots. When I did get time outside I mostly used it to sit in the arbour, reading a book. Actually, that was something that I resolved to do this time last year – to spend more time being in the garden and less time doing. It taught me a lot, namely that a well-enough planned garden will look after itself quite happily, and that a good relationship with a garden is like any other: it benefits from time investment.

For 2025, I would like to make the most of the garden we have while we’re in it. There’s a fair chance that we will move this year, and I suspect my grief at leaving behind my first proper garden will only be heavier if I feel I hadn’t spent all the time I’d wanted to here. So! I will be doing the things that make me happy: making sure I take tea breaks outside and cutting flowers for the house.

I’ll take photographs when things grow and note how the sunlight moves around the garden first thing in the morning, charting the passing of the weeks. I’ll eat the sorrel and parsley and oregano that grows in the gravel. I’ll smell the roses.

You may well have grander plans. A tree to plant. A new bed to cut. A vegetable patch and some new types of carrot to try. Maybe this is the year you build a garden studio, or rip up some hard landscaping and see what grows there instead.

January is a good time to nurture these ideas, while everything else is waiting to grow.