Women?s Institute is waving the flag for homegrown food
After 100 years, the WI has changed ? but it?s still celebrating their home-grown bounty in style.

The Women?s Institute may be nearly 100 years old, but it is alive and growing all over the country. Even in the capital, groups such as the Borough Belles, the Shoreditch Sisters and the Dalston Darlings are meeting, gardening and enjoying themselves.

When it comes to gardening, rules can be broken
Plants can?t help but surprise us, which means gardeners can be selective with traditional advice

Horticultural advice can be very prescriptive. Take the saying that you should ?cut your box hedges on Derby Day?. The idea was that, in warm areas, your box hedging would be extremely fluffy if you left it until the first weekend in June. Maybe the advice was more accurate in the past. If you lived in 1827 (when the lawn mower was invented) the cooler climate meant you would have to cut the grass for a month less than we do now (according to weather records), so hedge growth would have been much delayed, too.

How to store summer-flowering bulbs for winter
Summer-flowering bulbs and corms, such as gladioli and begonias, need to be dug up within the next few weeks so they can be safely stored for the winter.

Although you can take a chance and leave them in the ground in warmer regions of the UK, lifting them now will help more to survive and give you room to plant your spring bulbs. Once the leaves and stems have turned yellow you can dig up gladioli carefully, making sure you don?t spear them on a garden fork. Remove the soil around them and cut the stem down to just above the bulb.

Friends, family, Royals and 600 domestic staff mourn together at Chatsworth House funeral for ?Debo?, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and last of the Mitford sisters

600 staff lined route as cortege departed from Chatsworth House for the funeral at St Peter’s Church, Edensor. Elvis Presley’s How Great Thou Art featured in service, while brass band played New York, New York during burial. Prince Charles scattered earth on her wicker coffin as she was laid to rest next to her husband, Andrew Cavendish. The Dowager was obsessed with Elvis, enjoyed keeping chickens and country pursuits and hated Tony Blair. She was friends with JFK and Winston Churchill and once had tea with Hitler with whom her sister was besotted. ‘Debo’ married Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1941 and moved into Chatsworth estate, dedicating her life to its running. She had seven children of whom three survived – the 12th Duke Peregrine, 70, Lady Emma, 71, and Lady Sophia, 57.

Spectacular images show an amazing garden in the Black Country which shows off the full beauty of Autumn
Marie and Tony Newton spent years and £15,000 transforming the back lawn and flowerbeds at their home in Walsall.

These incredible photographs show how 65-year-old couple Marie and Tony Newton have transformed their back garden into a stunning autumnal oasis which is now visited by thousands of people.The green-fingered pair, who taught themselves gardening, spent years and £15,000 working on their Walsall garden, using a vast array of plants and flowers to create a place bursting with colour. Mr and Mrs Newton have grown around 3,000 different species of plant including 140 Japanese maple trees, 20 golden kings, 15 juniper blue stars and two huge Virginia creepers.