Dennis finished what Ciara started in West Cumbria's gardens

Whatever your views are regarding climate change, one thing is becoming clearer – we are now experiencing increasingly wetter winters.

So, what does this mean for the garden? Well, quite a few things. Last week I talked about the importance and different types of garden fertilisers. Unfortunately fertilisers are not inert, and the wetter the weather the more leaching of nutrients from the garden. The requirement for applying fertilisers and maintaining nutrient levels will increase.

As gardeners, we work hard to ensure we have a garden with good soil ‘friability’ which is a key soil physical property so we can have good soil tillage for growing our plants – basically a soil that is not too sandy or heavy like clay. However, most soils are ‘indurate’ which is the opposite to that of a friable soil. To improve our soils and to achieve a more friable soil we often add and ding in well-rotted compost or farmyard mature.

This is something which we would do over the autumn and winter period, along with frosty weather, to help break up heavy soils. But with wetter winters this process is held back as soils themselves become more compacted with the heavy showers and flooding.

And we all know what a strong wind can do to a garden. In my own neighbourhood a few fence panels were blown over including a neighbouring low wall. When we do have a calm period it’s a good idea to check the garden following a storm, not just the garden structures but the plants as well, particularly anything tall as there are often signs of wind rock where the plant stem meets the ground and the wind makes a hole as the stem move. Simply firm them up again. Bush roses often suffer from wind rock, so keep an eye on them. Also, check the branches of large plants as these can often break or be damaged by the wind, again the branches can be tidied by giving the plant a prune.

Despite the annoyance of stormy weather, once they have passed it is surprising how the garden can quickly recover, and with increasing daylight the garden is now producing lots of colour. This has been mainly by the winter bulbs, though my narcissi are just beginning to colour up and indicating spring is just around the corner. The winter flowering bulbs have been very colourful this year and are just about going over. I’ve enjoyed the snowdrops this year and now is a good time to lift them and to create new drifts around the garden, this is called ‘lifting in the green’ If your looking for new varieties or wish to increase your own stocks, then many snowdrops along with other winter flowering bulbs are being sold online in there green.

This week's garden show plants are my Helleborus. Although my Helleborus niger has been flowering since December, hence its common name of Christmas rose, it is my ‘Lenten’ roses Helleborus Orientalis which are taking the eye. I have quite a few varieties displaying a range of flower colours and markings. Most are single flowers, but I have a few which are doubled flowers. I have talked about Hellebores in the past and they are one of my favourite plants to grow in a garden. They are easy to grow and do best in a shady, moist garden location. They can take a year or so to establish as they hate disturbance. so do plant where you intend them to grow, if you later lift them, they can suck and not flower again for a year or two.

There are quite a few species of hellebores, though you mainly see the Christmas and Lenten Roses growing in gardens, mainly because they seem to have the showy flowers. Did I say flower, well they are not actually flowers, though they may look like they are? In fact, Helleborus flowers are actually colourful leaf bracts, and its not just hellebores, the colourful Poinsettias we see at Christmas time are leaf bracts. The most colourful part of the Bougainvillea is its leaf bracts. Having said that, it is believed that a plant that has colourful bracts is natures way to attract pollinators so maybe a bract is more akin to a flower than a leaf.