This year as well as sharing my year in photos I thought it'd be interesting to take a look back at a year in my garden. We've achieved quite a bit this year so that's one of the reasons for pulling everything together, but it's not just a "glory" post as I plan to do something similar next week for our year on the plot, and that will be far from that!

But that's next week...

So starting in January I was waiting for my grass to grow, quite impatiently so I could make use of my new Stihl trimmer. But by the end of the month, there was little progress and in fact after a few days in Austria I returned home to a frosty garden, pretty but not much use otherwise.

In February I found some bulbs I'd forgotten to plant and the hellebores signalled that Spring really was on its way, definitely something to celebrate.

By March the dappled sunlight was tempting me out into the garden more and more, but more sunlight meant the start of the weeds, oh joy!

MARCH: DAPPLED SUN, LOTS OF WEEDS AND A PRODUCTIVE DAY

April saw me Spring Cleaning the greenhouse, and it looked much better for it too - from the reflections of me in the greenhouse show me in shorts, so it must have been warm! It didn't take long to fill though, by the end of the month I was reporting it was already full.

In May's garden update we'd started work on adding the edging to the circles and with MOH a perfectionist, it was taking a while. But it was worth it when we added the slate to our circles (and I'm sure you've seen at least one or two photos of these since then!)

May was a busy month for us in the garden, and our yucca wanted to get in on the act too and set about flowering, which we were very grateful for. I also spoke to Katie Rushworth from ITV's Love Your Garden and got some advice and confidence to start tackling two of our garden's problem areas.

By the start of June I had a new favourite spot for a cuppa after a busy Bank Holiday weekend where I was sidelined temporarily by an insect bite and where we had lots of great help from my SIL and her husband, without them I'm not sure we'd have made the progress we did.

With my leg recovered it wasn't long before I was using my new secateurs to tame my patio trellis and I shared the start of our gabion basket journey, though in truth it had started earlier in May.

Our big party took place in June, and it was hot, hot, hot. So hot that we had to abandon plans to cook pizza, but were very grateful to have a new parasol to keep cool under. There were gifts of plants, including the hibiscus and by the end of the month I was reacquainting myself with my greenhouse.

In July I was sharing how we filled our gabion baskets and of course it wasn't the conventional way. And by the end of the month we were storing logs for the pizza oven in a further installation of gabion baskets, shortly followed by how I'd used some as planters. I told you it wasn't conventional.

In August I noticed my succulents were flowering, as were the agapanthus and the giant fuchsias which I'd bought as tiny, tiny bedding plants what seemed a long time ago. Our new sleeper bed had filled out too and was close to overflowing.

One thing's for sure and that's that my summer bedding plants had longevity this year. In September they were hanging on alongside the autumn colours, and that was to continue right up to the end of the year.

SEPTEMBER: AND THE SUMMER BEDDING CONTINUES

And much later than normal, it wasn't until November that we put our garden to bed.

The weather continued to be mild, but has since more than made up for it as demonstrated by my only December gardening post - what a difference a day makes. The Saturday saw us dash out into the garden to hastily cover up the pizza oven and logs with tarpaulin, pick the last of the chillies (in December?!) before waking up to a dusting of snow. Not very much of course - this is London - but a dusting nonetheless. I've never been more proud of being a just-in-time-kinda-girl!

I hope you enjoyed this look at my garden throughout the year as much as I have reliving it creating this post. It's still not finished, and even when I think I can tick that box, I know there'll still be plenty more to do, that's the life of a gardener, hey?

I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes over the coming year, and how many of the things from October's to do list we achieve...