By far the most important piece of advice for Christmas trees and conifers in pots is this: keep the potted Christmas trees only for a short time in their warm environment. Ideally, the trees are brought into the home on Christmas day and only stay there for a few days. After that, and perhaps even before that, the decorated little plants can continue to spread Christmas spirit on the terrace or on the balcony.

As a kid, it was clear to me that the Christmas tree had been brought and decorated by Father Christmas. Consequently, there was never anything to complain about the Christmas tree, for it had been adorned by a true saint! Who would dare to criticise something or just look critically at the tree to even some extent?

We don’t share the Scandinavian love of heading out to the forest to pick wild berries, which is a shame (as is the fact that most of us don’t have a forest on the doorstep that we could pick berries in!). But we can experience a similar joy by growing our own, and a lot of the Nordic berries are great choices for a British garden.

How you overwinter your citrus plants – contributes significantly to the successful growth of lemons, oranges, mandarin oranges and the like, and thus to a rich harvest of delicious citrus fruits.

The answer is actually short and concise: As late as possible. And here is the immediate second answer: no, do not put them inside now (in the middle of October)!

Recently, I was standing with my son in Copenhagen in front of a hotel entrance, perfectly fitted for a botanical lecture: "Here you see," I emphasised, "the youth form of Hedera helix, as this climbing ivy is called. The leaves are threefold, almost winged, it winds and grows for all it’s worth. But at some point the limit is reached, with this ivy quite precisely at the height of the hotel entrance’s awning, and the youthful, impetuous ivy will grow up, presumably after a tiny puberty phase that’s luckily hardly noticeable. It blooms out of season for us, but for the insects at just the right time, from the end of September to the middle of October, and then it starts to develop its fruits in the winter. Now the ivy is finally grown up and focuses on its offspring."

A few weeks ago I cut off a still immature lime from a finger lime tree and tried it. Finger limes are still so rare here in Central Europe and on the internet I have so often read about the exciting fruit content of these really very unusual, cucumber-shaped citrus fruits that come from the Australian jungle, that I couldn’t wait to try it any longer!

I would now like to talk about "cultivation". Cultivation as what man does with nature and perhaps also only means to do. The fig has almost forced itself upon man; it has infiltrated his religious and sexual symbolism, yes, it has indeed superimposed human sexuality in the truest sense of the word: as a fig leaf.

It is not too far to a phallic meaning that the fig and the fig wood with its milky juice also have. And the fig: the fig is divided longitudinally into two halves, broken, then the mouth and mostly the nose are immersed in the moist, reddish, fibrous fruit pulp in order to absorb all of its deliciousness.

In the course of its long history, the fig has often been amusing amidst all the confusion that it caused with its different types of fruit and its complicated pollination biology. The most extreme case is the total failure of Californian fig cultivation in the 80s and 90s of the 19th century.

I went back in time this summer, to learn a little about what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. Britain was a very different place back then. It was cooler and damper, and a lot of the land was covered in forest. Like us, our Paleolithic (stone age) ancestors had a sweet tooth, and would have made as much use as possible of the available fruits.

Berry season in Europe is well underway, also in the Western United States, where I vacationed for the past few weeks. Driving around in Oregon and Washington, it was hard not to notice the fresh fruit stands and I started focusing on the blueberries there. Most common in Oregon are the Highbush blueberries, which are perennial and long-living deciduous shrubs. They are self-fertile, however cross-pollination produces larger berries, which means if two or more cultivars are planted that ripen at different times the harvest season can be lengthened. Blueberries can be grown in beds, rows, hedges or individually. The dwarf varieties can be grown in containers. Oregon is number two in the United States for the production blueberries and there are even streets named after the fruit!

There are two types of raspberries that are important for horticulture: the famous European garden raspberry Rubus idaeus and the black American raspberry Rubus occidentalis (the variety Black Jewel).