MyGardenFinder.com

What do you do if your garden’s got completely out of hand and you know there’s little chance of you getting on top of it any time soon?

Or perhaps you’d love some professional input but don’t want to take out a second mortgage to get it, or you’ve always dreamed of surprising someone with by bringing in a gardening team, but have no idea how to organise it.

Well, here are some innovative ideas from ActivityGifts.co.uk that might be just the thing. They have packages to help you design and sort out your garden without spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds to do it.

Treat yourself or give as a gift to a keen gardener (or would-be gardener) close to you:

• Garden design package - £165. Create the garden of your dreams with guidance from professionals. A DIY kit will be posted to you to enable you to complete a site survey of your garden. An expert supplier will respond to the information you supply with a detailed scale design, planting scheme and step-by-step guides to completing the projects involved. A great opportunity to transform your garden into what you have always wanted, without the expense of a team coming in to do it for you.
• One-day garden makeover - £350. Transform your garden with a one-day attack. At least two gardeners and labourers will arrive at your home to give your garden a ‘deep clean’ including tidying, clearing, weeding, pruning shrubs, reconditioning the soil, cleaning hard surfaces and anything else needed to get your garden into a more manageable state.
• And finally… if you’ve overdone it in the garden and are feeling like a wreck as a result, why not treat yourself with a spa and pampering day to help yourself recover? Click here to see the options on offer.

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Looking for some seasonal reads, either for yourself or for loved ones, until spring comes and you can get back out into the garden?

Lay aside those seed catalogues and take a look at this lot. There’s bound to be something on the list that will suit your needs perfectly:

• The Mediterranean Gardener - Hugh Latymer and Niccolo Grassi - £12.91. This book reveals the rich diversity of trees, shrubs, flowering plants and cacti that will flourish in regions where summers are hot and dry and winters mild and wet. There are descriptions of more than 300 plants, most of them readily obtainable. Many of the subjects are illustrated in colour photographs.
• The RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening - Christopher Bricknell - £26.60. The definitive practical guide to gardening, from the experts at the RHS. From gardening techniques, planning and maintenance to growing plants, fruits or vegetables, create a thriving garden by following their unrivalled advice.
• The Allotment Handbook - Caroline Foley - £9.87. Allotment gardening is becoming increasingly popular as more and more people discover that growing their own organic vegetables, fruit and herbs is an attractive and achievable option. Gardening also has additional benefits: it is an excellent way to take exercise and can be very therapeutic. The Allotment Handbook is full of practical information and tips on every aspect of growing produce on an allotment.
• Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners - Christopher Lloyd - £15.20. The great plantsman tells the story of his Exotic Garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex which has delighted, and sometimes shocked, summer visitors since it replaced the Edwardian rose garden nearly fifteen years ago. The rose garden, designed by Edward Lutyens, had remained unchanged for nearly eighty years. Then, in 1993, much to the horror of many establishment figures, Lloyd asked his newly appointed head gardener Fergus Garrett to eliminate the roses. And then the fun began…
• Life in the Undergrowth - David Attenborough - £15.20. Enter a secret universe teeming with life and in all our gardens, yet one which never see it. It is a world of sex, drugs and violence and it contains not just bugs, beetles and creepy-crawlies, but scorpions and centipedes, mites and mantids, spiders and dragonflies. Witness the dramatic battles between predator and prey that are happening in the corner of your living room and in your lawn and borders.
• The Naming of Names - Anna Pavord - £25.50. A book that traces the search for order in the natural world, a search that for hundreds of years occupied some of the most brilliant minds in Europe. In a world full of plaques and poisons, there was a practical need to name and recognise different plants: most medicines were made from plant extracts. Anna Pavord takes us on a thrilling adventure into botanical history.
• Birds Britannica - Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey - £26.60. A work of huge importance as well as a handsome, easy-to-read, comprehensive cultural study of all the birds in Britain, species by species. This is not an identification guide, instead it attempts to describe the interaction of birds and humans and, in so doing, captures the essence of why birds matter.
• Meadows - Christopher Lloyd and Jonathan Buckley - £21.25. A meadow of grasses and wildflowers is a breathtaking sight and one that some gardeners crave to reproduce. The community created by flowers and grasses, butterflies, grasshoppers and other fauna, is rich and colourful - but fast disappearing. Full of practical information, this book is packed with all the advice for creating and maintaining your meadow that keen gardeners could desire.
• Moro East - Samuel Clark and Samantha Clark - £17.50. Sam and Sam Clark renew their passion for the food of Spain and the Muslim Mediterranean, but this time they find their inspiration in an East End allotment. Bordered by the River Lea and the Grand Union Canal, on its own little island, Manor Garden allotments may seem a world away from Moorish Spain or Morocco. However, once beyond the gates, you are transported to the Eastern Mediterranean by a community of Turks and Cypriots who cultivate and cook an extraordinary range of ingredients.
• Nature Cure - Richard Mabey - £6.07. In 1999 Britain’s foremost nature writer fell into a severe depression. He could neither work nor play, his money ran out and, worst of all, the natural world became meaningless. Then he gradually recovered and started to write again, thanks to the joy of discovering a new landscape. This remarkable book is an account of that first year of a new life.

Looking to give or receive some great ethical presents this Christmas? Present Aid is part of the charity Christian Aid and offers a great way to find a thoughtful ‘virtual’ gift for a gardener that will also make a practical difference for some of the world’s poorest people.

As well as buying for others you can set up a gift list for yourself. And every present comes with a free ring tone for WAP-enabled phones.

Here are our top 10 suggestions:

• A can of worms - help a Bolivian farmer fertilise their fields. Organic, cheaper and better for the environment than chemicals, they enrich the soil and help produce more and better crops.
• 2,000 saplings - buy these for a green-fingered friend or loved one and help promote reforestation in Honduras where new trees are vital, acting as wind breaks, holding soil together in tropical storms and preventing mudslides.
• Watering can - It hardly ever rains in the Niger River delta in central Mali, so Hawa Diarra was very pleased with the watering can she now uses to feed and support her family.
• Wheelbarrow - Antadou Kassogue from Mali faces a constant battle against soil erosion, and uses the wheelbarrow to transport the stones he needs to build walls on his land which stop the rain from washing away the soil and its nutrients.
• Beehive - For farmers like Wilson Rosel in Bolivia, bees are a lifeline. “With the money we make from the honey we can buy food and clothes,” Wilson explains. “Even if our rice crop fails.”
• Rainwater harvester - people in the coastal region of southwest Bangladesh have no access to fresh, safe water. Villagers have turned to the sky, capturing and storing clean, safe and sustainable rainwater.
• Seeds and tools - Twelve-year-old Jethro loves the new vegetable garden at his school in Zimbabwe, because once they’ve learned to tend and grow the vegetables, the students get to eat them!
• Ducks - in the face of unprecedented climate change, duck farming helps people like Sunita Ranidash in Bangladesh become self-sufficient, freeing them up from loans and allowing them to work towards a more secure future.
• A herd of goats - A herd of goats can go a long way in a place like Bangladesh. A goat provides milk to drink and sell, while its droppings can be used as fertiliser. This helps people like Johura Begum grow better vegetables to feed their families.
• Greenhouse - in Bolivia, Antonia and her husband grow vegetables in their new greenhouse, ensuring that their children are healthier and their own diet is much improved. They also grow medicinal eucalyptus saplings.