With a new year comes new plans, but don’t forget to relax in and enjoy your garden at this time of year, too

I don’t love gardening to-do lists – they make it feel too much like work – but I do think there’s value in thinking about what you’d like to do with your garden this year. Perhaps you haven’t been out in it for weeks, or maybe just for a few minutes here and there, to add the sprout leaves to the compost bin. But while January might be the sleepiest time in the garden – perhaps a snowdrop swelling somewhere, but otherwise fallen leaves and perennials tucked well beneath the earth – it’s still the start of a new year.

I have never been a huge one for new year resolutions, but I make gentle exceptions for my garden. Gardening is a practice that exists in the temporal space of hope. At this time of year, we imagine warmer days and flick through seed catalogues (if you want something more substantial, I recommend Katharine S White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden, a collection of the New Yorker fiction editor’s columns reviewing 1950s seed catalogues). The whole horticultural year unfurls before us: what will we do with it?