Look how everyone's e-garden is growing

E-GARDENING is this year's thing, but not quite the new rock 'n' roll if Garden Guides (www.gardenguides.com) is anything to go by. If this site was a plant, it would be a spiky shrub. No pictures, just reams and reams about dividing perennials and hardening off your transplants.

For the hardcore only. You want pictures, go and buy a magazine.

The Virtual Gardener (www.

vg.com) has at least discovered the joys of the garden fence: there are discussion forums on everything from the blood orange tree to herbaceous ground cover. There is also a mind-boggling Plant Encyclopaedia that enables you to search for plants by simply typing in the distinguishing attributes you are looking for.

Nothing for "indestructible, pink, self-watering", however.

The failing of many gardening sites is that you can find a definition of vegetalis obscuris, but not, say, how to build a patio.

You'd think that Titchmarsh and co's web offshoot, Expert Gardner (www.expertgarden er), would help but I rather fell at the first fence, trying to decide which Expert Gardener "community" was the one for me - the urban, country or themed garden. Get it right and hours of chat await. And expert guidance too, if they're not out digging up their spuds or whatever.

When they're not trying to inform, gardening sites are trying to sell. For sheer slick, click through, give me your bucks for bulbs, the prize goes to the US Garden.com (www.garden.com) where keywords in every article link to a product in its shop. Its own plant finder suggests suitable seeds for your kind of plot (dark/leafy/sunny) etc. The resulting bulbs (photographed in full bloom) are displayed alongside their price tag and you have the option of stuffing the seed packets into your online wheelbarrow.

But the "how not to sell online" prize must go to one of the biggest UK sites, Gone Gardening (www.gonegardening.

com). The shop is a loosely tacked-on extra rather than an integral part of the site. None of the articles relate to the goods for sale in the shop, so your credit card is more likely to stay in your pocket. A good thing for cash-strapped plantspeople. A bad thing for Gone Gardening.

The Royal Horticultural Society (www.rhs.org.uk/) does its best to get you digging in, with a design that's as cool and uncluttered as a white orchid, and throws in a bit of science to boot. But only two UK sites come close to offering the slickness of Garden.com - e-garden (www.e-garden.co.uk) and Greenfingers (www.greenfingers.com).

E-garden is bright and breezy - news, tips (though I'm not sure about that garden soap opera, Kate Lee's Diary of a Hothouse Office) and good links - and the Latin Translator to explain a plant's botanical moniker is a boon.

But we love Greenfingers because it tells us in detailed, easy-to- find articles how to plant grass, lay turf and build a patio. It also looks, and works, like a useful website.

Interactive search features abound. There's a garden jargon buster while its Plant Finder, complete with illustrations and colour swatches, tries its damndest to identify that unknown tree or shrub in your garden that it can't even see. Greenfingers gives gardeners a reason to get online. It's doing something right because we know we'll be back. After the slabs are laid, there's edges to be done.

If you can't be bothered .... visit the National Garden Scheme (www.ngs.org.uk/) which supplies a list of gardens to visit, many by appointment only.

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