YOUR GARDEN: DIGGING A HOL

JUNGLE, Japanese, Mediterranean, traditional English or American prairie...with a few clever tricks it's easy to turn your back yard into your favourite holiday destination, even at this time of year.

Evergreen plants will make sure that your garden doesn't look dull and bare in winter, so build a solid framework on which you can incorporate seasonal bedding, fashionable fabrics and finishing touches such as stylish plant supports, lighting and decorative labels or ornaments.

Choose tough, weather-resistant plants like cordylines, yuccas, phormiums, spotted laurels, bergenia and fatsia for the exotic look of far-flung places. You only need to add brightly coloured pots and furnishing in sizzling shades of orange, red and yellow and you might even begin to believe that you're in the Caribbean!

Rhododendrons, camellias, pines, bamboos and ferns with stepping stones and asymmetric paved areas plus, of course, a decorated tea room will transport you to the Orient. Dig up your lawn and replace with raked gravel, plant a flowering cherry in a prominent position, install a tranquil pool and edge your beds with bamboo hoops for authenticity.

Ornamental grasses have proved to be a great boon to the busy gardener. They're low maintenance and can withstand all kinds of weather including year-long drought and will give you the American prairie look.

Similar to the English cottage garden, it involves interweaving perennials such as red hot pokers, day lilies and heleniums but in this case between grasses. The effect is particularly magical in autumn when backlit with the sun filtering through the feathery flowerheads. In winter the evergreen grasses look especially stunning when coated with a silvery rind of frost or strung together with dew- encrusted spiders' webs.

Silvery foliage plants, grey-green rosemary and euphorbias and blue grasses fit the character of the Med. For a romantic French style add cast iron or wirework furniture and jardinere or planters. Transform wooden features with pale blue paint, whitewash walls and pull together a collection of weathered terracotta pots filled with pretty winter hardy pansies in pastel shades. Include box balls and twisted spires or create similar features with ivy trained onto wire frames.

Topiary can be used to create the traditional English garden too. Take home a few ideas from some of Britain's great houses such as using low hedges of Buxus Suffruticosa to edge flowerbeds. Yew and privet is also suitable for creating topiary and especially for larger shapes such as strutting peacocks.

Other key winter plants to take from the grand country houses to your suburban small garden are holly, ivy, mahonia, witch hazel, daphne, viburnum, Christmas box and daphne odorata. These will also provide you with plenty of trimmings for Christmas decorations - what more could you ask from your garden?

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