With wintery weather hitting all parts of the country there is little work that can be done in the garden.
Indeed, the best thing you can do is stay inside – and make sure you don’t walk on the lawn if you can help it.
Walking on snow will damage the shoots and will inhibit growth when it eventually comes in the Spring.
However, should there be a really heavy fall it is worth venturing forth to knock the snow off plants if it looks as if stems could be broken.
Really heavy falls of snow can even snap boughs of substantial trees, but leave repairing the damaged branches until the Spring if this happens. You may need to prune and re-shape lilac and laburnum bushes if this happens.
And if you can do so safely, remove heavy falls of snow from greenhouse roofs.
If you have plants in pots you should move them out of the morning sun; if they are already damaged you can cut back the frost damaged parts to the first undamaged bud.
If you are really determined to grow something, then you could set seeds in a propagator of vegetables like chillies or aubergines for transplanting later in greenhouses.
But it’s still to early to set a handful of seeds in a pot on the window sill.
There are many new varieties of annual flowers and vegetables to choose from every year, but the experiences gardener will probably have his or her favourites and will probably stick by those.
So now is the season for the less energetic gardener. Stoke up the fire and stay inside and read the seed and plant catalogues. Other than pruning and dealing with overgrown hedges there’s little else to do at the moment.