Five garden gifts for a spring housewarming

Move into a house with a garden in March and this is what you inherit: a rotary washing line, a broken plastic chair and a lawn that is mostly moss. Everyone who comes to the housewarming brings a bottle of wine. What you actually need is a hose. If you are buying for someone with a new garden, or kitting out your own, these five things get used every week.

A hose that does not kink

The first thing a new garden needs is water, and the first thing a cheap hose does is twist into a knot behind the shed. Buy a kink-resistant one with a spray head that has a soft setting for seedlings and a hard one for rinsing the patio chairs. A wall-mounted reel keeps it off the ground, and a soaker hose for the beds does the slow, even watering that vegetables want.

For someone who has just moved, an affordable tap timer is the best gift in this category. The first weeks in a new house are chaos, and the timer waters the tomatoes while they are still looking for the box with the plates.

Three hand tools that last thirty years

A trowel, a pair of secateurs and a hand weeder do most of the work in a garden. Buy the ones with a proper grip and a stainless or forged blade, because these get used every Saturday, and the cheap trowel from the supermarket bends on the first root. Felco secateurs or a Sneeboer trowel are the kind of thing people inherit.

Put them in a trug or a canvas tool bag and it looks like a gift instead of a hardware run. Choose tools with bright handles; a green-handled trowel in long grass is lost until autumn. Add a pair of gloves that breathe, since the rubber-coated ones get sweaty by May.

Somewhere to sit

A garden without a seat is a chore list. One bench among the planting gives the whole space a point, and two chairs by the back door are enough for a coffee at eight in the morning or a beer at eight at night.

In a small garden a bistro set does the job without eating the lawn. Match the material to the house: powder-coated metal for a modern place, hardwood for an old one, wicker if the garden has more roses than right angles. This is also the gift that a group of friends can chip in for together, since a good bench costs a few hundred and a bottle of wine does not.

Lights make the evening longer

Solar path lights along the walk to the shed cost nothing to run and stop guests walking into the flower bed after dark. A string of festoon lights across the patio or through a tree turns the garden into a second room from April onwards.

Add one or two solar lanterns or an LED spotlight on a tree or a wall if you want the space to have some depth at night. Mixing a couple of light sources looks far better than one bright floodlight, and for new owners it is the way they find out what their garden looks like after sunset.

Plants that come back on their own

Spring is planting time, and hardy perennials give the best return for the least attention. Hostas, daylilies and ornamental grasses are nearly impossible to kill and cope with most soils, so they are safe even when you have no idea whether the recipient's garden faces north or south.

A starter set of a few bulbs, three herbs and an easy shrub, with plant labels and a card saying how much water each one wants, gives a new gardener a fair chance. A pile of unlabelled pots does not. If you are buying as a gift, check the plants suit the local climate; that is the detail that decides whether anything is still alive in July.

Buy early in the spring, while garden centres still have the full range and the good benches are in stock. If the housewarming is yours, put the exact hose and the exact bench on a wishlist before people start buying wine.