There are a host of reasons to wear gardening gloves

– mine have slowly but surely migrated from simple hand vanity to the rather less glamourous need to pander to small children at a moment’s notice. Either way, cold fingers can ruin any gardening experience, and for warmth there is no substitute for real leather. Gold Leaf’s Winter Touch leather gloves are really good for warmth. For protection, Sophie Conran’s gauntlets are favourites. They offer a very good compromise between sensation-less gardening and injury, especially because they protect right up to the elbows – I can quite happily grab a thorny stem and strip it wearing these. Next are fair-weather gloves, which will help you to do all the weeding, lifting, pruning and digging whilst offering a layer of protection. For this I love the neoprene biker-like Ultimax gloves by Town and Country – padded in all the right places but flexible too, whilst being easy to get on and off. They are my go-to all-round glove. Lastly, the new generation of super-light, super-thin gardening gloves such as those from Joe’s are a brilliant option for many gardening jobs. They are really just a tougher, knitted step-up from your marigolds (which, by the way, are a sound option too, if you happen to be glove-less). With all these gloves it’s worth scraping your fingernails over a bar of soap before putting them on, as none of them will make handwashing redundant.