Dede Sophie

With more than 10pc of Audis sold in Ireland last year being electric, it’s clear that Volkswagen’s premium brand is playing its part in the push by the group towards an all-electric future, writes Brian Byrne. Nearly half of those sales were of the Q4 e-tron, the newest and smaller of the three Audi EVs available. My review car is newer still, as the Sportback version of the Q4 e-tron, and I was quite taken with the softer rear roofline compared to the full SUV version’s. It has the style of a coupe liftback, but without sacrificing any of the passenger space, and only mildly diminishing boot capacity. In size it not surprisingly is close to the VW ID.5 equivalent and a bit more compact than key competitor Hyundai’s Ioniq 5. I thought the car’s shape was very well displayed in the non-metallic grey — they call it Pebblestone — of the review car.  The Q4 e-tron stylists held on to the sense of a grille front end, which I still think gives an EV more presence than some of the flat front

Yes the weather is freezing. Yes it is the middle of December, but unlike our own garden which is sited in the milder climates of the south coast, the Exotic garden at RHS Wisley still has structure, seasonal colour, and a number of surprises that we didn’t expect to see!  The Fuschias and Abutilons are still in flower and despite a number of the key plants being wrapped in anticipation of winter frosts many of the specimen plants still have excellent ornamental value. In fact, now that some of the stock has died back or have been cut back to ground level other plants which were hidden in the greenery are now showing the splendour – in particular we found an amazing and extremely rare variegated Trachycarpus palm! So after following us around the gardens here at Wisley, why not follow our YouTube channel ‘Waling Talking Gardeners’ by clicking the ‘SUBSCRIBE’ button. It is absolutely free and you can be notified whenever we publish a new video by clicking onto the notification bell icon