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they put up a fight. That's why they're so successful.Bittercress continues to frustrate me, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Barely has a seedling had time to get established than it's flowering, then forming seed pods. And those pods have a trick up

on such small bits of card!Another is a series of fifty garden flowers ranging from delphiniums and water lilies to annuals like bright red salvias and candytuft. Each card has a bit of information and some hints about cultivation written by Richard Sudell - who

.Although grown in the UK as annuals, chillies are perennial plants, so technically they can last for several years. The climate of their native South and Central America helps though. I once stayed in a hostel in Fiji that had lush, green chilli bushes growing

Alexander-Sinclair share their top 10 plants for small gardens, which offer year-round interest and colour.The round-headed leek bears round flower-heads that open green and turn a deep red with maturity. It prefers full sun and well-drained soil

... round shrubs, roses and flowers, along the base of the hedge, around fruit trees and bushes, and over the veg plot. Beans get a good, deep mulch of compost to help conserve soil moisture, too, but it's not just water retention that mulching is good for

and bamboos as the new stars of the border and containers.They come mainly from South Africa where they're found on the fynbos, a rich and diverse habitat made up of bulbs, perennials, annuals and shrubs. This area is occasionally swept by fire, but smoke

of lettuce etc.A word on fruit crops: this is taken to mean anything which has the seed in the part where it's edible, so: artichokes, courgettes, cucumbers are all classed as fruit as well as what we traditionally call fruit.Annual flowers should be planted

will be taken over for as long as is necessary and I will be oblivious to any complaints.First off are hardy annuals, such as Eryngium leavenworthii, which can be sown from February onwards under cover. I’ll also sow a few tomato seeds, though I find there

lucky the Central Committee for Agriculture may plant some of my annual flowers for the cutting bed I had planned, but for all I know they could be planning to dig the whole lot up and plant nothing but potatoes!

there are seedheads of annual poppies. There are still some in flower but they are very late - usually because they have sown themselves somewhere a little shadier or generally less conducive to enthusiastic growth.Left untroubled, the ripened and fading carcasses