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is so unexpected and so swift that you're only able to take six plants from your existing garden.So which six plants will you choose? Will you go for something big - a favourite cherry or a noble oak? Maybe an evergreen to liven up your winter? A rose

for the one with the AGM sticker. But back to my confusing list of alliums, I notice that there are fifteen AGM plants. To make your job of choosing them even simpler, here are my top five:Allium caeruleum: a late-flowering, small-headed blue variety. Height 0.6

, let alone a tree - I know of herbaceous plants that achieve that height in a season. It's difficult to choose a tree that is guaranteed not to get any bigger than the height of a short giraffe, but here is a small selection that roughly fits the bill

that once planted, a bamboo will spread like a forest fire and forcibly colonise great chunks of garden. The truth is, as with all things in gardening, that if you choose the wrong plant for your situation then you are setting yourself up for tears

A client of mine said something curious to me this week, as we were discussing what to plant in her newly-landscaped garden: "I hope you're not going to give me any of those ghastly cabbagey things".Strangely, I instantly knew that she was talking

. Like the lives of James Dean or Tupac Shakur, it's short and spectacular. Thereafter, the leaves can be a bit dull and cast a lot of dry shade, so be wary of planting cherries as the sole centrepiece in a small garden. Plant small trees instead

with daffodils in an almost unquenchable variety of shapes and colours, almost all of them shades of yellow. Given the joys of this or this or this or (almost) any one of the 20,000 available varieties, why choose a forsythia for your spring hit of yellow?It also

eventually — after 15 years or so — reach an approximate height of nine metres, so probably aren't trees to choose if you're in a hurry.So all very lovely but, I hear you cry, why should this tree be good enough in early February to warrant a blog post all

are fattening, the earliest pussies are appearing on the willows (faintly interesting fact: in the Sound of Music, Marta - one of the cute kiddies - chooses pussy willow as one of her favourite things) and daffodils are pushing relentlessly upwards. I am not so