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, your safest bet is the white double Dianthus 'Mrs Sinkins' which smells like the wrists of wood nymphs. It's one of the old garden pinks (great scent, short flowering season, most of them about 30cm high) and was originally bred in 1868 by John Sinkins

. Then it was mostly about greenery, this time it is about flowers.Everything is beginning to explode into colour. Looking out of my office window there is a sea of pink as the Geranium psilostemon and Centranthus ruber are particularly rampant. There is a lone spike

of flower on Rosa 'Penelope'.Dahlia 'Hillcrest Royal': not a pink for the fainthearted. It is a full-bottomed swaggering pink that can really enliven a dowdy corner where the other plants are suffering from a bit of post-summer tristesse.Dahlia merckii

Although the time for roses is long past they can be remarkably resilient. Here we are at the beginning of December and I have two flowering in my garden at the moment - Rosa 'The Prince' and R. Moonlight. It is true that neither bloom is much

sink is the flowering currant with its limply hanging pink flowers. Not only is it extremely boring but the slightest contact with the leaves releases an unmistakable smell of cat pee. (I could just about accept Ribes sanguineum King Edward VII if I

plants, but Euonymus alatus was probably the first. Hailing from China and Japan, it is slow-growing, and deciduous. The greenish-white flowers appear in spring and, for much of the year, it is a green, innocuous-looking shrub.However, in autumn

with many fingered leaves, which turn yellow and red in autumn. The flowers are white with yellowy centres and these are followed by pink-stained, white berries that hold for most of the winter.Number two: Malus tschonoskii. Nearly perfect for all

as cut flowers). I saw them at the base of street trees, gleefully mixed in with bright chrysanthemums and lipstick-pink cyclamen. Not  a very conventional mixture but certainly striking.There are variations: this one has a good solid evergreen box edge

, flowers June/July.Allium moly 'Jeannine': double stemmed with yellow flowers. Height 0.5m, flowers May/June.Allium unifolium: a pink flowered variety, shortish (25cm) but good for cutting. Height 0.5m, flowers May/June.

and produce flower after flower until about early December. Perhaps we should be growing more of them. Good garden varieties include 'Clara Curtis' (pink), 'Emperor of China' (double pink) and 'Wedding Day' (white). You can read more about chrysanthemums here.