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Buying a camellia in flower lets you choose exactly the colour you want for your patio show-stopper. This single plant will give you delightful spring colour and its glossy, deep green foliage looks impressive all year round, even when its not in flower. Place it in a shaded, she...

Bring life to a shady corner with this mix of shade-loving favourites. There are hundreds of fabulous hostas to choose from. At the back of the planter the green fern adds strong textural contrast. If you can't live without flowers, mix in some

Hosepipe bans and water restrictions are always a challenge for gardeners. But if you get into the habit of saving water in your garden, you'll be able to take the restrictions in your stride. Storing rainwater will mean you can keep your plants

Salad leaves can be grown on a cut-and-come-again basis; harvesting the larger leaves by cutting them, allowing the smaller leaves to grow for a second crop. If you make successional sowings of seeds every three weeks, you will have a constant supply of salad throughout the year....

This rustic container filled with an orange pelargonium and a ruby red begonia is guaranteed to brighten up the gloomiest corner in your garden. Take care to keep the begonia out of the sun, or it will scorch. March - April June - September20

Herbs make the perfect partners to vegetables, whether they're eaten raw, roasted, boiled, mashed or fried. Mint is delicious cooked or raw, with root vegetables, in salads or dressings and marinades. Chives, with their mild onion flavour, are very versatile and can be chopped an...

that the only way to tackle a shady patch is to turn it into a foliage garden filled with box, ivies and ferns. But too many dark greens can make a shady area look gloomy. Instead, use them for background structure and texture, then bring the area alive

. Not that I've ever had this good fortune, but when you're gardening, free seeds are always a jackpot.Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) produce seeds by the thousand. A few years ago I planted several of them in my shady border, but since then they've self

and the taste doesn't suffer. The spots can be easily scraped off.A plethora of sooty, greenish or brown spots all over the fruit, which usually appear during cold, wet seasons, and particularly on shady parts of the tree.Good garden hygiene eases many fungal

Balling is triggered by cool, damp conditions, often in a partially shady site, where water-saturated outer petals fail to dry out before being scorched by the sun. The mushy plant tissue dries to form a stiff straightjacket around the petals