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to keep wearing the same size trousers. I could fly off somewhere hot, but sadly that's not terribly practical. Instead, my cheap and easy solution is to talk about summer flowers, with the only proviso being that they can be any colour at all except white

cyclamen' or 'winter hardy cyclamen' or something similar. With its classic, dark green foliage richly patterned with silvery white decorations and stunning flowers, it certainly holds a lot of appeal. But how hardy are they? Although I live in the south

, rather than flowers. Nothing surprising so far - many plants need to get established and fill their pots before settling down into a regular flowering routine. To get agapanthus to flower well you must almost ignore them. They need to become pot bound, so

of that fabulous scent: the philadelphus, or mock orange.There are a number of different varieties, all deciduous with white flowers and unremarkable foliage. In the first garden I had that actually possessed any soil (the first two were just concrete yards) I

is a beautiful plant in the right place. The thing about white flowers is that they work very well to lift other plants but tend to wash everything away if there is too much. Hesperis (seen in the background of this picture) has a tendency to self seed

There are some plants which everyone agrees smell bad. The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) and the dragon arum (Dracunculus vulgaris), for example, both smell like rotting corpses when in flower, to attract pollinating flies. Happily, not all

, indeed, an extraordinarily fine plant (I have it self seeding in the gravel outside my office). Pretty well everybody also knows about Verbena bonariensis which is one of the finest herbaceous plants ever invented: it flowers for ages (from about July

those of parrotia; Hamamelis intermedia 'Diane' (as shown on Fairegarden's blog) is a particularly striking example.Many winter-flowering shrubs (for example sarcococca or Lonicera fragrantissima) have white or yellow flowers, but it's good to have a

I have just got back from five fabulous days at Gardeners' World Live and, yet again, my garden has changed. The more attentive among you will remember my blathering on about the same subject when I got back from the Chelsea Flower Show

It won’t be long before daffodils, tulips, fragrant hyacinths and a host of other colourful flowers signal the arrival of spring, but if we want summer and autumn to provide similar displays we have to start planning and planting now