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It is a very old and trusted maxim that ‘a weed is just a plant in the wrong place’. I don’t know who said it originally, but part of me rather wishes that it had been me. The other part of me wants to punch whoever coined the expression

it will burst into flower (either pink or white).There are so many that I have had to leave out of this list (no acers for example) but I do not pretend that it is a perfect selection - feel free to contribute your own ideas.Everybody should plant trees. If your

. capillipes and A. grosseri.Cornus florida: a dogwood, but a long way from the red- and green-stemmed varieties we plant for a splash of winter colour. This one is a stunning plant that has green flowers surrounded by white bracts. These look like petals

Downie': one of the most reliable and popular small trees available. Lots and lots of pink buds open into a cloud of white flowers in May. Rosy-cheeked little apples in autumn. Self-fertile.Next up is Malus 'Red Sentinel': the reddest of red apples

, for those of you who have not met it before, is the most phenomenally over-the-top cherry tree. A vast amount of frothy white blossom that is spectacular for a week or so in May.Here are the first leaves of Rosa rugosa 'Snowdon', a wildish rose that I have

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

perfectly suited to the smaller garden. It has pure white star-shaped (hence the name 'stellata' as in 'constellation') flowers. It grows very slowly and will reach only about 1.5m after 10 years: given perfect conditions it will eventually top out at about

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

The time has probably come to say something a little contentious: there are some plants that are so dreadful that they should never have been invented. (I use the word 'invented' advisedly as the culprits are almost always those plants that have

, 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