Essential Summer Tips for Pets: Keeping Your Furry Friends Happy and Safe

Camassias, also known as wild hyacinth, Indian hyacnith, quamash or camas, produce tall spires of blue, white or occasionally pink star-like flowers in late April, May and early June. Grown from bulbs that are planted in autumn, they come into their own at a time of year when many spring bulbs have finished flowering and early perennials are yet to flower.

Lovely climbing rose on the front of this house

Slugs and Snails

This is one of the many books in my collection but the only one to focus on growing big, bigger and biggest vegetables. If you want to grow giant vegetable for exhibition or to get large crops then there are many pointers in ‘How to Grow Giant Vegetables’ by Bernard Lavery and below.

There are two great uses for Geraniums that make it worth growing these fine flowering plants. Outdoors they make fantastic border plants and the red varieties are very popular in formal bedding schemes. The second use is as a long flowering houseplant and if you deadhead and feed you plants you will get lots of geraniums from one windowsill plant.

Ipomea indica the blue form of Morning Glory is a cool clear blue, a startling colour in the garden. As you would expect from a member of the Convolvulous clan it is a strong twisting and binding climber.

Don’t judge the results by the crop you harvest but by the seeds you sow

The design of the Chesea Physic Garden dates back to 1673 when it replaced market gardens and orchards on the same spot alongside the Thames. Intended to be a physic garden ‘pertaining to things natural as distinct to metaphysical’ it is exceptionally practical rather than being design led.

A mantra from my gardening experience is that ‘A good big one will beat a good small one’ and this applies to containers growing plants outdoors. Big containers offer more control over watering and feeding, they bring plants closer to your senses and can be architectural in their own right. In a plant poll they also opted for a big one over a small one!

There is a clematis for every season, every aspect and every place. The flower size and colour range is also wider than you may imagine. Update I have just bought (2.9.19) another clematis Madame Le Coultre for flowering june to august.

Memories made at summer soirees should last forever, but the cleanup obviously shouldn't. Event planners Celia Duncan and Stevie Rozean with Wildly Collective are masters at the art of outdoor entertaining, and here they graciously share some of their trade secrets with us for making the teardown and tidying a breeze.