What a confusing year for plants and gardeners! A horrid, long and cold winter followed by a warm and sunny Spring, lulling plants into thinking summer has come early and then getting nipped by the frost. If you are concerned that, come July, all will be over, I suggest you plant now for some late summer and autumn colour.

You may find some bedding plant bargains now, and early June is actually a good time to add tender perennials and annuals to your borders and pots. Call me cynical, but I suspect that garden centres put out those nasty little floppy plugs of bizzie lizzies, fuchsias and geraniums for sale in March in the hope that we put them outside too early, they succumb to frost and we have to go back and buy another lot. It’s like selling winter flowering pansies which, in my view, should more usefully be called ‘winter flowering if you water them, deadhead and feed them and the weather is mild for the time of year’ pansies. But to be fair I suppose that’s a lot to print on a label. And what’s this move to stick perennials in a fancy pink plastic pot, call them ‘garden stars’ or similar and charging seven quid for them? Sorry, I digress.

Things you can pop into gaps now include dahlias, cannas, cosmos, tobacco plants, verbena, geraniums (pelargoniums), zinnia - the list is long. Later flowering hardy perennials are also available, michaelmas daisies, phlox, salvia (not the dumpy little red bedding ones, there are some gorgeous tall blue perennial salvias, some quite hardy), sedum, and my favourite garden chums, penstemons which flower and flower. You can also plan ahead and sow perennial and biennial seeds to flower next year. Delphiniums and foxgloves are really easy from seed and you will get loads of plants out of a packet.