Introduction   I consider my garden to be a place for food production, and don't really put "the look" of the place high on my list of priorities.  If I want to give my eyes a sensual feast, I'll do a Google images search for Lily Allen.  However, I may wear the wellies at home but I certainly don't wear the trousers so I have to relent and provide splashes of colour amongst the predominantly green fruit and veg in the form of flowers to appease Mrs Dablue, who, in her own words "doesn't want to look outside the back door and see nothing but cabbages - it's like living in a flaming allotment" (but is quite happy to eat those ...  Read the complete review

A year ago I completed my City and Guilds Gardening qualification, which in theory should mean I have a garden to rival Kew, but unfortunately that simply is not true. Our garden has become a football pitch, campsite, cycle park, or whatever else the kids deem it to be, and that means keeping it pretty is a tough job. My approach to gardening is quite a lazy one. I like plants that I can bung in the border and forget about, so we have quite a few shrubs and perennial plants, those that come up year after year. A big problem I have however, is getting anything to flower. As soon as something hits the border, it puts out lots of leaves and no flowers. I ...  Read the complete review

Forget-me-not, or Myosotis is a flower that is often underrated... taken for granted. In my area, it grows wild, and is so tolerant that it is easy to think of it as a weed. My mother-in-law allows it to grow in the border wherever it self-seeds, because it is attractive and non-invasive. But she does not regard it as being a 'real' garden flower, and this attitude seems to be a popular one, at least as far as I have found. I too have allowed the plant to grow wild, removing it from borders when it becomes straggly. At this point it is still full of the tiny blue flowers with their yellow star centres, but I like to see compact plants, and the wild ...  Read the complete review

Forget- me- not (Myosotis alpestris) really lives up to it's name. A biennial, plant one year, seed sown, sets and produces new plants the next year that will freely seed where ever you plant the first clump. Forget-me-nots traditionally have a blue flower but there is also a pink variety and in my garden, an almost white variety has developed on it's own. The plants have soft leaves and are quite bushy in appearance when established. The blue mass of flowers spike up over the leaves and can grow to a height of around 1'. They will tolerate any soil, any position but really prefer a well mulched free draining soil and will tolerate full sun. ...  Read the complete review

I bought just three forget-me-not plants about six years ago. They flowered beautifully and looked good in my front garden. I planted them fairly close together to get the benefit of a clump of blue flowers rather than have then spread out. These are very hardy little plants and they have survived frozen winters in 'far north' without any sign of damage. After all these years these pretty little blue flowers have become a real nuisance. They dry out at the end of summer and if you don't catch them quickly enough they seed themselves absolutely anywhere and everywhere. The seeds are particularly light so they do travel a long way ...  Read the complete review