If the weather allows, you can get on with lifting and dividing any perennials that have got too congested and stopped flowering as well as they had been – this can be done in spring but by then things can get very busy, so it is one less job to do. Lift the large clumps and, with a pair of garden forks back to back, prise them apart into smaller pieces. Discard the woody, congested centre of clumps, replanting pieces which look healthy and have a good root system and new shoots into compost enriched soil with some bone meal added. These will give a good show the following summer. This can be done up until Christmas depending on the weather.

Buy sweet pea seeds ready for planting next month. I know I have a tendency to go on about things (or so my husband tells me!) but sweet peas are such a great thing to grow. They grow up a wigwam of sticks so don’t take up much space, and if you enrich the soil with some compost before planting in their final position, they will reward you with flowers all summer long to cut. In fact, you must cut them so that they keep flowering and you end up with bunches of the little scented jewels all over the house. Heaven!

September can be thought of as coming to the end of the year in the garden, but it is also time for planning and planting bulbs for the coming year. It is a good time to order bulbs from catalogues such as Avon bulbs (www.avonbulbs.co.uk) who stock a delicious range of more unusual bulbs and who constantly win gold at Chelsea for their amazing displays. Tulips are best left until November to plant, but other things such as narcissus and crocus can be put in towards the back end of September.

Now is also a good time to plant Colchicums (autumn flowering crocuses). They like sheltered but sunny positions under trees (if too exposed they get beaten down by wind and rain). They look like crocuses but have six anthers instead of the three that crocuses have. You buy them as dry corms, and arrange in small groups of seven or more where they will be readily seen in the autumn and will make a lovely late display. Warning – all parts of the Colchicum plant are poisonous so wash hands after handling!