January

Echium vulgare is a valuable native plant and is exotic enough to earn a place in a flower border. The plant is much loved by almost all bee species. If you don’t want plants that honeybees simply visit, but want to select plants that honeybees clearly love, choose Echium for your garden.

If you don’t want plants that honeybees simply visit, but want to select plants that honeybees clearly love, choose Echium for your garden. Echium 'White Bedder' bears the most beautiful dense spikes of exquisite, pure white flowers. Make successive sowings for continuous flowering throughout the summer.

Echium plantagineum 'Pink Bedder' is a companion plant to the original 'Blue Bedder'. The blooms are rich in nectar and pollen, use in the border or as part of wildlife friendly planting schemes. The plant repeat blooms throughout the summer into autumn, providing nectar for bees for overwintering.

This beautiful highly versatile, aristocratic border plant has become very much in vogue in recent years. Oval, fleshy blue-green leaves spiral up the stem with tightly packed, sea blue bracts - and then the finale - small clusters of rich purple-blue tubular, nodding flowers which are adored by bees.

Canna 'Large Flowered Hybrids' create an undeniably tropical look, producing large flowers in hot colours in yellow, gold, fiery orange and red. With their lush tropical foliage and showy flowers they make borders and beds come alive with their bright colours all summer long until first frosts.

Canna indica is a superb tall strain with gorgeous foliage and bright vermilion red blooms. Growing to around 150cm tall, the wide banana-like leaves add a tropical feel to the garden. They are ideal to plant at the back of a border where they are in full sun, or to add colour to a partly shady area.

Cheerful and bright, use Calendula in beds, borders or containers. Calendula is prolific and durable, and like most hardy annuals it is easy to grow, simply sow where it is to flower. It is currently one of the top herbs used for medicinal use. Sprinkle salads and decorate cakes with the edible tangy petals.

Be prepared to get your funk on. The Funky Begonia has entered the dance floor, and she's ready to boogie all summer long. Huge, voluptuous flowers with superior heat tolerance and semi-trailing yet dense, sturdy growth habit, in six fantastic colours – Light Pink, Bright Pink, Orange, Red, Scarlet and White.

Elegant cascades of vivid, elongated flowers with large, arrow-shaped, neatly serrated, green leaves. Begonia boliviensis ‘F1 Sun Cities Mixed’ feature the three ‘Sun Cities’ of the USA: ‘San Francisco’ has slmon-pink blooms, ‘Santa Barbara’ features white blooms and ‘Santa Cruz’, fiery red blooms

Antirrhinum majus ‘Tetra Mix’ produce tall, stately plants with ruffled blooms in a rich variety of colours. The robust plants grow to around 90cm tall. Superb for contrast and for giving height to the border, they are grown year-round by florists as a cut flower and are an all-around excellent garden performer.

Worldwide, Antirrhinum is one of the most important 'summer cut-flowers', grown year-round in greenhouses they are adored by florists and gardeners alike. An all-around excellent garden performer, 'Snowflake' produces densely packed spikes that bloom in succession with pure white flowers.

Antirrhinum majus 'Lucky Lips' has been awarded the Fleuroselect Award. The judges were impressed by its height and compact plant habit. Blooming with distinctive contrasting bicolour purple-red and white flowers, a colour way that is often referred to as a 'silver bi-colour', it is ideal for adding height to borders or for cutting.

Antirrhinum majus 'Kimosy' is a lovely dwarf variety of Snapdragon with a tidy, compact habit. An all-around excellent garden performer, the plants perform well in containers, in beds or in borders. In a wide range of colours they flower from early summer right through to mid-autumn.