Planting ideas

Looking to create a charming cottage garden feel in your garden? Marcus Eyles picks the plants you need

From cool pastels and foliage to hot colours, designer Jo Thompson creates a stylish container combination

There are plenty of colourful plants that will ensure your garden remains fresh and bright throughout summer into autumn. Here are ten plants for late-summer colour, recommended by plantswoman Marina Christopher

With tight, bright burrs on wiry stems, long-flowering sanguisorbas offer a haze of gauzy colour

These tough, sun-loving blooms combine well with grasses and other late-flowering perennials and look great in prairie-style and modern cottage-garden schemes

As summer reaches its peak Tom Brown, the head gardener at West Dean Gardens, picks his favourite August flowers. Photographs Jason Ingram

A selection of planting ideas from the Filippis’ Le Jardin Sec in France, which specialises in planting for drought.

Spanish designer Fernando Martos explains why he combines the beauty of Spain's arid landscape with English planting ideas in his dry garden designs. If we're considering climate change, his approach could be a useful one for us to take note of

As the hot weather in the UK continues, we ask three horticultural experts of the realities of drought on gardens and how we should be adapting the way we garden to hotter, drier conditions in the summer, and wetter, warmer conditions in the winter

Short on time or just hate weeding? Here are the weeds most gardeners dread finding, plus some you should probably allow to grow

Discover some of the best July flowers and plants including a graceful daylily and a dwarf, claret sunflower

With their tall, fly-catching trumpets, sarracenias are wonderfully exotic looking, but given a sunny spot and plenty of water, they are surprisingly hardy.

Discover the indestructible varieties that designers, head gardeners and flower growers rely on: the top easy-to-grow, long-lived, pest- and disease-free performers for your garden

Biennials bring colour to spring and summer borders - and are easy to grow from seed. Sissinghurst head gardener Troy Scott-Smith shows how to grow biennials and the best flowers to choose.

These popular, high-impact summer flowers come in a wide range of forms and colours and are designer favourites as well as magnets for bees and butterflies

Three gardening experts recommend 17 of the best contemporary bedding plants, which pollinators will love, for stunning displays

Inspired by the gardens at Benton End, garden maker James Horner suggests a fresh container arrangement to capture the essence of summer

Create a buzz in your garden by adding the plants that bees love best.

Fragrant, drought tolerant and easy to grow, lavenders are popular plants that suit many different styles of garden. Discover more with our lavender expert grow guide.

Sissinghurst’s head gardener Troy Scott Smith guides us through the jobs that he and his team do in summer.

Make your garden attractive to vital pollinators with these suggestions of plants that butterflies love

Tim Stretton, head of gardens at Mounton House, explains exactly how to take cuttings from dahlia plants so you can increase the number of dahlias you have in your garden this summer

Garden maker James Horner uses lush foliage and delicate coloured blooms for a fresh container combination at Benton End in Suffolk, the former home of artist-plantsman Cedric Morris