There’s a rather sad-looking terracotta pot outside my back door. It was supposed to have been filled with the dramatic reds and yellows of my tulip bulbs, Flaming Parrot. It was the slugs that did it. Last year was slug year and, much to my disappointment, they devoured the entire crop.

This was the same pot last Spring. If it hadn’t been for those wonderful fritillaries, this corner of my garden would have looked pretty dull over the last month. Luckily my other tulips, Ballerina, were magnificent this year so it was’t all bad news for my favourite flowers.

I usually replace the tulip bulbs in my terracotta pots annually but last year I decided I would see if the  bulbs would come back. As you can see, they didn’t.

It’s impossible to predict the future, I know, but I’m trying very hard to avoid a similar problem next Spring and, this week, I’ve ordered next year’s tulips to be delivered and planted this Autumn. It will come as no surprize if I tell you I’m going for those Flaming Parrots again and some more Ballerinas. The tulip season is over in my garden now but, gardeners are optimists and I’m already looking forward to next year. I shall be keeping a vigilant eye open for slugs and snails too. Until then all I have are memories of this year’s tulips and, well yes, a well-known song played on a Dutch accordion:

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It looks colourful and luxurious enough from up here in my study but that garden is getting out of hand.

I have a small town garden in Lewes, England, that I have built from scratch in the last four years.

It is now showing its true colours at this, often the most unruly time of year for plants that have been left to riot and loot. Not so my new favourites, the vanilla scented and vividly coloured heliotrope plants that are currently adding their perfume to the whole garden.

They have made a richly textured impression outside my French windows, their colour nicely contrasting with the sky blue cornflowers that I grow from a few casually scattered seeds.

Elsewhere the rioting is in full swing and those clematis plants, once my idea of a subtle filler between the climbing roses, have decided that the world belongs to them.

In their youth, they looked so shy and well-behaved and, in those days, I could still see the lovely old flint walls.

The passion flower has the same tendencies even after the harshest of Southern English winters when I thought it could not possibly survive and when I even wasn’t sure if I wanted it to.

The roses, originally the main idea, are still flowering away in there somewhere but the time has come for a radical change…..

…not only is there less and less room for the roses but I am beginning to wonder where I fit in too so the clematis and the passion flower, sorry loves,  you will have to go.

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