Jackie French | How to make your garden look better

Everywhere I looked blinkin' crepe myrtles were blooming, with stunning pale to deep mauve blooms for months, and our crepe myrtles were just green leaves.

This was not fair. I'm a garden writer, for Pete's sake. I know how to grow a blinkin' crepe myrtle!

You stick it in the ground in a sunny spot and every late summer it gives you stunning blooms as a small tree or large shrub, and the new varieties don't sucker or get downy mildew like the old fashioned ones used to do. It's a foolproof flower, exactly the kind I love.

So why were everyone else's crepe myrtles putting on a gorgeous show and ours were doing nothing?

See paragraph two, above i.e. "Plant in a sunny place".

We live in a valley, in fact in a very narrow part of a valley.

More Jackie French:

"Very sunny" is relative here - we simply don't get as much sunlight as you lucky lot who are reading this.

Our crepe myrtles finally bloomed two or three weeks after everyone else's. They do look stunning now, but I am still miffed about missing out on a fortnight's blooms.

There are advantages to living in a valley. We are protected from most cold dry winds, so tamarillos, tree dahlias and avocadoes and other wind hating fruits and flowers survive here when they may be dehydrated by cold or hot winds up above. It's lovely in mid-summer, too to say goodbye to direct sunlight at 5pm or so, and still have time for a two-hour ramble in the garden or the bush.

But it also means that you lot - and I am speaking to just about all who read this column - will get three times as many pumpkins as we will, and five times as many melons, and they will all be sweeter than ours, as pumpkins and melons need lots of sun to give them flavour.

To be frank, our pumpkins are "anaemic to okay", and ditto our melons, while those grown down the valley where it broadens out give a crop of some of the world's best tasting mini melons and early rockmelons.

Mostly, though, if you have garden envy, you need to do five things:

Most gardens are severely under-planted. Make a note to buy something gorgeous and something delicious at least four times a year, once for spring, summer, winter and autumn.

Start this weekend. Buy what looks great now, and also what will look wonderful to cheer you in winter: camelias, rosemary, both upright and prostrate, French lavender, grevilleas and lots of red cabbage, savoy cabbage, parsley, winter rhubarb and broccolini seedlings, plus as many herbs as you have room for, especially thyme and winter savoury. Come winter, winter savoury really is the most savoury of herbs, superb anywhere you'd use thyme, that lose its flavour in the cold months.

I forget this step far too often, remembering only when the older leaves begin to look paler than the other newer leaves, a sure sign the plant- and possibly the whole garden- needs tucker. I could solve it by adding slow release fertiliser to everything - it only releases when the temperature is over about 24 degrees, so a once-a-year feeding is all you need, or maybe twice, in spring and mid-summer.

I have never had the sense to actually do this. I bung on plant food, hen manure, compost, foliar sprays "when I get around to it". The garden survives - in fact just now it's pretty much a paradise - but it could still do with a good feed now, while everything is growing strongly before winter. It probably isn't going to get it.

Do not ever fertilise your garden unless you or the rain will water it in immediately, or the concentrated fertiliser will burn the roots, possibly killing your plant, or leaving it vulnerable to root rots. We've had rain every few days for the past three years. This will not last. When it stops raining, start watering, especially as many young plants will have shallow roots as they are used to not having to forage deep down for moisture.

We begin summer with loads of agapanthus, the new non weed varieties, head into a bank of ginger lilies and belladonna lilies and white blooming bursaria; then have early, medium and late camellias all autumn to spring, daffs and jonquils late winter to late spring; autumn leaves and massed spring blossom including grevilleas, apples, pears, crab apples and wattles, and a so much more I don't have room to list them.

If possible, choose lots to make a real showing, like massed hardenbergia or tulips, or big single plants like the (smaller) magnolia grandiflora, or magnolias or waratah where just one in bloom will still yell '"Look at me and rejoice!"

This is something I have yet to achieve when it comes to gardening. We will never have the abundance of sun drenched gardens, and I should accept it. Read the label, Mabel, and choose plants that will suit the site and the soil you will plant them in, and the level of care you will - realistically - give them.

Yes, you can grow avocados and dwarf red bananas in Canberra - with a heck of a lot of work. You can grow rhubarb, plums, and a heck of a lot of yellow trumpet and Earlicheer daffodils as well as crepe myrtles without really trying.

To be honest, I am a long way from being realistic about our garden. If I had been realistic we wouldn't have a dozen varieties of avocado, or fruiting custard apples, the bananas that don't taste of much, Makrut limes and double daffodils, or so many varieties of apple tree that we have apples of some kind, no matter how dry, wet, hot, cold or dusty the season. I have always planted too much and suspect I will. A lot of it has worked, too.

But I still can't get my crepe myrtles to bloom as early as yours, nor for as long.

May you have joy with them.