I do hope you have been watching episodes of The Great British Garden Revival on the telly.

Some have been very interesting; others not so, but that is personal taste, I think.

I was whooping and hollering in support for Chris Beard-shaw’s piece on blossom. He’s quite right that blossom is a fleeting affair but it can, in many cases, lead to the formation of fruit and support wildlife in various forms.

The “fleeting” bit was especially interesting, because I am one of those gardeners who relishes the comings and goings of flowers. I have no desire to attempt to make my garden an all-year affair.

I grow what I love. It does not matter to me that some of the things I love have a short flowering period. I simply enjoy them while they are there and then turn my attention to the next thing that’s going to come along.

I was also whooping and hollering in support of Tom Hart Dyke’s drive for the pelargonium to be called just that: pelargonium.

It is not a geranium, in spite of both pelargoniums and geraniums belonging to the same genus, geraniacae.

One is a hardy herbaceous perennial that comes in species and cultivars suitable for sun/shade/wet/dry.

The other is a succulent from South Africa that will not survive the winter outdoors in our climate and thus is grown as a summer plant.

Bring it undercover in the winter, take cuttings, put it out again in May and it will reward you with a myriad of red, orange, pink and white flowers and, in some cases, gloriously marked leaves. But a hardy perennial, it ain’t!

The problem has been compounded by growers using “geranium” on their plant labels, but, as a garden centre, we shall now be using “pelargonium” on our signs.

Christine Walkden’s piece on shade was good, too. All too often we think of shade as a problem. To be fair, dry shade is a problem; probably one of the worst you can encounter as a gardener and difficult to deal with, especially where there are trees not only shading the area but also sucking every bit of food and water out of the soil.

In this instance, can the trees be removed or at least thinned? Conifers cannot be thinned in the same way as deciduous trees and have the added disadvantages of not shutting down in winter and shedding acidic needles that can change the pH of the soil. They also exude toxins, inhibiting the germination and growth of other plants. This explains why, if you visit a conifer plantation, there is nothing else there.

If trees are not the cause of shade, then aspect will be; in other words, whether a garden faces north or north-west. My garden faces north-west and is that a problem? No! The last garden I had faced south and was far more problematic from a watering point of view.

The space baked, so I was limited in what I could grow. My north-west facing garden has a border that gets very little sun, but I have stuffed it with ferns, snowdrops, hepatics, hellebores, cimicifuga and clematis that will reach up and find the sun with trellis.

The rest of the garden gets the sun at various points during the day and I am fortunate enough to have planned a west-facing sitting area in which to relax when I get home from work . . . after I’ve done weeding and pruning.