Louise Curley celebrates spring’s homegrown and low-carbon blooms, showing how to pick for months and arrange them in garden-gathered style

Gather armloads of blooms this summer with a picking garden

Make more plants this month by dividing perennials, sowing hardy annuals and planting summer bulbs

Presenter and garden designer Mark Lane shares his top picks for thrifty gardeners – easy to propagate, low maintenance and they’ll put on a fabulous floral show

I love growing summer flowers from seed for my cutting garden and to fill gaps in borders and containers to bloom all season on my patio and garden table. I sow hardy and half-hardy annuals alongside

Modest, alluring and versatile, Viola odorata, or sweet violet, is a small, hardy, herbaceous perennial that tumbles and scrambles close to the ground, forming dense clumps of dainty, heart-shaped, gr