Val Bourne is hoping precious plants can be saved by the sun after pests ravage her garden

Flaming June has not delivered for me so far. However, with the vagaries of the British climate it may be that, as you read this, we are basking in strong sunshine and high temperatures.

I pray that we soon are too, for it was a late autumn followed by a warm winter and both suited the slug and snail. If the sun shone now it just might stop them ravaging my garden. They have wreaked havoc and my irises are lacework doilies with nibbled buds.

As an organic gardener, and I have come so close to abandoning my stance this year, my only defence is the late-night, torch-lit guerrilla raid. We physically pick them off the growing tips of runner beans, the squash plants and the dahlias and then jump on them. It doesn’t make for a good night’s sleep.

It has been a learning curve though, for my pricked out zinnias and cosmos have been reduced to stalks and are now consigned to the compost heap, so I cannot look forward to their jaunty late presence in August and September. On the other hand the antirrhinums (principally the red and white ‘Day and Night’ and the dark ‘Black Prince’) were shunned completely. They have made it the rose, peony and phlox borders unscathed and thankfully these three stalwarts rarely interest the gastropods: they also hate anything aromatic.

On the vegetable front, we have had cold nights and our germination of carrots and beetroot are poor. Those seedlings that did come up soon went missing and there’s tell-tale slime.

The Best Beloved, ever the academic, explains that slugs create an unbroken line of slime and snails punctuate theirs with gaps. The end result, carnage, is just the same though, punctuated or not. The third resowing of carrot and beetroots is imminent, but it’s this strategic manoeuvring that makes gardening so interesting, or that’s what I tell myself. I am also frisking all those plants with long linear leaves that snails love to cling to and these include colchicums, kniphofias and hemerocallis.

There’s one plant the gastropods (and rabbits and deer) ignore and that’s the pungent allium, or onion. They have thrived on this wet, cool March, April and May because this is what they get in their mountainous homelands in Middle East and Central Asia.

Their short, stubby roots rely on damp weather early on, followed by a dry, hot summer and my leeks and onions are happy.

My ornamental alliums have also done well and I have just visited the Drumstick Allium Trial at RHS Wisley and this will continue until 2016. The raison d’être of all trials is to identify the best and give them the Award of Garden merit or AGM, sometimes depicted as a trophy logo. I feel the ones that dwindle away won’t get an AGM as few gardeners bother to lift and store alliums.

Ornamental alliums are grown commercially in Holland only and recent breeding takes place there, so the trials forum contains Dutch specialists. The most significant of the earlier alliums is A. hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’, a May-flowering purple with a round head. This was raised by J.Bijl in 1963 and usually reaches 3ft. ‘Purple Sensation’ is the best follow-up act for tulips I know, although by the time it flowers the foliage is tatty. All alliums ‘ankles’ must be hidden by low-growing nepeta, or similar. Or place them in gaps among tolerant, vigorous herbaceous, although not phloxes and heleniums.

The same breeder also bred the truly amazing ‘Globemaster’ in 1971 using two species, A.macleanii and A.cristophii. This has huge aster-violet flowers on strong stems that also reach 3ft. The flowers of this sterile species are densely packed together and, because it can’t set seeds, the flowers last for four weeks at least. It stood out on the trial and, although the bulbs are costly, this endures for me from year to year. Always use a bulb specialist rather than anonymous plastic packet and then you’ll get the right thing.

Suppliers are Peter Nyssen www.peternyssen.co.uk/0161 747 4000 or Avon Bulbs www.avonbulbs.co.uk/01460 242177.