May is on the way – a wonderful month We should be about to encounter the most perfect gardening moment – early May. You hopefully step outside to a sun-warmed garden burgeoning with life. E. A. Bowles, the distinguished garden writer, put it so much better. He wrote: “If a fairy godmother or a talking fish offered me three wishes . . . one would have to be to have the clock stopped on a fine morning towards the end of May.” Every committed gardener will applaud his choice. His personal wish was granted and he died on a May day in 1954.

Although May is full of foliage, flowers can be few and far between. The main spring display of bulbs and woodlanders has ended, but the herbaceous plants of summer are still six to eight weeks away.

It’s up to the gardener to fill the May gap with bee-friendly flowers because these essential creatures are in a busy phase. They desperately need both nectar and pollen.

The gentle geum is an ideal May performer and it’s an interesting genus divided between bright, wide-eyed sun loving plants (that seem to enjoy free drainage) and moisture lovers with coy flowers. It is the gently nodding May-flowering forms I enjoy most and I’m planting more of them.

In the past two weeks I have acquired a sharp-yellow called ‘Herterton Primrose’. This is named after a wonderful garden, Herterton House in Northumberland, built on plants and good bones constructed by a husband and wife couple, Frank and Marjorie Lawley, over 30 to 40 years.

About 15 years ago, I chose some plants from their excellent nursery and left with treasures wrapped in newspaper. (Tel 01670 774278) Rosy Hardy of Hardy’s Garden Plants, just south of Newbury ( 01256 896533/ www.hardys-plants.co.uk), often uses geums in her floral displays particularly for The Chelsea Flow Show and the nursery grow a large number.

The most interesting is ‘Hannay’s Double’ a sunset frill of flower originally from the once famous (but now extinct) Bath Nursery. It was hidden deep in the one-way system of Bath and I managed to get there only three times out of 20 en route to somewhere else.

Hardy’s are also launching a new geum at The Chelsea Flower Show called ‘Totally Tangerine’. This sun lover (pictured above) has been bred by Farplants, near Littlehampton. It’s a sterile hybrid involving G. chiloense and being sterile it produces large, tangerine flowers from May until November. Rosy will use it with grasses on her Chelsea exhibit. In the garden setting geums need regular division, every two or three years, otherwise many can fade away.

Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum x hybridum) produces gently arching stems of pale-leaf and ivory white pendant bells. The chocolate-brown spears and young foliage of ‘Betburg’ (from Beth Chatto – tel 01206 822007/www.bethchatto.co.uk) are wonderful in early May but eventually turn green. Slice the iris-like root and the markings look like Hebrew writing: this gives this stately plant its common name.