Things are starting to look, well if I’m honest, a bit shabby! The earth is parched and many plants are passed their best, so with my daughter back at school I’m using the extra time to do some cutting back and tidying up.

If you're in a similar situation, use this opportunity to assess your borders and note any gaps (or plant congestion) you may have so you can rectify them ahead of next year.

Bulbs are a great way of filling gaps and with an array of catalogues arriving daily at the moment you can start to make a wish list for autumn and winter planting.

Now is the ideal time to getting bulbs in while the ground is still nice and warm from the summer months - giving them plenty of time for the new shoots to bed in before the spring sunshine arrives. The bulbs will also benefit from the cooler temperatures in the colder months making them come through more abundant next spring.

Have a look at narcissi; muscari; fritillaria;crocus; anemones and tulips.

But as well as bulbs for outdoor planting consider some indoor bulbs, these should be started off inside (forced) in mid-October for flowers at Christmas – hyacinths for their amazing scents and amaryllis for their dramatic blooms. Liberty is a favourite, dark red show stopper of mine.

Dahlias still delight

Despite the time of year, there are still some late summer sensations to behold - dahlias being one of them. Once considered something of a 'naff tuber', dahlias now come in a wide range of flower types in striking colours and seem to be very much in vogue.

Christopher Lloyd did so much to revive the fortunes of the dahlia. He often praised its ability to flower from midsummer until the first frost and his renowned garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex is a great setting to see them.

The dahlias comeback really came about in the 1980s with ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, which was first raised back in 1924. Bishop of Llandaff began to swing interest in the direction of dahlias as it looked more like a perennial than a more traditional dahlia and so was deemed more acceptable.

Essentially a single-flowered dahlia, with a few extra rows of petals providing more impact, and reaching a very manageable 3-4ft (90-120cm) the flowers are not too big, the colour a rich scarlet set against sharply toothed leaves in dark bronze.

TOP TIP: Don’t forget to support your dahlias with stakes and flower rings to ensure the weight of their beautiful flower doesn’t cause their stems to break.