It’s time to think about the new season’s plantings, so James Henry offers some ideas for eye-popping displays. Whether your garden is traditional, with borders, or a modern, lower maintenance design with most of your plants in containers, you can always boost your displays of blooms with some spectacular show plants.

Tall varieties are particularly useful to give depth to a border. Climbers can hide a multitude of sins, unusual flowers or foliage provide a focal point, while bright colours and different textures also help you to plan the look that you prefer in your own setting.

The garden centre will provide a host of varieties for just this purpose. Growing your own from seed or bulbs will provide a cheaper option and the seed catalogues will also be a bit ahead of the market for actual plants, so you can get new varieties into your plot faster.

Growing from seed is usually reasonably straightforward, and very satisfying when it goes well. Bulbs will usually be suitable for splitting after a couple of years, creating many plants from the original. Here are a few suggestions for up-to-the-minute varieties available by mail order, and what you can expect them to do for your garden. For a Dobies catalogue call 0870 112 3625 or see the website www.dobies.co.uk

Nigella ‘Choc Ice’
This is a particularly unusual Love-in-a-mist bearing extra-large white flowers up to 5cm (2in) diameter, with beautifully contrasting black centres. It will produce 90cm (3ft) plants perfect for a border and very easy to grow. They are also suitable as cut flowers or even for drying. Sow the seeds March to May for flowers in July to September. To extend the season, sow September to flower May to June of the following year.

Chasmanthe ‘Exotic Trumpet Blend’
This new offering, growing to a height of 1m (3ft), has sword-like foliage and spikes of trumpet-like blooms in a beautiful combination of fiery red and golden-yellow. These spectacular perennials originate in South Africa, where they thrive best in semi-shade. In the UK, however, they will thrive in full sun or partial shade. They like a well-drained but moist, fertile soil. Plant bulbs 15cm (6in) deep in any well-drained soil after danger of frost has passed, or start them early under glass. Cut down in winter before new growth begins. Divide the corms in spring.

Delphinium ‘Summer Blues’
Though they will only grow to 20cm (8in), these are beautiful, bushy plants smothered in huge, bright-blue flowers above delicate, feathery foliage. Ideal for pots or bedding, with better heat tolerance than similar varieties. A beautiful contrast to yellow flowers. Delphiniums are notoriously irregular germinators but the reward is these very large flowered specimens. Sow late spring to early summer for flowers in June to August the following year.