Although all the celebrity chit-chat drives me mad, I follow the coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show in the same way that others watch Wimbledon. Each year I am amazed by the seemingly mature gardens that are conjured up, lush and lovely, within a month (I’m talking planting here, not the planning, obviously), each one looking as though it had been there forever. I sit, pen and paper in hand, furiously jotting things down as the names whizz on and then off the screen faster than you can blink, making lists for the next trip to the garden centre. Inspired and fired up by the things I have seen, I head out into my own garden and find myself back in the real world…

Oh dear. The first stage of planting is finished and the garden now looks rather odd, and certainly at odds with the vision I have in my head. Whatever one may see at Chelsea, a real garden, three days after planting, does not look lush and full, it looks startled and empty with far too much bare earth. The temptation is to pack more plants in, and quickly. But I am restraining myself because I know I’ve probably taken a few liberties with spacing already. But if I’ve been impatient, and a little greedy, I know that room can be found elsewhere, further down the garden where progress has ground to a halt, and probably won’t resume until the autumn.

The photographs above and below were taken last week, whilst I was laying the membrane which lies under the slate. The path looks very wide at the moment, and a little harsh, but I hope that the creeping habits of both Alchemilla mollis and Stachys byzantina will change all that. The beds either side of the path are filled with drifts of Salvia ‘Blue Queen’, Achillea (label mislaid, so we’ll have to wait and see exactly what it is), knautia (another label gone astray – bad habits die hard) and Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’. Elsewhere I’ve used Nepeta ”Six Hills Giant” as a speedy filler and to get the garden looking a little less anaemic by mid-summer. I was hoping to plant several Euphorbia characias wulfenii, but have not been able to find a single plant in any of the four big nurseries that serve Bristol. But I’m prepared to wait, it can always be added later – it’s not as though a garden is ever finished, is it?

I’ve planted lots of sedum, some of which were plants I managed to save and then divided, and others Sue kindly donated from the allotment. Verbena bonariensis crops up all over the garden, first as a ‘hedge’ of sorts on the top terrace where I’ve put it in metal containers, then it lines the path on the next level down, and finally I’ve dotted it here and there in the beds above. It will provide height, which is rather lacking at the moment. There are also four roses, with more to come, and a couple of really lovely climbers, neither of which I’ve grown before and can’t name either because the labels are still on the plants – so not lost, but not accessible right now. Splashes of hot pink, to break up the dusty blues, will come from Geranium psilostemon and Cistus purpureus. How long all this will take to knit together is anyone’s guess, but I hope it will feel fuller next summer.

I’ve also scattered seeds of Nigella damascena (Love-in-a-mist) and the beautiful Californian poppy, Eschscholzia, along the edges of paths and into the beds, and the girls have poked nasturtium seeds wherever they wanted. Up on the top terrace I’ve filled old wine boxes with mint and tarragon, neither of which I grew from seed I’m sorry to say, to add to my pots of chives and marjoram. The wine boxes came from Majestic who were happy to hand them over in exchange for a small donation to charity – though I guess they’d let you have them for nothing if you were also buying the contents. I have one more to do, and in this I will sow some of these…

Looks and sounds mad, I know, but I saw Alys Fowler do this on her wonderful series last year, and she had a harvest of pea shoots all summer long. She used exactly the same brand, the sort that you would usually boil for a million hours to make mushy peas, and had great success. They are incredibly cheap too – this packet was just 69p. I will keep you posted on the progress of what is now known as “project pea shoot”.