We gardeners are greedy: we want a garden that looks wonderful for as long as possible, yet doesn’t require too much hard work. Unfortunately, there are times of year when drabness descends and there’s little in flower.

While accepting that nature has its fallow times and that you can’t have summer’s effusion all year, you can still maintain interest and movement without slaving away 24/7. The key is to understand that all plants have different life spans. Knowing what these are and, more importantly, how the plants interact, will help you to put together a garden in which showy plants take up the baton of performing from each other, like a relay race.

Colour burst: for sock-’em-in-the-eye colour, you can’t ignore massed park-garden ranks of busy lizzies and other bedding plants, such as salvias and petunias. Annuals are like rockets on bonfire night: a brilliant streak of colour and then they are gone. They germinate, flower and produce the next generation of seed, all within the same year, and have to shout loudly to get noticed by pollinating insects — it’s a competitive world out there.

Look among the seed packets for a huge selection of these fast-movers. There are two types: hardy and half-hardy annuals. Hardy annuals, such as love-in-a-mist, are the tougher of the two and will cope with cold and severe frost. Almost all are easy to grow and not fussy about soil. They are perfect for beginner gardeners and children alike.

Half-hardy annuals need frost protection. Lots of common bedding plants, such as French marigolds, busy lizzies and snapdragons, are half- hardies. You will see trays of them for sale from March onwards but, unless you have a heated greenhouse or cold frame, don’t be too quick to plant them out, as harsh frosts are still likely well into May.

Annuals are great for bare, brand-new gardens as they provide an instant, spectacular show while longer-lived plants get established. The downside is that they need more maintenance to keep them looking good, especially half-hardies. Regular weeding, watering, pest and disease control, deadheading, feeding, and sometimes staking to stop them flopping over are necessary. For this reason, most annuals are used in colourful easy-to-care-for tubs and hanging baskets or in gaps in mixed borders, where different plants can provide interest at other times.

Twice as nice: many cottage favourites, such as foxgloves, Canterbury bells, wallflowers and sweet william, are biennials: these take two years to complete their life cycle. In the first year, they produce leaves, followed by flowers and seed in the second. In severe winters they look a tad miserable, but will rocket away in spring, giving long-lasting displays while the rest of the garden is just waking up. You won’t need to bother collecting any seed, as most biennials self-seed all over the place, often in inhospitable spots — once you sow forget-me-nots, for example, you will have them for life.

Lifelong friends: perennial plants are the mainstay of most gardens, as you don’t have to replace them on a yearly basis. In everyday parlance, “perennial” has come to mean “herbaceous perennial” — a soft-stemmed plant, the top growth of which dies down in autumn but bursts into life again in spring. Strictly speaking, it’s not an accurate definition, as huge trees are also perennials, as are a lot of shrubs and fragile customers, such as canna, which originate from hotter climates.

So it is better to split perennials into three categories. The first group, woody perennials, are evergreen, and deciduous trees, roses and shrubs — from pretty big specimens, such as rhododendrons and laurels, to small sages and rosemaries. With rigid, permanent stems and branches, their lifespan is anything from a few years to a few centuries. Deciduous woody perennials lose their leaves in autumn; evergreens, as the name suggests, retain them all year round, only shedding a few every once in a while.

Herbaceous perennials, the second category, are plants that have soft stems rather than woody ones. “Herbaceous” is a bit of a mouthful; most gardeners and nurseries simply say “perennials” for convenience. Some are evergreen and carpet the ground over winter but usually the top growth disappears, with the roots alive under the soil.

If you have nothing but herbaceous plants in the garden, you’ll have little display over winter because the plants die back and go dormant — though, as Rachel de Thame advocates on page 58, you can leave some of the dead stalks standing for a ghostly presence.

In a mixed border — one with a small ornamental tree, shrubs, climbers, conifers as well as bulbs — perennials such as lupins and delphiniums sit well and will give continuing colour. Don’t forget herbaceous grasses either. Many look stunning, and their seedheads last all winter.

The main difference between tender perennials, the third category, and the other two is that the tenders come from hotter countries than ours, and can’t tolerate low temperatures or frost. Pelargoniums for example (most gardeners still call them “geraniums”), hate cold weather and need to be brought into a frost-free place to ensure they survive the winter. Most house plants are tender perennials, and although they love an outdoor holiday in summer, all must be brought inside before autumn proper.

Weeds: technically, a weed is simply a plant in the wrong place. Some perennial weeds are thugs, however, and have a shocking resistance to intervention. Gardeners dread bindweed, horsetail (identifiable by its green bottlebrush foliage), couch grass and ground elder. With deep roots, they will survive normal weeding: the tiniest piece of root left in the ground will regrow and multiply rapidly.

If you want a garden at all, these overstaying guests need the big boot. You can torch them repeatedly with a flame gun. Weedkillers containing glyphosate also work, but make sure there are no children or animals around. Remember that weedkiller not only nobbles weeds, but also any choice plants nearby, so be careful when you apply it and do so carefully.

In early spring, annual weeds can smother a plot. Hairy bittercress, for example, can look scarily like it is taking over the garden but it is not as bad as it looks. Wait for a dry day and chop off the top growth with a sharp hoe — it will wither away in the sun.

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