Blooming bright Easter | In Fiona's Garden

This year, thanks to rain, lots of plants are still in flower and looking lovely among colourful autumn leaves.

Hydrangeas everywhere have been wonderful this summer.

The tough and hardy oak leaf hydrangea (H. quercifolia) is the best for districts with dry summers and has the additional feature of gorgeous autumn leaf colour.

Deciduous bigleaf hydrangea (H. macrophylla) is also fairly reliable but needs summer irrigation, luckily not in limited supply this year.

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H. quercifolia and its various cultivars including 'Alice' and 'Snowflake' bloom on buds formed the previous summer.

If your plants need a trim to keep their shape, do it as the flowers fade. Don't prune them in spring, you will lose a season's blooms.

(I learnt this the hard way. I often ask myself why I seem to learn everything the hard way.)

Bigleaf hydrangea is far more obliging from the pruning point of view as it flowers on both old and new wood.

Flemings now offer a wonderful repeat flowering range called 'Endless Summer'. The collection includes mophead and lacecap varieties and with regular deadheading they flower from spring to autumn.

Colours include blue, pink and white, but remember that hydrangea flower colour varies according to soil acidity. Lime turns flowers on acid soil pink, sulphur changes those on alkaline soil to beautiful blue.

My bigleaf hydrangea flowers are mauve, which I attribute to acid soil that has lime leaching into it from the mortar in a nearby brick wall.

Easter is a good opportunity to catch up on jobs that you might have postponed because of wet weather, like potting up summer cuttings and planting the last spring bulbs.

Another of my tasks is to tackle my laurustinus (Viburnum tinus) bushes that a horde of chewing insects took to this summer, indeed one plant was so badly affected I had to dig it out.

I'm hoping a homemade remedy of soapy water will banish them: the soap's fatty acids dissolve the insect's exoskeleton, bringing death by dehydration.

Proportions are two tablespoons of soap flakes (or grated bar soap) per litre of water. You need a spray container with a longish wand in order to reach the undersides of the leaves which is where the insects lurk.

I haven't used a chemical insecticide in the garden for thirty years and I'm not about to start now, the last things I want is to harm the birds, bees and other beneficial creatures that help keep the nasties like thrips, mites and aphids at bay. So fingers crossed my soapy remedy works.

Many plants are setting seed now and badly need cutting down or I'll have a major weed problem next spring.

Agapanthus are the worst, along with bronze fennel (Foeniculum vulgare purpureum), Queen Anne's lace (Amni majus) and those fetching but menacing garlic chives, Allium tuberosum.

All are off to the bonfire. I don't trust my compost heaps to heat up enough to destroy their viability.

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