Red, red vine | In Fiona's Garden

In most regions of NSW it's our harshest season, with high temperatures and long hours of sunshine.

Heat stress shows up plants that might need moving or replacing, and you can ask yourself what you could do during the cooler months of the year to improve the garden's design.

I love walking through a garden and catching a glimpse of red.

It brings the garden closer; it highlights silver or grey plants and it's especially beautiful with green, one primary colour looking its best against a combination of the other two.

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Red gives an instant lift to what might otherwise be a flat planting.

While I'd love a small scarlet bridge over our pond, I think I'll stick to flowers for the time being.

Red spring bulbs include tulips, sparaxis and the Aztec lily (Sprekelia) from Mexico and Guatemala with large, striking, scarlet flowers.

Poppies, scarlet cannas, geraniums (Pelargoniums) and Salvia darcyi take care of summer, followed by ornamental grape or a Japanese maple in autumn, and red pansies and wallflowers for winter.

Get ahead with red.

Looking at my garden's design, I'm confronted by an increasingly annoying issue that must be common to all gardens: where to put the utility corner so that it's out of sight but is still easily reached.

Good garden design practice says to group your compost heap, washing line, propagation bench and so on in one place, preferably hidden.

But this can easily leave the compost- the garden's lifeblood - miles from where it's needed.

This didn't annoy me (much) until I started growing vegetables.

Apart from lettuce and radicchio, my vegies seem to produce a ginormous quantity of green waste in comparison to the roots and fruit that I harvest.

This is extremely noticeable with zucchinis, beans and squash, which I'm picking now.

All the leafy leftovers have to be lugged to the compost heap and the mature compost in turn barrowed back to my vegie patch on a regular basis.

One solution is to have a compost bin next to the vegetable beds.

There's a bin near the washing line I can empty and move. Just do it Fiona.

January is an excellent time to assess a plant's possibly brief season of beauty when it's in flower against the time you need to spend on it when it's not.

Do I really want purple drumstick alliums (A. sphaerocephalon) that flop over as they come into bloom and then seeds themselves everywhere?

What about those pale blue camassias (C. quamash) that were in the garden when we moved here and have flowered precisely once, the clump becoming irritatingly larger and leafier as each each year passes?

Apparently the bulbs are an important part of the diet of several north-west native American tribes.

Maybe I should move them to the vegie garden.

Having weeded out your garden losers, look at your winners.

Summer is the time to take semi-ripe cuttings of favourite shrubs. Start with Daphne odora, you can never have too much of a good thing.

Lambley Nursery (www.lambley.com.au) offer Salvia darcyi.

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