There are special events at gardens all over the country too, so you can enjoy your day out with Dad and bring him back full of inspiration for your own patch. RHS Wisley, in Surrey, has stone carving demonstrations (Dad can have a go, too) and at Lyme Park in Cheshire he can choose from thousands of bulbs grown in the gardens, followed by tastings of locally-brewed beer. And at the National Botanic Garden in Wales, Dads get in free: once inside, there's also the chance to make your own F1 racing car and race it on a track set up in the Great Glasshouse. World-class plants and racing cars... possibly the most perfect Father's Day ever.

They look particularly gorgeous trained flat against a wall in an 'espalier' shape, with the branches held horizontally in tiers. Get the look by setting up a framework of wires behind the plant 30cm apart. Plant your pyracantha away from the wall so it's not too dry, then let it grow up a central vertical cane.

Select the most vigorous horizontal branches and tie them in to the wires on both sides. Then prune back sideshoots coming off each branch to two pairs of leaves: these fruiting spurs are where the berries are formed.

When the plant reaches the top of the fence, select the leader plus the topmost shoot and train them out to each side. Then every summer, all you need to do is tie in new growth, shorten framework branches if necessary, and trim back those sideshoots, to clothe your fences in finary all year round. 

West Cork enjoys a warm microclimate, warmed by the Gulf Stream, and you'll find a garden you love no matter what your style. Enjoy the Italianate splendour of Glenview Gardens, near Enniskeane, or the coastal romance of Glebe Gardens, in Baltimore, complete with amphitheatre. The Inish Beg estate boasts 97 acres of walled gardens, orchards, bamboo groves and woodland walks; Carraig Abhainn gardens in Bantry is a subtropical oasis with tender and rare plants amid natural waterfalls; and Heron Gallery Gardens, also in Bantry, is a showcase for its artist owner full of colour and quirky ideas, as well as an orchard of Irish heritage apples.

It's a golden opportunity to talk to the gardens' owners and get the inside story on how these wonderful gardens were made. Many are not often open to the public, so this really is a once-a-year chance. For a brochure and more details on all the gardens featured, visit www.westcorkgardentrail.com.

Earlier is always better, as with supports in place before they get too tall plants happily grow out and around to cover unsightly posts. Strapping a plant up after it's already fallen over inevitably leads to a 'trussed' appearance, so anticipate any imminent collapse as soon as you can to keep things looking natural.

A simple solution is circles of bamboo cane or short hazel sticks, poked into the ground around your clump. Loop twine around each cane to make horizontal strings at 30cm intervals up the canes.

Brushwood or twiggy prunings of hazel or birch poked in among your clumps and woven together make unobtrusive stakes which quickly disappear among the foliage while still holding wayward stems in place. Look out for bundles of peasticks in your favourite garden centre. You'll also find sturdy wire or rusted-iron hoop plant supports: poke the ends into the ground and the hoop will restrain any outward tendencies nicely. 

This year the 28 show gardens set a particularly high standard, with top honours going to Gerard Mullen from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford for his modern evocation of the wetland habitats of the Comeragh Mountains of Waterford.

Best Medium Garden was Jane McCorkell's edible garden 'Love to Grow', while best Concept Garden was won by Paul Martin's 'Concern Worldwide 1000 Days Garden', exploring how to break the cycle of poverty. In the Floral Marquee, best nursery display went to Mount Venus Nursery of Dublin.

You can recreate the look of your favourite show gardens long after the show has ended, too. Look out for the 'It's Garden Time – Create the Bloom Look' banner now in garden centres around the country and you'll find plants featured at the show to create a little bit of Bloom in your own garden.
 

There are quite a few gardening tips the garden centres can give you to make sure you get the very best from them, and you'll find a fantastic selection to choose from. Some will flower early, others much later, and with many you can encourage further flushes of flowering to extend the season.

Clematis grow succesfully up fences and walls, over tree stumps, and in (fairly large) tubs and containers. They really are one of the most versatile plants and early June is a great time to put them in!

A core driver is probably the desire to know the origin of some of the ingredients that go into our food – if you’ve grown the herbs and vegetables yourself, you know exactly what you are eating! We’re thinking here about the bay tree, rosemary, oregano, thyme, chives and mint – useful in so many domestic situations. But herbs aren’t just about food…

Great to eat and medicinal too!
So many recipes include herbs, but don’t forget their roles in remedies too. Think of James Wong’s ‘Grow your own Drugs’ concept (on TV, online and in books) where extracts from herbs and plants are used as active ingredients for treating ailments, for tasks around the home where synthetic chemicals would normally be used and for cosmetic applications. Examples include thyme tea, which aids digestion and is an effective hangover cure or rosemary, which improves blood circulation.

Roman emperors believed so strongly in the protective powers of the leaves of the bay tree (Laurus nobilis), that they used to cover themselves in them during thunderstorms to protect against lightning. As recently as the seventeenth century, the bay was still thought to protect against witchcraft, thunder and lightning. It is believed oil from bay leaves was a key ingredient in the first solid soap to be produced in the Levant over 2000 years ago. Still known as ‘Aleppo soap’ this is still formulated from a combination of the oil of bay leaves and olive oil. At the time of the Crusades, Aleppo soap was taken to Marseilles, from whence began the soap brand ‘Savon de Marseille’.

You can grow herbs too!
The chances are you have already been seen gardening programmes or magazine articles where people have created small herb gardens in raised beds, containers or simply a handy corner near the back door. Beautiful in their own right, the added value of ingredients when you need them, fresh and free from any chemicals, makes herbs a ‘must have’. They’ll also save you money!

Growing herbs in containers or raised beds really simplifies the process. Each plant is easily accessible and can be given its exact requirements in terms of water and fertilizer. This substantially improves efficiency and prevents waste of seed, water and fertilizer. Weeding is hardly necessary at all, indeed general maintenance needs are very low, which is a real benefit given the demanding lives most of us have. Gardening like this is also accessible to people of all ages and abilities because it’s physically undemanding and can be done in the smallest spaces. Some urban gardeners are having success now with the exciting concept of edible walls – worth thinking about if your level ground is in short supply.

Edible plants can be just as beautiful as purely ornamental ones. Use your imagination, look around for ideas and don’t be afraid to tear up the ‘rule book’. If you do this you will find that you are able to create a garden that is not only great to look at but also delicious to eat! Plant up your own mini-green paradise and enjoy it to the fullest. It will be good for the wallet, good for the environment and good for your body! 

That's mostly a good thing, as it allows for a few casualties to slugs or poor germination. But there comes a time when they start competing for water and nutrients. Time for you to act as referee, removing unwanted seedlings to leave the ideal spacing between each plant.

Choose the sturdiest seedlings to keep, and remove the rest. They're easy to pull up, but if there's a danger they'll disturb the roots of the remaining seedlings pinch them out at ground level instead.

You don't have to do your thinning all at once, and some crops, like carrots, provide an extra mini-harvest if you thin gradually. Pull every other seedling, then once they've grown a little more and their shoulders are touching, repeat until you reach the final spacing of around 5cm between roots. The tiny baby carrots you pull are deliciously sweet and tender scattered raw in salads. 

• Build your raised bed: a raised bed 1.2m x 1.2m gives you 16 squares – and with one type of veg in each, that's quite a range of home-grown produce to pick. Ready-made raised beds, available from your favourite garden centre, click together in moments for instant results.
   
• Find the right spot: choose your sunniest corner for your square-foot veg garden. Place it on bare soil, or turf: you can even put your raised bed on concrete, though drill drainage holes to let excess water run off.
   
• Fill your bed with compost: a 50:50 mix of multipurpose compost and a soil-based mix like John Innes no. 3 is ideal for growing veg: you'll find both in your favourite garden centre. Fill the bed level with the top and then firm down gently.
   
• Mark out the squares: you can do this with string attached to nails in the sides of your raised bed, or by tying together a grid of canes. Either way, your squares should measure 30cm x 30cm each.
   
• Plant your veg: sow one type of veg into each square, at slightly closer spacings. One square foot holds four 'Cos' type lettuces; a tomato plant; 16 leeks; four dwarf French beans or 16 carrots. Taller plants grow better at the back; smaller ones get more light at the front.
   
• Keep the harvest coming: as soon as you harvest from one of your squares, replace the crop with fresh plug plants bought ready-grown from your favourite garden centre, or raised from seed. You should be picking a dazzling array of veg from your square-foot garden from early summer through till spring.
   

There are dozens of varieties of eucalyptus, some with multicoloured or peeling bark, others with silvery evergreen and fragrant foliage. You'll find a good selection in your favourite garden centre. However if left to their own devices most make sizeable trees, far too big for all but the largest gardens.

You don't have to give up on growing eucalyptus, though, as they respond really well to coppicing – removing all top growth to the ground. It's particularly good for the popular Eucalyptus gunnii as new growth comes through with the prettier, more delicate young foliage, much loved by flower arrangers.

Annual coppicing keeps the plants smaller but will weaken them over time, so a better compromise is to coppice every 2-3 years. It's very straightforward to do: simply use loppers or a pruning saw to remove all the top growth to about 15cm from the ground. It looks drastic, but you'll find the plant very quickly starts producing young, whippy growth, reaching up to 2m tall in a season and making a spectacular backdrop to tall perennials and grasses. 

Using a garden fork to avoid damaging the bulbs, lift the whole clump up out of the ground and carefully split it into single bulbs using your hands. As you do this, give each bulb the once-over, discarding any which are showing signs of rotting – keep an eye out for the fat grubs of narcissus bulb fly, too, which will eat their way through your entire stock if you let them.

Before you replant, dig over the soil and beef it up with a good generous spadeful of well-rotted manure or other organic matter, adding some grit if your soil is on the heavy side. Then pop the bulbs in about 5cm apart, twice as deep as the bulb's height, and you should have a healthy and much expanded daffodil display for next spring. 

The adult beetles are very pretty, in brilliant scarlet with a jet-black head and legs. But their grubs are among the ugliest in the garden: found in the axils between leaf and stem, they're fat, orange and usually covered in a mess of slimy black excrement.

Lily beetles and their grubs will defoliate your plants in a matter of days once numbers build up, so keep them under control with regular patrols of susceptible plants while they're active, from March to October.

When you spot an adult beetle, place one hand underneath to catch them as they throw themselves to the ground the moment they're disturbed. The grubs can also be easily dislodged and squashed before they do any damage. As a last resort, pesticide sprays, available from your favourite garden centre, can help control the problem: ask the staff for advice on how to use them responsibly.

There can be few flowers with such a dazzling range of colours to choose from: everything from deepest purple to brilliant yellow, white, pink, striped and bicoloured. As well as single petunias you can find blowsy double-flowered types, and varieties with prettily ruffled petals.

Large-flowered grandiflora types and the robust, weather-resilient multifloras are the most commonly grown and have been popular for years for their lush growth and showy flowers. But modern breeding has now expanded the range of petunias available. A great choice to look out for in your favourite garden centre is the trailing Surfinia petunias, which tumble generously over the edge of containers and have the added benefit that they don't need deadheading.

Give petunias a sunny spot where you can show them off to full effect. They're not fussy about compost, but it's a good idea to mix in a handful of water-retaining gel and slow-release fertiliser when you plant to keep the display going for longer. Keep them well-watered and you can look forward to a dazzling display right through to the first frosts. 

This is such a wonderful time of year, when there's warmth in the air and in the soil and the garden is just hinting at summer finery. Keep it looking its best with these jobs to be getting on with this month:

General tasks:

• Start mowing the lawn setting your blade to a higher setting to begin with, then lowering it as the season goes on.
• Stay alert for pests, especially aphids and lily beetles which start to build up now, and pick them off immediately.

Ornamental garden:

• Lift and divide daffodils as soon as they've finished flowering. Split them into clusters of three or four bulbs and replant.
• Put supports in place for tall perennials. You'll find a wide choice of plant supports in your favourite garden centre.
• Thin out hardy annuals sown last month, removing unwanted seedlings to leave the strongest spaced at 10-20cm.

 Kitchen garden:

• Earth up potatoes, drawing up soil around stems to the top tuft of leaves, to avoid green tubers forming near the surface.
• Support peas with twiggy peasticks sunk into the ground by each plant or by stretching netting between canes.
• Harden off young plants by gradually increasing the time they spend outdoors over a period of 10-14 days before planting out.

Annuals include some of the loveliest of all garden flowers, often self-seeding at the end of the year so you'll have new plants popping up next season too. You'll find lots of seed to choose from in your favourite garden centre: try feathery-petalled love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), sky-blue cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus) and vibrant scarlet 'Ladybird' poppies, each petal blotched black at the base.

Prepare the ground well before you start, and water if it's dry so you're sowing into damp soil. Then mark out big, generous 'drifts' on the ground where you want each type of flower to be, using silver sand dribbled out of a drinks bottle.

Within each drift, make shallow drills: this helps you recognise which seedlings are the annuals you've sown, and which are weeds. Then simply sow sparingly along the bottom and cover lightly with more soil. Keep well-watered and you should start to see seedlings within a week. Once they're large enough, thin to their final spacings and you can look forward to a summer full of colour. 

You'll find dozens of ready-grown plug plants in your favourite garden centre to start you off, as well as hanging baskets, felted liners and compost. Then follow our step-by-step instructions for a display that's as fragrant and colourful as bedding – and much more tasty!

1. Ten plants fill a 35cm (14”) basket: choose varieties which will be happy in containers, like Tomato 'Tumbling Tom' or the strawberry 'Mara des Bois'.
    
2. Prop up your basket on a bucket and line with a liner to hold the compost and retain water. Then mix a handful each of slow-release fertiliser and water-retaining gel into the compost before you start.
    
3. To plant through the sides as well as on top, cut slits through the liner. Fill the bottom of the basket with compost, then poke the rootballs of your plants through the slits from the outside, back-filling with compost as you go. Finally plant the topmost plants into the centre and water well. 

It's well worth tracking down some of these spectacularly beautiful small trees for your own garden. You'll find a good selection available at your favourite garden centre: here are a few of the best:

• 'Amanogawa' is a very upright tree reaching about 4.5m tall, in spring turning into an eyecatching column of fragrant, soft pink flowers. 
   
• 'Kanzan' is a gorgeous traditional flowering cherry, about 10m tall, its spreading branches laden in spring with rich pink double blossom.
   
• 'Okame' is an early-flowering cherry, one of the first to blossom in March. Its flowers are sweetly fragrant and carmine pink, and it grows to around 8m tall.
   
• 'Kiki-Shidare-Zakura' is a small weeping cherry, just 4m tall, with elegantly drooping branches smothered in a breathtaking display of double pink spring blossom.
   
• 'Shirofugen' flowers a little later than most Japanese cherries, but steals the show with its large, double white flowers against coppery young foliage. It reaches around 7m high. 

Have a go at these fun activities at home:

• Sowing seeds is always popular. Larger seeds like courgettes, cosmos and marigolds are easier for little fingers to handle.
   
• Hold a sunflower-growing competition! Choose tall varieties like 'Russian Giant' and plant seeds straight in the ground now.
   
• Build a wormery with a large jar filled with layers of sand and soil. Send the kids on earthworm hunts so they can watch their fascinating underground life.
   
• Go on a night safari with a torch and a notebook. Moths, beetles, voles, and hedgehogs are among garden wildlife more active after dark.
   
• Make a seed tray garden with squares of turf for lawns and stick fences. You'll be amazed what the kids find to create miniature plants, trees, buildings and even people!

General tasks:

• Tackle bindweed as soon as it appears, training it up a cane before spraying with glyphosate-based weedkiller
• Put slug defences in place: slug pubs, wildlife-friendly iron phosphate pellets and barriers are available in your favourite garden centre.

Ornamental garden:

• Sow hardy annuals like marigolds, cornflowers and nasturtiums direct into the border for spectacular splashes of instant colour.
• Dead-head daffodils to keep the display going, then let foliage die down naturally as it'll feed the bulb for next year.
• Prune smoke bushes (Cotinus coggygria), cutting back last year's growth by half to encourage lots of colourful new stems and bright foliage.

Kitchen garden:

• Sow veg seeds direct: carrots, beetroot and chard can all go straight into well-prepared, damp drills from this month.
• Plant asparagus crowns, laying the spidery roots over ridges of soil made in the bottom of 15cm deep trenches and back-filling with rich soil.
• Get beans growing: runner beans and French beans are frost-tender but can be sown now on a windowsill for planting out next month. 

You'll find good fruiting figs such as 'Brown Turkey' – bred to perform in cooler conditions - on sale in your favourite garden centre. Make sure you restrict its roots on planting – line a sunken pit with paving slabs, then fill the bottom with rubble. Backfill with soil and plant into that, and your fig will grow less vigorously and concentrate on producing fruit.

To train your fig, choose well-placed main branches to tie in to the supports in a fan and around now, in late spring, prune out any branches which spoil that shape. While you're at it, take out crossing branches and any which are damaged.

Then in summer, snip back any new growth to around five or six leaves from the main framework of branches. That'll give you plenty of short, fruiting spurs to keep your fig tree as productive as possible even in smaller spaces. 

Tropical indoor orchids such as moth orchids (Phalaenopsis) and Cymbidium need a quiet time over winter to gather their reserves for the season to come. Move them to a cool but frost-free place and reduce water and feeding to a minimum.

Now though it's time to return watering back to normal, making sure you're using saved rainwater rather than tapwater and avoiding the plant standing in water for any length of time. While you're at it, add a liquid orchid fertiliser to the water every three weeks or so to perk them up and give them the nutrients they need. 

Roses flower most prolifically when their stems are held horizontal, as that encourages them to send out lots of smaller flower-bearing sideshoots. So aim for a series of branches arching out on each side from the main stem, tied in to their supports at regular intervals up the wall.

If you're growing your roses up a pillar or obelisk, the same effect can be achieved by circling the main stem around the pillar in a spiral, instead of training it straight up. This holds the stems at about 45° from horizontal, enough to encourage a really generous display.

There are dozens of lovely climbing roses at your favourite garden centre, all of which respond well to this treatment.

'Dublin Bay' is a sultry deep scarlet, while 'Golden Showers' is a sunny yellow. If it's scent you're after, 'Madame Gregoire Staechelin' has masses of beautifully perfumed pale pink flowers on almost thorn-free stems.

'New Dawn' is a robust, pale pink climber which tolerates some shade; and 'Cecile Brunner' is the one for true romantics, with its frothy double flowers like a cascade of little pink puffballs. 

Most varieties grow to about 75cm tall, making bushy, evergreen shrubs with a silvery-grey tinge to the leaves. The flower spikes appear in summer: English lavenders have densely-packed bluish spikes, while French lavender flowers carry curious butterfly-like bracts, in shades from white to deepest purple.

Lavenders are Mediterranean herbs, so enjoy a gritty soil in full sun – they're very drought-tolerant. The only maintenance they need is a quick trim after flowering to keep them neat and compact.

When it comes to picking a variety, you're spoilt for choice. 'Hidcote' is a fine choice for hedging, while for something different, try soft pink-flowered 'Loddon Pink'. 'Nana Alba' is a white variety growing to just 25cm tall, and Lavandula stoechas subsp. pedunculata, also sold as 'Papillon', is one of the best French lavenders, its flowers topped with long, purplish-pink bracts.

Here are our top five ideas for enjoying your garden this Bank Holiday weekend – and long afterwards, too.

• Sow a mini veg garden: you'll find ready-made raised bed kits from your favourite garden centre which slot together in minutes and fit onto even the tiniest patio. Sow with salad leaves, beetroot, peas and chard.
   
• Make a sweetpea tower: choose a pretty woven obelisk and plant pots of ready-started sweetpea seedlings around the base for pretty, scented cut flowers for the house.
   
• Plant an annual wildflower meadow: pick your favourite seed mix, clear a patch of the garden and broadcast-sow the seed freely to fill your garden with colour, bees and butterflies all year.
   
• Fill containers with summer-flowering bulbs: pack your pots with dahlias, cannas and gladioli, all in the garden centre now, for dazzling colour and huge, showy blooms.
   
• Create a wildlife pond: preformed liners make building a pond a weekend job. Line the hole with sand first, then fit the liner, fill with saved rainwater and plant with irises, waterlilies and marsh marigolds.

Choose the place you're going to plant them carefully: they're woodlanders, so prefer dappled shade (they're happiest planted in carpets around the feet of trees or shrubs). Clear any weeds, and dig in a good few forkfuls of well-rotted organic matter.

Then lift your snowdrop clump carefully, breaking as few roots as possible. Gently loosen the soil away and then break up the clump into little clusters of two or three bulbs. Plant each cluster about 15cm apart and water in well.

If you're short of snowdrops in your garden, now is also the time to buy them 'in the green' at your favourite garden centre. You can buy simple and beautiful native Galanthus nivalis, or try one of the more fancy cultivars: 'Flore Pleno' has pretty double flowers that look like green-speckled petticoats, 'S. Arnott' has strikingly large, teardrop-shaped flowers, Galanthus atkinsii is tall with elegant pointed petals, and Galanthus elwesii is the one to choose if you're growing in drier soil.