Alexandra Campbell shares notes from her garden

Alexandra Campbell sings the praises of helpful self-seeders.

DEAD-HEADING is a big job at this time of year – but hold back on the snippers for a second. If plants are good self-seeders, then leaving a few to get on with it can be a huge help.

Most of the gaps in my garden are filled with self-seeders. Letting some plants self-seed means less dead-heading, less weeding, less growing from seed and lots of free plants.

You have to be fairly relaxed about how your borders look – self-seeding is not for those who like to plan their borders with precision.

But it is remarkable how often self-seeders seem to organise themselves into the best possible arrangement.

I’ve just gone out to count how many self-seeders are out in my garden at the moment. There are around 15, either at their best, just going over or about to come out. I’d have had to do much more work and spend much more money without them.

They include foxgloves, euphorbia oblongata, marigolds, cerinthe, erigeron karvinskianos, smyrnium perfoliatum (like euphorbia, but without the irritant sap), angelica archangelica, some varieties of hellebores, poppies (papaver rhoeas), violas and wild gladioli.

Creamy spikes of sisyrinchium make a wonderful vertical contrast to mounds of green foliage, popping up in gaps all over the garden. If I don’t want them there, I just yank them out.

I bought three plants of smyrnium perfoliatum from Great Dixter 10 years ago.

Now several huge, bright green mounds plump out beds from April to June. It then disappears below ground completely, which makes it a very useful plant.

In the veg patch, flatleaved parsley is a reliable self-sower, and coriander has been amazing this year. It has been quick to bolt, but has self-sown vigorously from a very dismal little

patch last summer.

Rocket, too, seems to prefer to grow itself rather than be grown by me.

Aquilegias and verbena bonariensis are supposed to self-seed but are slow to do so in my garden. That may be the soil, or they may not be as vigorous as their publicity suggests. I usually have to add a few every year.

My eryngiums don’t self-sow either, although they appear in many “top 10 self-seeding plants” lists.

You don’t even have to plant some self-sowers. They simply fly in, presumably courtesy of the birds. Borage popped up in my garden this year.

I’ve never grown it, and am faintly annoyed that it is invading the “yellow bed”, along with dozens of self-seeded purple allium christophii. But I can’t help being grateful, too.

Some self-seeders have been here for much longer

than I have. A friend, now in his eighties, was born in this house.

As a child, he remembers the drooping ruby spires of wild gladioli dotting around the borders. They have probably been here for at least a hundred years.

And, of course, there are always the self-seeders you don’t want, known as weeds. For me, this is feverfew or chrysanthemum parthenium. I just don’t like it, although I love the similar “seaside daisy” or erigeron karvinskianos.

So there’s an excuse to make a cup of tea rather than go out in the garden again.

If you want self-seeders, you can’t be too good at weeding. You need to be the sort of weeder who weeds a bit of a bed when it’s getting out of control, but then forgets about it for a few months. My very tidy friends don’t really have self-seeders. n