Hello and welcome to the BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team here at the magazine.

Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

Hello and welcome to Garden Favorites with me, Alan Titchmarsh. This is a new series of podcast about some of my favourite things, not whiskers on kittens and brown paper packages tied up in strings, but the plants that I love and think are indispensable in a great garden. You see, everyone gardens differently and has their own favourite

plants to grow. So join me as I share the plants and gardens that have become dear to me

over my gardening years. The thing about gardeners is we are always planning ahead. It doesn't mean we're not enjoying the moment.

It just means we've always got an eye to the future. And that's just as well, because it means that preparations can be in place to make sure that the colour isn't going to end in your garden tomorrow.

You've got plans afoot to make sure it lasts even longer.

And by thinking about your summer bedding plants now, and if you're not very good at raising them

from seed, growing them from plugs, you'll make sure that when it is time to bed them out,

mid to late May, depending on where you live, you will have plants ready

to go straight into your garden or into containers. I had a wonderful summer, this one just gone by

trying one or two new bedding plants, and one that I was so impressed with was Scevola, the fanflower.

I just happened to see it in the garden centre.

Oh, that looks quite nice.

I might give that a go.

I'd seen it before.

And the one I'd seen before was sort of bluey mauve.

This one had pink flowers.

I've got one huge pot outside our front door.

It's about two feet across. And I changed the display in it right the way through the year. It has spring flowers in it and then it has summer bedding. And I put Skaevola, half a dozen plants right round the rim of the pot and it spills over sideways. It's not very tall. It's a spreader and it comes out it it doesn't quite trail but its growth is

fan-like as well as its flowers actually it sort of spurts out from the side of the pot do you know from me

putting that in the end of may until october it never stopped flowering it was spectacular right the

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