Hardy daisies that bring joy

These cheerful flowers will bloom for months

- Ruth Hayes

ONE of the mainstays of our garden, from early summer until well into winter, is a large clump of Shasta daisies.

They start flowering as the weather warms up and are often still bravely blooming until around Christmas. They are cut back in late summer when they start to straggle and become unsightly, but you can guarantee they will soon start throwing out new buds to brighten the shortening autumn days.

Shasta daisies are also easy to divide, which is a good way of keeping the main clump at a tidy, manageable size, so offspring of our original plant are dotted around the rest of the garden.

If you would like these bountiful beauties in your garden, get sowing this week’s free seeds, which are for Shasta daisy ‘Alaska’, the most popular variety of Shastas that produce pristine white petals radiating out from an egg-yolk yellow centre.

Growing to a height of 3ft (90cm), they like a sunny, well-drained site and are relatively low-maintenance, though you may need to check developing clumps of plants for slugs and snails.