Patty’s Plum has now spread-eagled herself across the path like a binge-drinking party girl on a Saturday night.

Oriental poppies tend to have unruly habits and while desperately needing support do not lend themselves to elegant staking.

However their blousy blooms are always worth a place in the garden.

I have Papaver ‘Patty’s Plum’ – or at least something that was sold to me as that, although it is not as pink as it appears in my encyclopedia – and I had a more ordinary scarlet one which seems to have disappeared this year for no good reason.

Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, is also a welcome visitor to the garden.

A lovely double salmon pink one arrived via the birds a few years ago and I have also had a stunning claret one.

This annual poppy makes an unmistakable pale green curled-leaved seedling which I never weed out.

Each seed pod produces a million tiny black seeds which I always resow in the garden after flowering, but I never get more than a handful to grow each year and I fear they are the ones sowed by the birds and not by me.

They are even allowed to grow in the vegetable patch – which is otherwise carefully weeded – because they are so beautiful and because I always hope to get a special colour.

The other poppy I have is Mecanopsis cambrica – the yellow and orange Welsh poppy.

I have written before about my tireless fruitless quest to eradicate the ever self-seeding poppy from the back garden and establish it in the front.

I thought I had succeeded last year with a little clump developing by the drive but I see it has gone – and yet the orange blooms are still appearing cheerfully in the back garden.

It is a just a matter of the garden letting me know who is in charge.

We ate our first courgettes this weekend and it looks as though we can expect good crops of both green and yellow varieties.

The broad beans are almost ready to pick although I had to wash off a small infestation of black fly.

I tasted my first delicious blackcurrants – few in number but deeply exciting – and I await my strawberries eagerly.

Thanks to a series of football matches in the front garden I am now reduced to one developing fig on my fig tree and one plum on my plum tree.

I did not expect much from the plum tree in its first year, but there were 14 figs almost all of which have been knocked off or damaged.

I have now warned the footballers to place the recycling bin in front of the tree while playing to protect it, but it is too late for this year’s crop.

Garden pests come in all shapes and sizes and this year they are about six feet tall, have two legs and live in my house.

If I had not already established a self-imposed hosepipe ban, I feel a good drenching with a strong jet of water might be a humane deterrent.

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