Bad news. It is at this time of year, when we've finally seen some sunshine, that we must forget about tans and start turning our thoughts to wrapping up warm (ugh), going outside in the cold (yikes) and digging several hundred holes in stony frozen soil (blerg). Yep, it's bulb-order time again.

Mizuna, mibuna, Chinese chives and pak choi would still be strangers on British allotments, were it not for Joy Larkcom. A few seeds were available, thanks to Chiltern Seeds' catalogue, but the problem was the lack of any detailed guidance on how best to grow them. That gap was stupendously filled by Larkcom's Oriental Vegetables, first published in 1991.

Alès created his stunning garden to grow the plants for his beauty range in the Sixties. Fiona McCarthy gets a private tour.

What to do

The Tour de France is over and the Olympics finally under way, so now we can spend the next three weeks gasping, 'She ran it how fast? HOW FAST?' and doing some mental arithmetic about the 20 minutes later we'd have finished.

What to do

There's no need to rush, says our resident gardener – there's some pretty impressive bird watching to be had first…

I am not sure just what percentage of you spend mid-week catching up with the latest from Grazia magazine, but just in case any of you missed it, in the last issue they actually name-checked a horticulturalist. Quite exciting, because you may be shocked to learn that it's not all that often that gardeners get discussed in Grazia. But this week was a positive turn-up for the books, because Jekka McVicar, herb grower and expert, got a mention in an article devoted mainly to comparing Kate Middleton's talents as a wife to Kate Moss's. Evidently the Queen gave Kate a copy of Jekka's herb cookbook, it being a royal fave.

What to do

I used to know the streets round London's Clapham Old Town reasonably well, wheeling pushchairs past the grand façades of The Pavement, balancing small children on swings in Grafton Square, haring after scooters in Rectory Gardens. Someone once told me this was the oldest squat in London. I like Rectory Gardens – the random collections of stuff tacked on to walls, the small bits of garden laid straight on to the street, shored up with timber offcuts, casually, promiscuously planted with marigolds and lettuce, petunias and parsley.

Emma Townshend pays homage to a woman whose passion for vegetables saw her take to the roads of Europe in the 1970s.

Anna Pavord explores a Nepalese-style garden

What to do

Victoria Summerley digs up their remarkable stories

It's complex, but there are more ways than one to give your flowers the support they need