Like many gardeners I am obsessed by the weather and I prop myself up in bed with a cup of tea to catch the early morning slot on Radio 4. It can ruin my day completely if Jim Naughtie overruns so that the man from the ‘met office’ squeezes the forecast into a minute of gabbling – largely focused on London. My obsession also leads me to scan Philip Eden’s weather column (www.climate-uk.com) on the back page of the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph.

A couple of Saturdays ago, Philip was debating spring, and apparently in some rural areas the definition of the beginning of spring is when a virgin’s foot can cover six daisies at once. This sound bite was greeted with even more amusement than usual by the better half. The probability of finding a virgin versus the chance of six daisies within such a small area was also discussed with a little too much enthusiasm in my opinion.

On a more serious note, the daisy underpins the garden and successfully attracts many pollinators with its roundel of ray petals. These flag up the presence of a flower and the pollinators descend on the pollen-rich disc in middle and hoverflies are often very attracted. It’s quite common to see a hoverfly pupating on the centre of a daisy – looking like a tiny pink slug. Its positioning makes sound sense because the first food a newly emerged hoverfly needs is protein-rich pollen. This enables them to breed. Pollen is also important to the bee because it feeds the brood. Nectar, on the other hand, is the energy drink – the ‘Lucozade’ of natural world.

The first daisy to make an impact in my garden is a pallid-yellow sun lover called Anthemis ‘Susanna Mitchell’. This is hybrid between the early flowering white A. punctata subsp. cupaniana (a low-growing, April-flowering sprawler with silvered, finely-cut foliage) and the more upright, summer-flowering Anthemis tinctoria. The seedling almost certainly arrived spontaneously and the variety was launched by Blooms of Bressingham about 20 years ago. Hybrid plants have vigour and the flowers are often sterile, although not always, so many flower for much longer. Susanna shines from May until October.

But she must be sheared back in midsummer and given another trim in early September to prevent legginess. Even then, like all anthemis, she is short-lived so cuttings must be taken.

Taking cuttings sounds complicated but there’s an easy way. Have some half-size seed trays or pots full of damp horticultural sand and plunge your cuttings in and, as long as the sand is kept damp, they will take. Penstemons, dianthus salvias, artemisias, achilleas and pelargoniums can be raised like this – with little effort. The ideal cutting is new growth that has begun to harden up and there shouldn’t be any flower buds. Pinch them off if needed.

Other long-performing daisies include the tall, lemon-yellow Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ and this is a tight clump former unlike so many tall daisies that ramp through everything! The equally tall, dark-leaved and lavender-hued Aster laevis ‘Calliope’ will also reach five feet ot more.

But the best long-flowering aster of all is Aster x frikartii ‘Mönch’: it begins in July and goes on and on.