This Month in Your Garden - MARCH

There's a lot going on in the garden in March and plenty to do with (hopefully) the weather improving. March weather spurns many sayings: a windy March may forecast a fine May. If March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb, but if it comes in like a lamb it will go out like a lion.

If you have not already done so in February, sow and plant of vegetables, transplant herbaceous plants and start others, like fuschias, into growth.

Tough clumps of plants like heleniums, Michaelmas daisies, geraniums (border) and rudbeckias can be divided by using two border forks back to back to prise them apart. Keep the young, outside parts to plant up, discard the old centres.Use a trowel or spade to plant the outer shoots in the border. Snowdrops can be transplanted. It's a good month for turf laying and the greenhouse will be filling with seedlings. Perennials can be grown from seed - delphiniums, pinks and lupins could be flowering by late summer.

• Check fuschias for buds, keep them moist and warm ready to re-pot, then keep them cool

• Take cuttings of bedding plants and root in soil-less compost

• Plant out sweet pea seedlings started in January (or back in the autumn) or sow seeds outside

• Sow hardy annuals – alyssum, calendula, cornflower, larkspur, Shirley poppies, nigella to name but a few, and sow half-hardy annuals

• Start dahlias, cannas, begonia and gloxinia 

• Spray roses started in the greenhouse, treating for greenfly when not in bloom

• Lift, divide and plant lily of the valley

• Split polyanthus after flowering to gain several more plants

• Pot overwintered chrysanthemum and carnation cuttings

• Sow perennial seeds in trays or modules to grow on a windowsill or in the greenhouse at 13°C (55°F)

• Bed out spring bedding plants if not completed earlier: wallflowers, Canterbury bells, daisies

• Prune shrubs grown for winter colour such as dogwoods (Cornus) and willows (Salix)

• Move large shrubs to other locations in the garden

• Repair lawn damage