Finish your spring spruce-up by edging flowerbeds. The easiest way is to dig a shallow trench between lawn and border using an edger (a half-moon shaped tool available at hardware stores). It may take time, but the payoff is a garden with a professional edge!

Raking the lawn is not only a pleasant spring pastime, but it helps remove thatch buildup, which can weaken the roots of turf grass. Rake off the winter mulch from flowerbeds too, so they warm up faster. Reserve the mulch, mix it with compost and reapply as a top dressing in a few weeks.

Skip this task if you were good and cleaned, sharpened and oiled your shovels, secateurs and spades last fall. For those of us who put it off till spring, unearth abandoned gardening tools and forsaken containers, and clean them up so they’re ready for another season.

Before they get out of hand, control annual weeds that germinate in the spring, such as crabgrass, purslane and lamb’s quarters, and perennial weeds that overwintered, including chickweed and wild mustard. Hand pulling is most satisfying, but there are organic herbicides and all manner of specialty tools available, like this dandelion puller from Fiskars, that do the trick too.

Take only one piece of advice and yours will be the most robust garden in the neighbourhood: Feed the soil to feed your plants. One of the best ways to feed the soil of perennial garden beds is to top-dress them with a layer of compost every spring. Compost adds nutrients to the soil, and improves its tilth (the horticulturally correct term for “crumbly”) – as well as plant health.

Hardy perennials can weather the pre-May 24 weather, so beat the rush to the nursery and select some of the season’s choicest plants as soon as they arrive. Once the ground has thawed and dried out, it’s a good time to plant shrubs and trees too, especially magnolias, birch, oak, yews, rhododendrons and azaleas.

Think back to last season. Did the flowers of your phlox seem a bit smaller than previous seasons? Did the middle of your clump of dianthus brown out? Were the stems of your yarrow so tightly packed that they seemed to be choking the life out of the plant? These are signs of decline that dividing can conquer. Tease apart baby crowns of plants such as coral bells and hardy geraniums, and cut large clumps of daylilies and hostas into smaller pieces. Discard the tough, mature sections, and replant the newer growth that generally appears at the outer edges.

Rule one of pruning: if a shrub blooms in spring or early summer, wait to prune until after it blooms. Otherwise, you’ll be nipping the current season’s flowers in the bud! Now is the time to prune late-flowering shrubs such as rose of Sharon, hydrangea (the mop-headed Annabelles can be cut right down to the ground), butterfly bush and roses. Cutting back dogwoods ensures a fresh flush of flaming red or orange stems which will look fabulous against the snows of next winter. But, before applying secateurs to limbs, though, consult a pruning book with good illustrations that clearly show you how.

One of my favourites is Lee Reich’s pruning primer.

Stems and stalks of perennials like sedum, coneflower and phlox look wonderful growing through drifts of snow, but let’s face it, they’ve served their purpose, and as the world around them starts to turn green, their unsightly brown clumps should be chopped to the ground. Also remove the dead leaves of coral bells, hostas, barrenwort and hellebores (all but H. argutifolius and H. foetidus), and cut back ornamental grasses to within 10 to 12 centimetres of the ground.

8.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be asked to join a press trip in Holland and visited Appeltern, a huge display garden full of great ideas, including designs for outdoor spring floral arrangements and wreaths. These caught my eye.