Here are my top tips to plug: geraniums, as we all call them, though correctly they are pelargoniums. Rarefied gardeners remain reticent about these lovely plants, stereotyping them as plants for municipal bedding schemes without much attraction for bees. Influencers go on about grasses, not about red geraniums, but these fine bedding plants have been beloved by the gardening public for the past 150 years. Throughout the summer one of the loveliest uses of bedding plants is to set pots of scarlet geraniums down steps into a garden or out from a house. Gardeners in the south of France have long been adept at this style, using single-coloured geraniums and nothing else.