- Complete the trimming of evergreen hedges and take any whiskers of those cut earlier in the year. What can be more attractive in low winter sun, when the flowers have gone, than the clean lines and planes of hedges and topiary?

- Hedges of beech, thorn and hornbeam should have any runts or leggy specimens cut down low now; they will bush out and be far stronger next year.

- Lipstick-pink nerines, like Schizostylis, always look so absurdly, rosily optimistic at this time of year and we should be glad of them. Divide nerines after flowering, breaking up mounded clumps and setting the bulbs somewhere warm, individually, with the noses just poking through the soil.

- One of the best plants for shade is the variegated cuckoo-pint, Arum italicum ‘Marmoratum’; its drumsticks of red berries will be starting to fall over now. One plant put in even just a couple of years ago will, if lifted now, give you enough to spread around to light up dark corners of the nastiest, driest soil. Do it just as the leaves snout through. Brilliant around tree trunks and under hedge bottoms.

READERS' QUERIES

I have a peony that has taken several years to become established. This year it flowered at last but, in the meantime, it has become smothered in Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’. Can I move it safely? W. Pears, Rosedale Abbey, North Yorkshire

There’s a great myth about not moving peonies because they take so long to settle down to flower. Certainly they hardly ever need dividing and the tougher, older varieties survive in rough grass in abandoned gardens for decades. That’s because the root is such a massive storage organ, a great tangled mass of fat, woody limbs. It can take an axe to chop through them. And so people nibble bits off (nurseries too) – tiny fangs of root or a piece broken from a hollow crown. They then take years to build up the fine root system needed to develop a fat-budded crown ready to flower.

So, when it comes to buying a peony, go for a specimen bearing fat flowering stems and, if you are dividing one, don’t chop it into small pieces. If you are moving one, take a really big rootball and it may never notice what’s happened.

You could move yours now, but pick out all those crocosmia corms from the root ball as you do. Why not leave the peony and move the crocosmias?

Corydalis lutea

I wrote a few weeks ago about the virtues of good old cottagey Corydalis lutea, for making a comfy yellow cushion between paving and walls. You can buy seed of C. lutea and its white-flowered sister C. ochroleuca from Chiltern Seeds (www.chilternseeds.co.uk). This remains one of the best seed lists around, and, at £2, the catalogue is well worth buying for new ideas.

For the Corydalis, they recommend you sow as normal and keep at 22C (72F) for at least six weeks. Transfer to about 0C (32F) for six to eight weeks and then increase to 10C (50F) for four to five weeks, ie, give them a pretend winter to break dormancy; many seeds require that, especially trees. Remember it’s always worth keeping seeds of hardy plants that don’t come up as cold as possible, to see if they appear the next spring.

stephen.anderton@thetimes.co.uk

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