There's lots to learn from wild flowers My abiding memory of last year's Chelsea is of daisies and buttercups and frothy cow parsley - a bucolic dream, but the reality is that these delicate-looking wild flowers are bullies, coiled ready to take over your garden unless managed with a firm hand. There are alternatives, and luckily Carol Klein is to hand with a brand new book - Wild Flowers: Nature's Own to Garden Grown, charting the year through all that grows in the wild, and highlighting their cultivated cousins. As Carol says in her introduction, "Once upon a time, wild flowers were part of everyone's life. Not only in a Wordsworthian way, but more fundamentally. They were part of the everyday poesy of life, the basis of folklore and legend, of magic and superstition. She reminds us that even today, more than 70 per cent of our medicines are derived from plants, and encourages us all to appreciate the connection with our local landscape and all that grows there. She believes that gardening is the direct route to understanding the fundamentals of life. Inspired by her enthusiasm, I walk along Kentish lanes and seashore, and spot primroses, anemones, violets, spurges and ferns, sea kale and sea hollies. Leafing through Carol's book, I can find information about the primrose's relations - the primulas and polyanthus - and learn that they all enjoy the same hedgerow conditions in dappled shade, areas under deciduous trees or between shrubs in organic matter. The plants can be split when, as Gertrude Jekyll described, "the flowers are on the wain." An understanding of how plants grow in the wild without our help makes sense of growing instructions for their cultivated counterparts. The Devon woods, ditches and lanes near Glebe Cottage are home to wild wood spurges, flashing lime green foils to bluebells, garden escapee honesty and primroses. Their cultivated family, the Euphorbiaceae, is enormous and one of my favourites, thriving in virtually any garden situation. I grow Euphorbia mellifera (the honey spurge) and E. characias here in sheltered Whitstable, and tougher E. myrsinites virtually anywhere in my garden. We all need their lime green cyathium leaves to wake us up after a winter of browns and sepias. So, take a brisk walk in the countryside with Carol Klein's book in your pocket and spot what's growing. There's a lot to learn from our native wild flowers in their habitats and by recreating these same plant combinations within our own gardens. So those romantic daisies can be replaced with inulas, felicias and leucanthemums, and pretty buttercups with ranunculus, thistles with cirsiums and wild poppies with papavers, and as for foaming frothy Queen Anne's lace, well - just read my guide to the best umbellifers. 'Wild Flowers: Nature's Own to Garden Grown" by Carol Klein: Telegraph Books - £16.99 plus £1.35 p&p