IF you have no time and little space in your garden, take a trip to the conifer section of your garden centre.

I know they have a reputation for being drab and boring, but these underrated, under-used plants can add height and texture to borders and pots, adding colour and shape to the garden and lasting all year.

The range of colours, from silver grey to acid green, yellow and blue, can provide a hugely contrasting border with not a flower in sight. Place them in pots as dramatic stand-alone features in symmetrical shapes and you create an instant formal look around a door.

Conifer and heather borders can also look fantastic all-year round if you pick conifers with a wide range of leaf colours and stem heights, forming a backdrop to a range of heathers at the front of the border which flower at different times of the year to provide the ultimate low-maintenance, high-impact border.

Plant them in the right spot and they should only need a little pruning and watering. They are generally pretty disease-resistant and just need a little loving care during really cold spells.

As National Conifer Week draws to a close, garden centres nationwide have been holding demonstrations and advice sessions on all aspects of conifers to show the versatility of these plants.

“They create a very striking look and have the same impact as a larger feature plant,” says Roger Ward, chairman of the Association of British Conifer Growers.

Good stand-alone specimens in terracotta pots include the conical white spruce (Picea glauca albertian ‘JW Daisy’s White’) for a formal look, while unusual conifers such as the Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria Japonica ‘Sekkan Sugi’) provide a taller, more feathery textured effect.

If you want extra height in a shrub border, or a tall feature set in the lawn, good varieties include Juniperus scopulorum ‘Skyrocket’ or Taxus baccata ‘Fastigiata Aureomarginata’.

Tough conifers such as taxus, pines and picea are also great for roof gardens as they are naturally hardy and their needle-like foliage is wind-resistant.

Conifers are tolerant of most soils and positions. Yellow or gold varieties do need sunlight to maintain their richness, so avoid your darkest spot for them. All forms of yew are tolerant of chalky soils and some blue spruces and firs prefer acid soils to give the best colour.

Spherical, or bun-shaped, conifers work well as punctuation points at the apex of a border, on either side of entrances or give strong shape in a border of daintier perennials.

However, is this not what growing up is all about?

(Review by Jane Thompson) Among new non-fiction books is Arnhem: Jumping the Rhine 1944 and 1945 – The Greatest Airborne Battle In History by Lloyd Clark, published in hardback by Headline Review, priced £20.

The Battle of Arnhem – codenamed Operation Market Garden – in September 1944 remains one of the most controversial episodes of the Second World War.

Despite heroic efforts, airborne Allied troops failed to secure the bridge at Arnhem in Nazi-occupied Holland and enable an Allied crossing across the Rhine into Germany. Thousands of the servicemen were killed, injured or taken prisoner.

Serious errors of judgement had occurred at the highest level and, despite subsequent attempts by military and political leaders to whitewash the failure into a “near victory”, the general impression remains that it was a badlyplanned operation that should never have taken place.

Author Lloyd Clark, a senior lecturer in war studies at Sandhurst, is gentler and believes that it was a risk worth taking.

His book is well-stocked with dramatic personal accounts and much military detail.

Examples include Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Minima Glauca’ and Thuja occidentalis ‘Danica’.

Most conifers cannot be hardpruned to rejuvenate them or reduce their size. However, yew (Taxus baccata) responds well to hard pruning and mature yew hedges can be cut right back to the bare stems to reduce their width.

Newly-planted conifers are most at risk from the drying effects of strong winter winds, which are more likely than frost to be the cause of browning or death in winter.

The answer is to plant your conifer in a sheltered spot where it has the protection of other plants or a wall. Smaller conifers can be protected with cloches or horticultural fleece, until they are more established.

Jobs this week

❃ Cover rows of perpetual (autumn) varieties of strawberries with cloches or horticultural fleece at night to help them ripen.

❃ Continue to plant up containers for winter displays, including cyclamen, winter-flowering heathers and pansies for colour.

❃ Lift tender perennials such as osteospermums, argyranthemums and fuchsias for over-wintering.

❃ Re-pot arum lilies for winter flowering under glass, using John Innes No 3 potting compost, placing three in a 20-23cm (8-9in) pot.

Store them in the greenhouse or indoors.

❃ Remove any rubbish that has built up at the base of climbers in the summer to allow winter rain to reach the soil below.