As every gardener knows, weeds are a good deal better at growing than the actual plants we want to see. Keeping nuisances like bindweed under control can be an endless, dispiriting task.

Alan Titchmarsh, the nation’s favourite gardener, has a few tips on how to manage unwanted intruders in your flower beds. He points out that weeds don’t tend to flourish on lawns – and for a good reason.

Alan explains on the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Podcast: “If you think of bedding your lawn, there are not many perennial weeds because they’ve all been mown out – apart from dandelions and, and docks and plantains, which form rosettes, which sort of sneak under the mower.”

For that reason, Alan says you need to stay on top of weeds, pulling them up where you can, but even when that’s not practical, just make life as difficult for the weeds as you can.

He said: “I keep going through my border, taking it out as soon as I see it,” Alan says, adding “Keep cutting off the top growth time and time and time and time again. You will kill it. And it takes a lot of doing it.”

Once you have fairly “clean” soil, Alan says, how you plant your new plants is key: “The solution is to plant things close together. I don’t plant anything much more than either foot or 18in apart – that’s 30 to 45cm apart. So the cultivated plants cover the ground quickly, which means there’s less room for weeds to get in.”

If your weed problem is particularly severe, you can lay a square of black polythene over the affected area for a few months. “Black polythene doesn’t look pretty,” Alan admits, “But if you leave the ground covered up for at least a year…that will kill it out. It cannot survive that length of time.”

The real nuclear option is, of course, using a heavy-duty weedkiller such as Roundup – a herbicide so potent that it’s set to be banned after the end of the year. Alan says that, although technically his garden is all organic, he made one exception when he first moved into his home some 22 years ago.

“Some people like to use Roundup,” Alan says. “I don’t, but I have, in the early stages of this garden here.”

He added: “When I took in a new area that I needed to clear, I did allow myself to use Roundup once to clear it, and from then on it stayed organic. But that gave me a head start.”