How many types of sweet flowers grow in an English summer wardrobe? I only ask because, if the catwalk directives are anything to go by this season, your closet will be wild with meadowsweet and lady smocks, gentian, lupine and hollyhocks, roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, blue forget-me-nots…

Forgive me for getting carried away. But if you’re not on your mettle, you’ll wind up looking like an explosion in the Tropical House at Kew. Or, worse, like my new house before I moved into it. The sitting room was done out in exactly the kind of splashy, brash florals that have lately appeared on the catwalk. There were pink and mauve stripes lurking about too, doing battle with the blousy roses splashed willy-nilly across the curtains. The Roman blinds were yet another breed of fancy blossom, in apricot and apple-green as I recall, with sprigged fabrics cropping up all over the place like weeds in a herbaceous border. The point is, it looked like a cat’s breakfast – so busy with colour and form and Eighties chi-chi that I hid in the under-stairs cupboard to regain my composure the very first time I saw it.

Curiously, one of the key references for summer dressing is follow this kind of more-is-more approach. According to the designer cognosciente, we should splash it all over, plumping for great swathes of florals. If you want to go the whole hog, fling it together with further mismatched prints (ticking, anyone?), noisy, beady jewellery and cuffs all the way up to your elbow. Christian Lacroix has been doing the look for aeons, but now it has hit the high street.

So, before you dive in, a word to the wise. Go easy. Don’t, however, do as I did in my new home, and strip everything down to bare biscuit tones. Wear nothing but neutrals and you’ll be bored blind before summer solstice (believe me, I pine for those rose curtains now that I live in an oasis of blank calm). What you want is to introduce the taste of the trend – the fragrance, if you will - without looking as though you’ve snitched the floral tributes from an East End funeral cortege.

So, starting with a crisp, white cotton shirt (I buy mine by the weight at Matalan – where two white school shirts for a 16-year-old girl cost £8), add your prints in calm succession, like Matisse applying oils to canvas. Try it first with jeans (think about a flower-print silk scarf as a belt), then add further colour at whim. Think of the prints as ingredients, the outcome as a perfume. The moment you start to feel like a Laura Ashley sofa, retreat.

Remove an element till you’re back in your comfort zone.I did this yesterday, and managed to look vaguely vogueish. Busy is back, my little buttercups. But do tread lightly in the jungle.