The 20th Century The Secret History of the British Garden

'Growing your own fruit and veg

'and sharing the produce with family and friends

'is one of life's great luxuries.'

And over the last 100 years, this has increased greatly.

People doing more and more of it themselves

in their own back gardens and allotments.

But this has come about as a result

of calamitous global events and huge social change.

'On my journey through 400 years of garden history,

'I've discovered the hidden messages

'that revealed a forbidden 17th-century faith.

'I've seen how the desire to create an Arcadian dream

'gave rise to the great landscape gardens of the 18th century.

'And I've learnt how Victorian technology went hand-in-hand

'with colonial expansion

'to enable us to grow new and exotic varieties from around the world.'

Look how beautiful it is!

'I'm now moving into the 20th century.

'This is an age of war, social upheaval

'and huge technological advancements,

'all of which transformed our gardens.'

Brilliant!

'And I'll be discovering who were the most influential figures

'in 20th-century gardening.'

This is a photograph of one of my heroes.

He's one of the greatest garden designers

this country has ever produced.

'And I'll be seeing how technology has enabled modern nurseries

'to mass-produce plants by the million.'

Their colour is slowly beginning to emerge.

-Yeah.

-You can just see it appearing here

and then it's starting to look like a field of flowers.

'I believe that gardens are every bit as important

'as the buildings we live and work in.

'And if we can unearth their secrets and listen to their stories...

'..we get a unique insight into our history

'and what makes us the people that we are today.'

Here, in the middle of London,

set six storeys up above the River Thames,

with St Paul's on one side and Tower Bridge on the other

and the great corporate temples soaring around us,

is a garden.

It's a garden that's working hard.

It's providing relief and a green space

for the hundreds of employees of the bank behind those glass walls.

It's for corporate entertainment.

Practical, cheap, pleasant.

It's a brand.

You can see it from all around.

As the city grows up and up, the gardens have to rise up with them.

As you look around, there are other little pockets of garden

showing off what good souls

and how cultured these corporate dragons are.

And there's a very human side to it. They're growing vegetables

which go into the canteen to feed the workers.

It's doing this as part of a world that couldn't have been imagined

by the garden-makers 100 years earlier,

at the beginning of the 20th century.

'In 1900, Britain was emerging from the Industrial Age.

'Huge numbers of the population

'had steadily moved away from the countryside

'to find work in increasingly overcrowded and polluted cities.

'All connected by a railway network

'that could now transport people faster than

'anyone could have thought possible 100 years earlier.

'But with this urbanisation came a growing nostalgia

'for a vanishing rural way of life

'and a desire to return to nature.

'And this reaction, against the wholesale industrialisation

'of the Victorian era, was reflected in a new style of garden,

'created right at the start of the 20th century

'here at Hestercombe in Somerset.'

This is classical Victorian bedding.

Plants raised in hot houses because they could.

They had the staff. They had the heating.

And from here...all you can see is the view.

Then if you go to the balustrade and look over...

..you have what is both a beautiful

and, for its time, radical garden.

Although to the modern eye, this might seem fairly formal

in its symmetry and planting,

in its day, it would have looked startlingly natural

compared to the contemporary Victorian gardens,

where nature was controlled with an iron hand.

The authors of this new style

were two figures that were a huge influence

on subsequent 20th-century gardens.

I've got pictures of Gertrude Jekyll

and Edwin Lutyens here.

Now, Lutyens was a rather brilliant architect.

And Jekyll, the doyenne of British gardening.

'And together, they were greater than the sum of their parts.

'They made gardens which dramatically changed

'the way that we gardened.

'Both Jekyll and Lutyens were heavily influenced

'by the Arts & Crafts movement,

'which reacted to the mechanisation of industry

'by advocating an aesthetic based on traditional craftsmanship

'and materials.

'So, at Hestercombe, we see Lutyens making a garden

'based upon stone quarried from the estate

'and hand-finished by local masons.'

This area seems to me so typical

of early 20th-century gardening.

What that means is you've just stepped out and crossed the threshold.

You've left the 19th century behind.

You're now in the 20th century.

And it has a kind of attention to detail using local materials

that is very typical of Lutyens.

And these patterns and designs,

contrasting shapes and forms and colours...

..sets up the space. It's circular.

You've got away from the four-square solidity of the house.

And this is a kind of antechamber.

OK, we've left one century, we're about to enter the next,

cleanse yourself, prepare for what's to come.

A few steps and then... Bang!

You get a really dramatic new view.

You can't see this at all from the top terrace.

And it sums up everything about this new age of gardening.

It's sensitive to place, it's sensitive to materials.

Relishing the stone and the structure.

And yet the planting is fascinating.

'Gertrude Jekyll was a painter

'before failing eyesight made her turn to garden design.

'And she uses Lutyens' framework as an artist would a canvas.

'Painting a blanket of colour and texture on top,

'as if nature has been allowed free rein.'

Jekyll loved colour, but she loved it by restricting her palette.

So, on this very hot, south-facing side and wall,

you've got Santolina, you've got the lavenders,

you've got salvias coming through there.

The Stachys. These silvery blues,

glaucous colours...that create the clumps and the shapes.

Actually, you can feel that. And you've got the oil...

Oh, that smells fantastic!

..the oiliness and the resinous.

She understood all that

and was able to incorporate it.

And there behind, Lutyens' wall, with its planting pockets.

Deliberately put in from day one.

And he gave her every opportunity to just flow.

Just go with a colour.

And that gives their gardens a kind of easy, comfortable assurance

that is just miles away from the tightly controlled,

almost masterful intentions

of the 19th-century garden.

'Although Jekyll's planting schemes

'were primarily designed for wealthy clients,

'she wrote prolifically and reached a much wider public.

'In particular, the growing middle classes

'who enthusiastically embraced her style.

'And 100 years on, she is still influencing gardeners today.

'Jekyll's original planting plans

'give us a fascinating insight into the mind at work behind Hestercombe,

'and serve as an invaluable source for the head gardener, Claire Reid.'

It's really useful. It is like you have to sort of put...

You can more easily put yourself into her shoes

and try and figure out what she was trying to do.

Lutyens, you know, does the hard landscaping

and she almost just throws a blanket of flowers over the top.

But you do see clearly from this

the way that she saw it as a flow.

-Mm.

-The shapes are very organic.

Yeah, definitely. Almost like a paintbrush sweep, aren't they?

Yeah, they are, they are. They create almost a collage.

And actually, we don't think she ever came here.

She probably designed this remotely.

In which case, she may well have just been given this drawing

-and sort of filled it in.

-Yes.

It's very hard to design like that without seeing something.

-She never came here to do it, she never came here and saw it?

-No.

That's... That there is the only thing she ever had?

Yeah, that's right.

-Interesting, isn't it?

-As far as we know, yes.

And here we are, 110 years later,

sitting in the garden that you're so carefully preserving.

-Yes.

-To her plan.

I don't suppose that when Jekyll was doing this,

there were any concessions to ease of management, were there?

Absolutely not, no. Labour would have been cheap,

they could have had what they wanted, I guess.

And how many gardeners would there have been when she did this?

Well...here's a photograph.

This is 1912, and this is the gardens team then.

-17 gardeners.

-Mm. All men, as well.

-Yeah. All holding the tools of their trade.

-Mm.

Though the head gardener there,

he doesn't look like he gets his hands very dirty.

No, he doesn't. I think he points.

Now, if that's taken in 1912, I wonder how many of the younger ones

were still alive five years later, or so.

-It's a frightening thought, isn't it?

-Yeah.

'The outbreak of World War I in 1914

'was to have a devastating impact

'on the grand estates of Edwardian Britain.

'Many skilled gardeners were killed.

'And those that did make it home no longer wanted to work in service.

'The old order of British society had been irreparably shattered.

'Some of our finest gardens were left to become overgrown and forgotten.

'And those that did survive now began to embrace new,

'labour-saving technology.'

I'm heading off to visit somebody

who I know is mad about garden machinery and collects it avidly.

The reason I'm going to see him is to see if the mechanisation

that came with the war

had any kind of beneficial dividend in peacetime

and impacted into the way that we garden.

DOORBELL

Hello. Come in.

Come through.

'I'm told that Christopher Proudfoot

'has one of the largest collections of lawnmowers in the country.'

-How many have you got?

-I don't know. I stopped counting at 300.

That was a long time ago.

'To get a feel for the way garden machinery changed after the war,

'Christopher first shows me a pre-war mower, dating from 1910.'

The ANN Auxiliary 20 inch.

-Yes.

-Chain lawnmower.

-Can we use it?

-Of course we can use it.

-OK. Where are we going? Down there?

-Down there, yep.

Right, I tell you what, if we're going to mow...

-Yes.

-..I'm going to take my jacket off.

That sounds like a very good idea!

And do you want me to pull, or push?

Whichever you like. The choice is yours.

-You're the master, it's your house. You'd better be steering.

-OK.

-And I'll be the boy.

-Fine.

-So, off we go.

-Just keep it taut and you'll be fine.

-OK.

'Like its horse-drawn predecessor in the 19th century,

'this mower is still a two-man job.'

You'd have either a man in front, or a lad in front,

or a donkey, or a pony, or whatever you happened to have available.

-Right, OK.

-It's very heavy and it needs a bit of extra assistance.

I'll be lad, donkey and pony combined.

What was the instigator

of the development of mowers from this point?

Well, the instigator was, I suppose

the development of the internal-combustion engine,

plus, of course, WWI, which meant that a lot of people went off to war

and either didn't come back, or when they did come back,

they knew all about engines, and mowers got lighter -

partly because of the use of lighter materials,

and partly because of things like ball bearings and machine-cut gears.

And in the '20s, mowers got much, much easier to use for one man.

This is where most of the motor mowers live.

Mostly date from the '20s and '30s.

It's an early two-stroke engine.

The sort of thing you'd have had on a motorbike.

Does this have a kick-start, or a handle start?

This has a handle start.

Can I do it?

Um...it's so tricky that it's probably better if I do it.

-OK, all right.

-I'm not...

ENGINE STARTS Oh! First go!

No. No, no, you see... No, it always does that.

Um...so we'll have to try again.

ENGINE STARTS

-Ah!

-Yeah, that's what you need to do.

-You manage that...

-OK.

-..I'll manage this.

Because that takes skill

and this just takes a little bit of coordination.

-You're doing it the wrong way.

-That explains something.

And there you are. No, that's right. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'In theory, at least, this is a machine operated by just one person.'

We'll get there. CHRISTOPHER CHUCKLES

-It is more difficult than it looks.

-Yes.

But you're indulging me. CHRISTOPHER LAUGHS

ENGINE SPLUTTERS

Ah! ENGINE STARTS

THEY CHEER Brilliant!

-It really nips along, doesn't it?

-It does, yeah.

'The arrival of motorised lawnmowers after the war

'not only saved many of the big estates

'who no longer had the luxury of a large workforce,

'but it also played a major part in the evolution

'of the gardens that belonged to the burgeoning middle classes.

'For the first time, tightly mown, immaculate lawns

'were a relatively cheap and easy option,

'and so they soon became a staple feature of every suburban garden.'

It's clear that the accelerated mechanisation

that happened as a result of WWI

did play into peacetime gardens.

And the effect is still with us now.

And I'm off to see another garden which I've long known about -

but never been to before -

which also had an effect on the way that we garden

as a result of the First World War.

But this belonged to an artistic elite.

And it was the way that they lived and viewed the world

that was influential, as much as the way they kept their gardens.

'During the war, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant,

'who was a conscientious objector,

'moved to Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex.

'They were both artists and members of the Bloomsbury Set,

'a group of radical artists, writers and intellectuals.'

This is extraordinary because just this room

is a distillation

of everything I know about the Bloomsbury Group.

I've been brought up with them as a really important part

of the culture of the 20th century.

Charleston reflected a new post-war liberalism expressed through art.

It was the antithesis

of the restrictions of their Victorian parents

and the world that they were breaking free from.

Here are pictures of them. There's Vanessa Bell herself,

who was married...to Clive Bell.

And she lived here with her lover,

here, Duncan Grant.

Who's pictured with his lover, the economist Maynard Keynes.

You can see already that it was a complicated household.

'It's easy now to forget just how influential the Bloomsbury Group was

'in redefining art, philosophy and even morality

'in the early 20th century.'

This is the studio that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant built.

And, like the rest of the house, the art spills off

and covers every surface

and is reflected in every utensil in the room.

And, of course, it didn't just spread from the canvas on to the carpets

and the cushions and the fireplaces -

it spread outside, into the garden.

'And this is a garden that many of us would feel at home with today.

'It has all the looseness

'and bursts of colour that you'd find at Hestercombe,

'but has a spontaneity that you'd never find

'in a garden deigned by Lutyens and Jekyll.

'The man charged with keeping the essence of Charleston's garden going

'is Mark Divall.'

What was the spirit of the place? What is it you're trying to preserve?

It was a painter's garden.

They almost treated the garden as they would a canvas.

So a daub of this.

The effect was everything.

A wonderful dither of colour, or a sweet disorder.

Sometimes it can cross over into disaster.

Disorder, disaster are quite close.

It would not have been a typical garden, would it?

-Middle class, educated people...

-Mm.

..would not have had a slightly chaotic, rambly, cottagey garden.

No. Things weren't over-cared for.

They might come back from Lewes

with something they just saw in the market and plonk it in.

There was no grand plan.

So in a way, they were no better gardeners

than a good amateur gardener.

What this garden represents, with its dither of plants

and its slight sense of anarchy, is freedom.

Freedom from the repression of the working world

and morality and discipline.

Freedom to get up in the morning and just be creative.

And it was through this outpouring

of artistic expression in the '20s and '30s

that some of our greatest 20th-century gardens were conceived.

In amongst the complicated tangle of Bloomsbury love lives,

Vanessa Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf,

was the lover of Vita Sackville-West,

who, in the 1930s, began to make Sissinghurst,

which is still one of the most famous gardens in the world,

and a Mecca for any serious garden-lover.

The poet and author, Vita Sackville-West,

made Sissinghurst with her husband, Harold Nicolson.

And between them - he largely designing the layout

and she being responsible for most of the planting -

they helped to start a fashion which is still going strong

for the notion of a garden as a series of enclosed spaces or rooms,

each with their own colours and themes.

It took the very best of 17th-century formal garden design

and added to it the informal abundance and love of plants

that was evolving in the 20th century.

However, gardens like Sissinghurst

were still the domain of the privileged few

who could afford to indulge their creativity

by making their own private horticultural paradise.

But that freedom was short-lived.

-PRIME MINISTER NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN:

-I am speaking to you

from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street.

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin

handed the German government a final note

stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock,

that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,

and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.

'As the Second World War began in September 1939,

'pleasure gardening was again put on hold for the second time in 25 years.

'Nevertheless, gardening and our gardens

'became a key part of the war effort.

'So I've arranged to come to Cambridge University Library

'to meet up with Chris Going, who's going to show me

'how the government set about allocating land for food production.'

These are the land use maps

that Professor Stamp put together in the 1930s.

A series of categories of land use.

'It was the first detailed land survey since the Domesday Book,

'and had been done so that the government could know

'what land could be requisitioned for producing food.'

This is the dense urban landscape, the red.

The purple is housing with gardens

or open space associated with it,

which was sufficiently big to allow vegetables to be grown.

So you're looking, effectively, at the suburbs in purple

and the inner city in red.

So the...the purple, those gardens had to grow food?

I would have said they had to grow food.

Yeah. But presumably, the red was in trouble.

There was virtually nothing you could do in those areas

other than put public open spaces,

like Regent's Park, like Hyde Park, to grow food.

'At the end of the war, there was an urgent need to rebuild

'the cities that had been devastated by the Blitz.

'But there wasn't time to send out teams of cartographers

'to carefully map them.

'So they took a shortcut and used aerial photography.'

The earliest ones are taken in June/July 1945,

so right at the end of the war.

And these show the public spaces

which were actually being used for the growing of food.

And looking here, there's the Albert Memorial, the Albert Hall

and an incredible stream, a line of allotments...

Absolutely.

-..running through Kensington Gardens, into Hyde Park.

-Yep!

The public were expected to cultivate their gardens and allotments

in a campaign that became known as Dig For Victory.

So London, the big urban centre,

has reacted to the Blitz and U-boat stockades

by creating temporary allotments,

by digging up gardens,

-by growing whatever they could in cities.

-Absolutely.

These pictures were taken for the repair of these towns

and for the building of new towns. How did we react?

Did we build more allotments in case we got bombed again?

I don't think they did, no.

I don't think they felt that

the near future would be like the recent past.

It was now going to be a time of peace

and eventually, they hoped, plenty.

With hindsight, it does seem extraordinary

that after two world wars,

both of which had threatened to reduce the country to starvation,

that allotments, which had been central to survival in both,

were not a key part of the rebuilding strategy.

But at the end of the war, there was an overwhelming sense

that people wanted a fresh start for a new world.

'So the government spurned the proven practicality of allotments

'and, instead, turned to an avant-garde,

'rather esoteric garden designer

'to help them in this huge rebuilding project.'

This is a photograph of one of my heroes.

He's called Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe.

And he's one of the greatest garden designers

this country has ever produced.

'But before seeing his vision for the new towns and cities,

'I've come to Shute House in Wiltshire.

'The home of Suzy and John Lewis.

'The garden was one of Jellicoe's later works

'and his own personal favourite.

'And it's a really good illustration

'of the way that he used abstract ideas

'as a central part of his carefully manipulated landscapes.'

I've always felt it must be a double-edged sword, living in

what is essentially a famous garden.

Because it's revered by people who've never been here

and yet you have to live in it, it's your home.

-Well, that's the point, it is home.

-Mm.

And I think one forgets about all the razzmatazz and just loves it.

There is always a slight trepidation when you visit a garden

that you've seen pictures of for half a lifetime.

You think, "Oh, God, I hope it is good!"

-I'm sure it is.

-The secret here...

-Yeah?

-..don't look left.

-OK.

Until you get right to the top.

-Why not?

-You'll see.

-OK.

OK, I'm not looking left, I'm not looking left, I'm not looking left.

-Now.

-I am looking left.

You see, it's very curious

because there is both that incredible familiarity

because you've seen lots of pictures, and, at the same time,

it's different because it's real, and the trees, I can see the height

and the sound of the water

and all these things that aren't there.

'By diverting the source of an old Roman spring,

'Jellicoe created a series of rills,

'pools, fountains and cascades,

'all carefully designed to evoke specific moods and feelings

'and to tap into our subconscious.

'And the rill is just part of the larger garden which, at first,

'may appear to look like other large, established gardens,

'but, in fact, is all based around our response to water at every level.

'From the abstract...to the immediate.'

One of the things that fascinates me about Jellicoe's work

is this way that he taps into the subconscious.

And that water, the way it moves, and its sound,

taps directly into that.

-Do you feel that in the garden?

-Oh, definitely.

-There is... There is serious magic here.

-Mm.

The copper is bent differently at each level.

-And it's supposed to sound like...music.

-Right.

And this is combining the magic of water

and the magic of shape and nature and...life.

As well as ordering the rill

so the water flows in a straight line, as Jellicoe wants it,

he imposed this grid of box hedges,

partiers, squares, borders.

There are a thousand gardens with exactly this kind of idea,

but they don't function as other gardens do.

They're not rooms.

You can see over the walls. The hedges are too low.

They're not borders, because each one is like a little garden.

And yet they're clearly integrated.

And, in fact, what Jellicoe seems to be doing

is imposing a kind of order

just sufficient to allow the subconscious,

or disorder, if you like, to have free rein.

'Jellicoe wrote that he should like everybody to experience life

'at a much deeper level than that of the visible world.'

What fascinated him was the way that art could be created

out of the combination of conscious, practical application

and the subconscious.

And you can't control the subconscious.

It wells up and you make of it what you will and it's very

important and relevant that this garden is based around the spring

that is here that has been coming up

out of the ground since time immemorial,

which has brought people here since the Romans.

And he shapes it and he channels it

and there are references here to history.

That view before me is deliberately

reminiscent of William Kent's Rousham, made in the late 1730s.

Jellicoe knew his garden history, he knew his art and music.

He's collated it all together here at Shute House

and that's in rhythm with music, with poetry,

with painting that's been produced throughout the 20th century

and gardens traditionally haven't done this.

This is absolutely a modern idea

and the result is something absolutely unique.

I rang Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe up once, just before he died.

And he was charming and full of life and talking about design

and he said, "You know, I'm not at all interested in plants!"

And what he meant by that was that it wasn't plants and botany

and the cultivation of plants that drove him -

it was design, landscape, ordering it, shaping it,

tapping into the subconscious forces within landscape.

And although I think this is one of the great gardens,

and I think that he is the 20th century's greatest garden

designer, it wasn't just gardens that he was interested in.

It was landscape and how mankind related to landscape,

be that a small back garden or an entire town.

Jellicoe's opportunity to create a new urban landscape

came in the 1950s.

To address the chronic lack of housing after the Second World War,

the government set about planning 22 new towns.

Geoffrey Jellicoe had been involved in rebuilding war damage

and was offered the chance to design an entire new town,

and he chose Hemel Hempstead and worked on it for a year,

and, in fact, he was paid the princely sum of £1,000 for it,

but his proposal was regarded as too avant garde, and was rejected.

However, he did subsequently design a water garden that runs

through the middle of the town, and I can see it there, snaking

through, and that word - snaking - is very apposite, because he

transformed the design deliberately to be a snake, so we can see the

body of the water running through, and then the lake at the far end

is the head of the snake. And then he famously wrote that if London could

have the Serpentine, then Hemel Hempstead could have the serpent.

Now the point about this was not that it was a nice idea that

people could enjoy, but that it struck deep into the collective

subconscious, so that municipal landscape, places where people

lived and worked and played, were being enhanced and enriched, despite

the fact that they were unaware of it, and that design could do this.

Not just in gardens, but deliberately as part of working lives.

To give the illusion of space at the heart of the busy new town,

Jellicoe makes the water seem more extensive by varying

the width of the channel and creating vanishing points.

And like Shute House, the weirs are

carefully designed to make different sounds.

The path along the bank deliberately meanders to slow people down,

to create the time to enjoy the garden.

I'm meeting up with Dominic Cole, the landscape architect who's

been given the job of renovating this really significant

piece of 20th-century design.

It was like a bursting opportunity to rethink how cities worked.

Jellicoe, I think, is the master of all the new towns.

What is stunning here is the structure is all still here,

the paths, the bridges the water - as intended.

He wanted to create mood.

So here was very much about just...

You might have been to do your weekly shop or whatever,

but on your way back to the car park

you could just stop here for a minute

and just read the paper or whatever

so it really was about a breathing space

between busy, bustling high street

and getting back into your car and carrying on with your everyday life.

Jellicoe used both his knowledge of the subconscious

and deliberately included it.

Do you think it just stops here and is something

that works on a level of art, or has it genuinely spread through?

Does it work in the way that he wanted it to work?

The philosophy blah-blah-blah doesn't sit at all comfortably

with our everyday understanding of the garden, but if Jellicoe

was here describing it to you, you would be completely captivated.

Now, I accept that most people would probably roll their eyes at the

idea of a municipal garden designed to raid the collective subconscious.

But this kind of approach was really central to modernist

thinking in the decades following the war.

It was a brave new world,

the age that gave rise to the welfare state, and Utopian ideals.

So the new town of Hemel Hempstead was built to reflect changing

lifestyles and aspirations and a quiet revolution that

was taking place in the country's back gardens.

-Hello, Roy.

-Hello. Monty, I believe.

-It is. It is.

Very nice to see you.

-Come in.

-Thank you.

-Mind how you go.

I've come to see Roy and Pat Humphreys,

who moved from bombed-out southeast London after the war,

having applied for a brand-new home and life in Hemel Hempstead.

Who's this? Is that you?

Some of the hair's going a bit there, isn't it?

Now, if you're going to be personal, I can't handle it!

Would you have had a garden in London if you'd got a house, do you think?

Very unlikely, very unlikely.

Me mother, she had a small front garden and a tiddly back garden.

And half of that was taken up with an air-raid shelter.

-Really?

-Oh, yes.

Roy and Pat belong to the generation who reached adult life

just after the war, and job security,

rising incomes and affordable housing meant

more people like them could have their own homes and gardens.

It's my pastime. It keeps me out of mischief.

Yes, it's beautiful.

Do you follow garden fashions?

No.

I have... I have moments.

I've had Chrysanth moments,

I've had Dahlia moments and I enjoy it all.

Some have been a success and some have been... We won't mention!

And why do you garden?

I enjoy it and it's good for me and I like to see the result

and my good lady, you know - she thoroughly enjoys it.

At the beginning of the 20th century, less than half of us had a garden.

Today, that figure has risen to something more like 90%,

and gardening is the nation's most popular pastime.

And this dramatic shift is perhaps the single most important development

in the history of our gardens.

Now, rising incomes,

and more leisure time played an important part in this development.

But there were also key individuals who created the fashions

and trends that made domestic gardening accessible to all.

Now, you wouldn't think that this was the entrance to

one of the 20th century's most profound gardening revolutions.

This is Blooms of Bressingham, the garden

and former nursery of a maverick entrepreneur named Alan Bloom,

who, in the 1960s and '70s, played an important role in inspiring

the nation to add colour to their back gardens.

What was revolutionary was that Alan Bloom came out with a spade

and just dug borders.

There you can see from the shape of them that they're not particularly

oval or spherical - they don't actually look designed at all.

They've just got nice, flowing curves.

Now, he was growing mainly herbaceous perennials.

They were easy to grow, they died down in winter,

you didn't have to look after them and you could have lots of colour.

Now, if you think about it,

this is completely at odds with everything that went before.

Because if this had been before the Second World War -

where the influence of Sissinghurst, Lutyens, Jekyll -

they would have taken the house and they would have taken sight lines

from the windows and from the doors and paths and put in yew hedges

and maybe walls, if they could afford it, and there would be garden rooms.

None of this.

This is just an open space, big beds, packed with plants

and, of course, this was accessible to everybody.

You didn't need to have a field to work in.

if you had a back garden with some grass, you could just cut into it.

It wasn't just the novel idea of island beds filled with

herbaceous plants that Alan Bloom was selling.

He also bred over 170 new varieties of hardy perennials

and his nurseries sold them

to gardeners keen to replicate the style of his own garden.

This became a huge commercial success

and Blooms of Brassingham became one of the largest nurseries in Britain.

So this is your vantage point.

Yes. We can look over the whole of the garden.

Alan Bloom died in 2005, aged 98.

His son Adrian took on the family business,

having built his own garden, Foggy Bottom, just round the corner.

This was my father's wholesale catalogue that, um...

We still had a pony in those days,

which would manage not to tread on plants.

This was open-ground perennials.

It was big nursery, so,

three and six, three and six, four shillings, seven and six,

about 35p for good plants.

I shouldn't let you look at wholesale prices, should I?

No, well, never mind - this is history! This is history.

It is history.

What do you think was driving the changes in the way that

people gardened, not just here,

but right across the country in the '60s and '70s?

Well, I think it was certainly the social changes

and the sort of freedom that was coming with people having cars

and being able to travel a bit, and the garden centres, you know.

Gradually, all those things gelled together.

I remember, early '70s, this thing of being able to go out,

think... Say I'd like to buy a plant, and within an hour,

have it back in the garden.

And don't forget, you know, actually right from the beginning,

the garden centres could open on a Sunday

and do trade on a Sunday when it was closed to all other shopping.

Garden centres and universal car ownership suddenly made

everything accessible.

At the same moment that another new feature of modern life - television -

began to exert a huge influence.

That's Percy Thrower. Look at the equipment.

They had 30 people, I think, with that crew,

-and cables, of course, everywhere.

-Fascinating.

This is a little bit later. This is at Foggy Bottom.

This is Peter Seabrook.

Regular television and radio programmes informed

and inspired ever more people to get out and garden.

And even the allotment - the saviour of two world wars -

became a leisure pursuit.

And so, by the end of a century marked by huge social changes,

we had truly become a nation of gardeners.

With the horticultural industry now worth £9 billion to the economy...

..and plants that were once coveted by our ancestors as exotic treasures

are now grown by the hundreds of thousands,

using computerised technologies.

I've come to Double H nursery in Havant, Hampshire,

which specialises in growing plants destined for the major supermarkets,

and it's a world away from any concept of gardening

that most of us would recognise.

The nursery manager, Howard Braime, is showing me round.

So, what stage are we at now?

We've got cuttings that have come in from Uganda, and the girls

and boys are sticking them here, five in a pot.

These people are doing thousands an hour.

They're trying to do 2,000 pots an hour, yeah.

OK, well, I've taken thousands of cuttings in my life,

but I've never done them as quickly as this!

-So, can I have a go?

-Certainly!

Am I going to ruin your whole production set up?

No, we'll let you have a go on one

-or two of them. I'm sure you'll be OK.

-And just off we go.

Yeah, just a centimetre in from the edge of the pot, really.

I'm not competitive - I'm just going to win!

Now, come on!

It's getting the damn things out of your hands.

Now, as a matter of interest,

why is the conveyer belt going at this speed?

We need to stick 30,000 pots a week,

so it has to go at this speed to get 30,000 done in the five days.

Now, we've swapped the teams around a bit.

-Yes, because it must be fairly mind-numbing.

-Yeah.

-That's perfect!

-OK!

-OK.

Ha-ha! Now you can do it properly!

Thousands of uniform chrysanthemums are produced

here each day, by using the latest computer

and robot technology for creating an artificial ecosystem.

It's a vivid illustration of how commercialised

plant production has become.

Maybe it'll encourage the amateur gardener to stop being

-so frightened of taking cuttings!

-That's correct. Yes.

Just take a cutting and stick the damn thing in

-and it will probably grow.

-It will probably root.

What are these guys doing?

So, these guys are pinching.

-30,000 plants.

-Times five.

-A week?

-A week.

-Right. 150,000 pinches!

-That's right.

And that's what these guys do.

That colour is slowly beginning to emerge.

It comes as they get older now, yes.

We can just see it appearing here

and then it's starting to look like a field of flowers.

Are these now ready to go?

Yes, these are now having their final quality control.

So what are you looking for in your quality control?

We're looking for the right-height plant, so we're looking for a plant

that's 18-25 centimetres from the top of the pot, and we're looking...

-That's 18.

-Yes. We're looking for any bad leaves to come off.

We're looking for any pests,

diseases, and the number of flowers that the customer requires.

What is the number of flowers the customer requires?

Typically they're wanting, now, an instant effect -

a plant that gives instant effect.

So we're looking for about eight open flowers, at least.

-Although you and I know, as gardeners...

-They're past their best.

..that what we should really be buying is one with no open flowers

at all - perhaps one, so you can see the colour.

That's correct, yes.

-And then when you get it, you should pinch it off.

-Yeah, yeah!

OK, what do you do with a plant that is

17½ centimetres or 26 centimetres?

That would then go to... That would be graded out

and have to go to a lower-grade customer.

Right, so anything outside those

parameters is regarded as second class.

That's correct, yes.

So, that's now the finished article.

How much will that sell for?

That will sell for £2.50 to £2.99.

And how much of that is profit?

About 3p.

Really?

Only 3p, yes.

-That's a tiny margin, isn't it?

-It is.

Which is why we have to produce the numbers we do -

the 30,000 a week - to make it economic.

Nurseries can now raise tens of thousands of plants every day

with minimum labour and to the exact specifications of the buyer,

ready to be picked up astonishingly cheaply, along with the weekly shop.

And if that wasn't attractive enough,

they might even get a bit of added sparkle.

What's he spraying on that?

He's spraying a water-based glue on there at the moment

so that we're going to glitter these plants.

You...

You... You put glitter on.

I have never seen this before.

Now, you could say that 400 years of plant breeding,

and collection, of the skills of the nurserymen

handed down from generation to generation,

of the technological developments in greenhouses and heating and

lighting and plant protection come to this -

a limited choice of plants,

strictly determined by height, that are a throwaway commodity.

But it also means

that millions of people can enjoy flowers,

can afford them, don't need to have gardening skills to do those things.

In fact, don't even need to have a garden.

Everybody has access now to plants.

And this has never been more important.

As the population rises and we cram ourselves into crowded towns

and cities, living out our lives behind glass and metal,

we have to find room for the natural world somehow -

whether it be a plant for the windowsill,

a small back garden, a roof terrace for city bankers, or a public park.

Over the last 150 years, parks have been an essential

aspect of urban life, giving people the chance to

stretch their legs, walk, play and relax in the sunshine.

And, as we move into the 21st century and more and more people are

and will be living in cities, parks remain a key aspect of urban life.

So I've come to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, which is

by a long way the biggest and most ambitious park made in recent times.

To get a sense of the scale of the task involved in creating

this new landscape, I've met the head of parklands, Phil Askew.

The park itself is about 240 acres in size.

We planted about 6,000 semi-mature trees in the park.

We planted the largest sown perennial meadow of its kind

ever attempted in the world - several hectares.

The wetland you see down here in the river Lee,

we grew 300,000 wetland plants to achieve that.

-So everything we're seeing...

-Everything we're seeing...

..which looks natural has been grown and planted.

..is grown and planted.

In the original brief for the park,

designers were asked to look for inspiration from this

country's rich gardening history, and I can see the influence

of Gertrude Jekyll in the planting clumps and drifts of the borders.

Views open out, referring back to the landscape gardens of the 18th century

and the designs of William Kent and Capability Brown.

Looking out at this, I know that it has been artificially created,

but it looks very natural.

-Essentially, I am looking on a Brownian landscape.

-Yes, it is.

In many respects, I think what we

have here is actually a picturesque landscape.

It's a... It has a direct relationship

going back through time of the British landscape movement,

if you like, and the landscape is, in that sense,

a very British product.

And in sentiment and ethos, it echoes the great Victorian parks

that provided open spaces for workers.

The Victorian park was a place where people could go and walk

and relax in surroundings that they couldn't get at home

and that role has pretty much fed through, hasn't it...

-Yes, it has, absolutely.

-..to the 20th century.

Are we just doing exactly the same thing here,

but just with different planting?

I think, to an extent, we are, and there's no doubt that fantastic,

good quality, green spaces in cities is really

important for people's health and wellbeing, but I think what

we're doing here is also thinking about, well, what is happening

in the next decade, the next 20, 30, 100 years.

How does the urban landscape need to respond to what is a changing

climate, undoubtedly - what is much more intense rainfall events?

How do we bring biodiversity, lots of birds and animals

into the centre of the city, where, after all, most people are living?

My understanding is that, in the next 30 years,

almost 80% of the world's population will be living in cities.

So how can we think about that

and perhaps set out some ideas which will drive other large

interventions in terms of landscape and public parts, etc?

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park doesn't just look back

to our gardening past for inspiration - the designers

were also required to respond to the very particular environmental

challenges that we face today.

And thus it seems a fitting place to end my journey

through the last 400 years of our garden history.

Along the way, I've been struck by how clearly garden design has

echoed the events and changes in our society -

whether it be as statements of faith in a time of religious conflict...

..or the creation of an Arcadian ideal of the British landscape.

Technology has been a key factor in the evolution of our gardens,

from the invention of plate glass to protect exotics,

to the development of the mower that enabled us to maintain urban parks

and tend our own lawns.

And as I visited many of this country's historic gardens,

it was always bought home to me that gardens were made by people

and they always reflect private whims and private passions.

And finally, and what is shown

so clearly here at the Olympic Park, is the way that if you want to make

a garden that is truly modern and looks into the future, you must draw

upon the past. And with gardens, as in almost everything in life, if you

want to know where you're going, you need to know where you've come from.