How Britain Got the Gardening Bug

MUSIC: "In An English Country Garden"

Britain has gone gardening mad.

Most of us have got the gardening bug, and we now spend more of

our hard-earned cash on our gardens than any other nation in Europe.

-It's a story of how gardening went from this...

-Welcome once again to our Gardening Club.

..and started being like this.

Almost without knowing it, we've been through a revolution.

One that tells a story of how our lives as well as our gardens

have changed beyond recognition.

So, just how did Britain get the gardening bug?

The story starts in 1940, and Britain was at war.

Life as we knew it came to a standstill,

and while the men were sent to fight, everyone left back at home

was conscripted into their own war effort.

The patriotic duty to grow as much veg as we possibly could.

It was the London Evening Standard - a headline on one of their leaders

came up with the Dig for Victory phrase.

The Government then embraced it, of course,

and what they urged us to do was to turn over every piece

of available and productive land into vegetable production.

MUSIC: "The Sun Has Got His Hat On"

The Government issued information

to advise and instruct people how to grow vegetables.

Beautiful posters, which are now very collectible,

with the Dig for Victory logo emblazoned across it.

I think it also was a really important part of the war effort,

socially and culturally, people felt that they were playing a part.

Across the country, great open public spaces

were full of vegetable growing. It was a marvellous endeavour.

'There may be room for vegetables on your Anderson shelter.

'Or in the backyard. Or even on that flat bit of roof.'

Dig for Victory was an incredibly important propaganda moment.

People like Potato Pete,

this character who was exhorting you to eat him,

a sort of cannibalistic,

he was like that Bertie Bassett liquorice man, in a way.

'Put your garden on war service. If you haven't got a garden,

'go to your local council office and ask for an allotment.'

Digging for victory was a serious business,

and, coupled with our healthy waste not, want not attitude,

soon led to Britain's first ever potato peeling patrol.

Dearly beloved brethren, is it not a sin

when you peel potatoes, to throw away the skin?

The skin feeds the pigs. The pigs feed us.

Dearly beloved brethren, is it not thus?

As well as the vegetables, there were things called pig clubs.

6,900 of them, I think.

Groups of gardeners got together and they bought a pig,

and it fed off vegetable and kitchen scraps.

Finally, at the end of the day, down to the kitchen

and they shared it amongst the people who had reared it.

'The black pig is Romeo. The white one, she's Juliet.

'But so far, there's no balcony scene.

'When they grow a little bigger, well, that'll be another story.

'A sad one for Romeo and Juliet.'

The Dig for Victory campaign grew and grew.

Everywhere you looked, people were digging up parks, playing fields,

flower beds and lawns. What the nation needed was a gardening guru.

And before long, the first gardening celebrity was born.

Where else but on the wireless?

-'Good afternoon... Ahem!'

-Well, when we say "celebrity"...

'I suppose one of the most difficult jobs to explain

'over the wireless is the pruning of fruit trees.'

Cecil Middleton was a phenomenon

before and during the Second World War.

He started his broadcasting on the wireless in 1931.

On the Home Service he was getting 3.5 million.

Eat your heart out, Gardener's World.

'My general advice to amateurs is,

'if you don't know why you are making a certain cut, don't make it at all.'

I remember one of his homespun phrases was,

"The harder we did for victory, the sooner the roses will be with us."

For the women left at home, the war effort was seriously hard work.

The Women's Land Army mobilised 80,000 of us.

Women were suddenly in charge.

We may have only been digging up potatoes, but this change

paved the way for the emancipation of women in years to come.

I think the Land Army and the work that women did

through the Second World War almost put women on an equal basis.

They worked machinery, drove tractors,

the big heavy work that nobody would have expected of them previously.

I think actually it liberated a lot of women, it allowed them to do

men's work. And also played an important role in the war effort.

They became confident. I'm sure a lot of men had a horrible surprise

when they came back and found their housewives had turned

into these very sturdy strong confident women.

Whilst the war affected everyone's lives,

it didn't start us gardening as a nation.

We Brits already had a grand tradition of gardening,

-as only a nation who ruled the world could.

-I think, before the war,

even the middle classes would have a jobbing gardener, um, and so...

I think a lot of middle class people

didn't actually do a lot of gardening themselves.

Before the Second World War, in the inter war years,

there were still very large gardens with large forces of gardeners,

really the Victorian set-up, with the head gardener,

and a strictly hierarchical order of men working under him.

The Second World War really caused the end of that system.

# Keep the home fires burning... #

Professional gardeners went off to the war to fight,

didn't always come back to be gardeners.

Ended up somewhere else.

And also I think deference had taken a great hit during the war.

I think Dig for Victory did give people a sense...

it certainly did teach some people how to start vegetable gardening,

particularly in the very inner city areas. I think maybe,

maybe it may have led to an idea

that your yard could be used for something else.

# You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain

# Too much love drives a man insane... #

The 1950s came along.

And, in the face of austerity, we got on with life as best we could.

Being choked to death by air pollution and surviving on rations.

We realised that gardening might actually cheer us up.

Especially as, on Sundays in the fifties,

there wasn't a fat lot else to do.

In those days, you couldn't go racing, you couldn't go to football.

You couldn't go shopping.

And I think, for a lot of people,

gardening was what you did on a Sunday afternoon.

The earliest recollection of why people did it

was because there wasn't a lot of other things to do,

and there was a real pride in their front patch.

They didn't want to be shown up by their neighbours or anybody else.

After the war, you had

all these little houses with little backyards.

And it's where you kept the outside loo, where you hung the washing.

And it was a purely functional area.

The yard mainly was for storing things like coal and wood.

There was a shed and often a privy, and people would keep it like that.

There wasn't a single garden,

back garden, in our row that I can remember. They were all little yards.

It is all about plumbing. If you can move the loo inside, then suddenly

you have got an area that doesn't smell. And you have got a shed.

And that yard then becomes a garden.

The Chelsea Flower Show, which had been cancelled during the war,

made a comeback, bringing a bit of glamour into

our rather dismal lives and fuelling our imaginations.

We flocked there in out droves, collecting all sorts of colourful

pick-me-ups to take home and plonk into our borders.

I think the people who went to Chelsea at that time -

really up until recent years -

um...would have been... It was the start of the season.

So it was a place to be seen.

'Ah, here's Harry Wheatcroft, the rose grower.

-'No show is complete without him.'

-Yes, Harry Wheatcroft.

I can remember a large man with a moustache,

and maybe a checked jacket.

'Then come the thousands of visitors.

'Garden lovers, all of them, from every walk of life.'

It was a place to take your gardener, perhaps, and order this or that.

But really it was just a social event, rather than a flower show

in the way that we know them now.

'But on Friday night, the show must come to an end.

'The gardens are dismantled, and in a few days the huge marquees

'have disappeared, and nothing left but the scars on the turf.'

# This old house once knew his children... #

One of the big post-war priorities was creating

new housing for returning servicemen and their families.

Before we knew it, 160,000 prefabs were built,

each with its little, and we mean little, plot.

Post war, a lot of prefabs went up, so people just immediately

had somewhere to live. And I think most people know that

they ended up staying up much longer than was originally intended.

Imagine again all those years of the war, not knowing,

not having any certainty about home life, and, even though it was a box,

they had something to call home, with a little patch of ground in front.

Since the war, nobody has tried to invade us -

always helpful if you are being a gardener. If nobody tries to invade,

you look at the area around your house and you can make it prettier.

# As I walked home on a summer night

# And the stars in the heaven were shining bright

# Far away from the footlights' glare

# Into the sweet and scented air of a quaint old Cornish town... #

The garden was used for sitting out when it was sunny.

You never thought of going out, I never thought anyhow

of going out and doing anything constructive in the garden.

And if it was hot and sunny, you sat out of it.

It wasn't a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Well, it was,

but beauty in your eyes then, not, as it is now, an extra room.

It was a place where you went when it was hot.

I don't think one had many meals outside either.

If you wanted a meal outside, you went on a picnic.

# I thought I could hear the curious tone

# Of a cornet, clarinet and big trombone

# Fiddle, cello, big bass drum

# Bassoon, fleet and euphonium

# Far away I was in a trance

# I heard the sound of the floral dance... #

Well, in gardens in the 1950s, I think there was a division

between bits of the garden as there were inside the house.

And in a way, if you can think of the front garden as the front room,

that was the showpiece, and perhaps nobody really went there very much.

You'd have a round bed with a big shrub in the middle,

maybe a fuchsia or something.

Petunias or something planted out around it in the summertime.

And in the back, you might have a tiny little square of lawn

which again was very carefully kept.

And it would devolve into vegetables very often.

It wasn't really used for leisure purposes.

People weren't having barbecues or having Jacuzzis

with built in stereos. Things people have nowadays.

Our post war love of colour was essential in the fifties garden.

Livingstone daisies, dahlias and roses were all the rage.

What we had in most back gardens in this country was really the style

in a way which we still have, this basic structure of it.

It's a sort of miniaturised version of Arts and Crafts style

of the early part of the 20th century.

So you have features like, for example, crazy paving,

which lot of people laugh about today.

In the 1920s, crazy paving was the height of sophistication.

Then you have elements, like a sundial for example.

A quintessential Arts and Crafts feature.

You might have that in a suburban back garden as well.

Or you had a wishing well.

But at the same time, there was this great emphasis, I think,

particularly in the early fifties, on bright colour. If you look

at gardening books at this time, it's not helped by the fact

colour photography reproduction in books is very smudgy,

and you open them up and you get this kind of smudgy red or purple

kind of zinging out at you. Of course, it's to do with the fact

that we'd just been through this terrible war,

and in austerity, there was still rationing going on.

# Inch by inch, row by row

# We'll make this garden grow

# All it takes is a rake and a hoe

# And a piece of furrowed ground... #

We'd perfected our veg growing skills during the war,

but when it came to planting anything ornamental,

the truth is, most of us were still just learning the ropes.

I think, before the war, it was very much a question

of people passing on plants.

Not a lot of people would have ordered things,

not unless they were rather well-to-do.

After the war, people started to sort of...

experiment a little bit with seeds, but it was difficult.

You couldn't walk into a place and see great arrays of seed.

You had to get a catalogue, you had to try and find out

what those plants were. How did you find out?

You had no websites to visit, no internet, nothing.

I think the catalogues in those days, essentially,

they were lists of plants with more or less useful descriptions.

The second thing is, they expected people to be quite knowledgeable.

If you ordered roses, for instance, you'd just get this bundle of roots.

You still can, of course. It's one of the most exciting ways to do it.

But if you were an inexperienced gardener,

you'd have wondered what the hell this was.

I can't remember my mother ever going out to buy plants.

She might have bought some seeds.

Men and women were back out in the garden together.

But who exactly was doing what?

It was still very much a man's prerogative.

It was still very much a question of, you know,

a man and his tools, that's how you garden.

You know, you're in control, that's what you do.

You can probably generalise that Mum would do the flowers

and Dad would do the vegetables and Dad would do the lawn as well.

When I was very young, my grandfather, my darling grandfather,

I remember his one job was to clip the privet hedge.

With shears. I can remember that. And my grandmother had to nag him.

I don't think he enjoyed doing that very much.

1950s Britain had well and truly come down with the gardening bug.

The dawning of technology was rocketing us towards

a snazzy new automated era. Everything started to go high-tech.

There's an idea that gets about

that the garden can be something which can be tamed.

It's this sort of ancient battle, if you like,

between man, and I probably do mean man in this case, and nature.

Time-saving gadgets were part of the consumer boom.

And the gardening world was no exception.

If the day comes when we can press a button, sit back

and let the machine guide itself around the lawn,

then cutting the grass will really be a pleasure.

In Australia, you always had a lemon tree. And you always remember it,

because we children were sent to pee on it.

We weren't to go into the house

if we were outside playing, we had pee on the lemon tree,

because we believed that the lemon tree somehow appreciated

this offering of our essential juices.

In my first garden, um... it was a large suburban garden.

Very neat, mostly laid to lawn,

and full of lots of don'ts. You know...

"Don't go near the pond, you'll drown."

"Don't walk on the rockery, you'll fall and twist your ankle."

"Don't kick a ball into the borders."

I had a wee pond, I remember, which was overgrown,

but had the occasional frog, and a lovely rose at the end of my garden

called an albertine, which flowers for about a week,

drops all its petals and makes a hell of a mess.

And then doesn't do anything for the rest of the year.

After all of the years of austerity, we Brits were finally beginning

to loosen up a little bit.

Flower power had arrived from America and, suddenly,

it was becoming cool to be British.

But gardening wasn't really cool.

Not yet, anyway.

I'd love to be able to sit here and say the 1960s saw

this incredible unbuttoning of the horticultural world,

and we had psychedelic gardens, and people on acid trips creating

incredible kind of garden worlds with abstract plant material.

It wasn't really true. People were still wearing headscarves.

Lots and lots and lots of bright colours, garish colours,

mixed colours out there in the borders as well.

But I don't think it was a particularly young pastime.

The people who were really exploring the sixties in fashion and music,

I don't believe for a moment were out gardening.

I grew up in this suburban, almost rural idyll.

It was a London suburb and they were much more rural than they are now.

And it had all of the classic features.

It had a wonderful lawn,

it had great flower beds, it had magnificent trees, shrubs.

And I was encouraged at a very, very early age

to do a lot of things in the garden. You'd be picking apples,

you'd be cutting the grass, maybe with shears.

We had a couple of dogs, we had hamsters that were in the garden.

We had lots and lots and lots of cats.

I remember the cats were always buried under the hedge.

Modern times called for a modern materials in our gardens, and soon,

people began to offset the floral abundance of it all

with that essential forward-looking 1960s material.

Concrete!

They want something which is cheap and easy and new,

so concrete is the ideal material. Very malleable,

very democratic, really.

They colour it blue, pink, orange, fantastic!

Mum and Dad decided we should have our own paddling pool in the garden.

And one week, they just set to with spade and shovel

with Fiona, my big sister,

and dug a paddling pond about a quarter the size of a sort of room,

lined it with concrete, then filled it with a hose,

and then that was where, for years, we would, I suppose, swim.

MUSIC: "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys

Britain didn't just have the gardening bug,

we now had the travelling bug.

The new-fangled package holidays made foreign travel possible

for working people, who's only real previous experience of it

had been wartime conscription.

All of a sudden, we were jetting off to sunnier climes,

like Spain and Portugal.

The mass movement towards package holidays and foreign travel made

a difference to how people looked at their gardens when they got home.

Combined with the nice weather,

-it should make your holiday a happy one.

-'So you had'

elements that had never existed in gardens before, like patios.

# This year, I'm off to sunny Spain

# Viva Espana! #

Which is a Spanish word, it's the Spanish context.

Before that, if you'd any kind of hard standing, you'd probably call it

a terrace, which was French, or terrazzo, which was Italian.

But suddenly, because of Spain, there was this inspiration

about bringing living outside much more.

In the 1950s, your herb garden consisted

of a few bits of mint and possibly some parsley.

But once you'd been to Majorca, you came back and you thought

there was rosemary and lavender and a lot of things

that you felt that you wanted to grow in your own garden.

People realised there was a whole world out there

that they hadn't come across before. When I was a child,

olive oil was something you bought in the chemist.

It was something you put in your ears for ear ache.

Nobody cooked with olive oil in those days.

Back at home, new levels of prosperity

and shorter working hours of the 1960s

meant we had more time and money to spend on our gardens.

As much as £100 million a year.

And our spending was helped along by a new phenomenon

that had started life in America. Where else?

The gardening centre may well do for Syon House

what sideshows and lions have done for other historic homes.

We saw the arrival of the garden centre.

And again, linked to social mobility,

people owning cars, they could drive off for an outing in the afternoon.

-ANNOUNCER:

-One of the things that makes the centre different

is that it contains what might be called

the first gardening supermarket.

And suddenly, this one stop shop for anything related to the garden, from

plants to furniture to barbecues, and it changed everything about how

we garden. It changed that need to nurture a plant from a seed

or a cutting, because why bother, you could go and buy a mature plant

and bring it back and pop it in and there it was, finished.

It took away the mystery. It took away some of the problems of growing.

And it made gardening much more accessible in many ways,

for people that didn't want to get their hands dirty.

Garden centres were agricultural and therefore, they could sell their

own stock on a Sunday.

Garden centres were therefore one of the very few places people

could go on a Sunday.

In early garden centres, we all had the most enormous

overflow car parks for Saturdays, and particularly Sunday afternoons.

Many a garden centre operator would tell you in the '60s and even into

the '70s, the most important job he had to do on a Sunday afternoon

was direct the cars to get them into the space available after lunch.

A small plant, a big plant.

No need to wait for them to grow up nowadays.

Just pick them up the size you want.

Complete with a trolley to cart them off to the car.

We were horticulturalists, going into retail,

and we knew nothing about retail. We were learning as we went along.

And the excitement and the fun of that was tremendous.

Having a good-looking garden was becoming fashionable. Trouble is,

it was still a bit too much like hard work.

And so our quest for ways of saving labour out in the garden continued.

This time, in the chemical department.

People used chemical sprays, quite freely, without any awareness

of any impact to the environment or natural balance and so on.

Because that really wasn't something that people had begun

to have any awareness of.

My father, you know, had this - very old-fashioned, looking back on it -

this old pump thing, hand pump,

and sort of reeked of garden chemicals everywhere.

All of the old fashioned chemicals, Paraquat, DDT,

were meant for an instant hit.

You sprayed them, whatever the problem was, dropped dead instantly.

Whereas these days, we've become much more sympathetic

to the environment, much more aware,

but it was that quick fix.

That was important in those days.

Saved you time.

When you save that labour, or save that time, actually, it should give

you time to do other things in the garden, like, shock horror, enjoy it.

Good afternoon, and welcome once again to our gardening club.

Gardening had had us glued to the wireless since the '40s and '50s.

So it was only a matter of time before television got its turn.

Even if it was still black and white.

Not exactly ideal for flowers.

And the person at the helm was a former parks man,

who became such a sensation that most of us remember him to this day.

Do I remember Percy Thrower?!

What sort of a question is that?!

We still use Percy Thrower's Gardening Encyclopaedia, or whatever it's called.

There were very few television programmes about gardening.

My hero always has been and always will be Percy Thrower.

He looked like a gardener, he talked like a gardener, and that

was very much hands-on gardening.

If you've only got room for one plum tree on a wall, I suggest Victoria.

My very earliest memory of gardening on television

was Percy Thrower for magnolias.

And it was the only gardening programme,

in fact, only television programme I was allowed to watch on television.

Last week, in Madeira, we were looking at the Canary date palm,

the avocado pear with the young fruits on.

Percy was the person that gave you a global

appreciation of what was going on. He went to places like Chelsea.

He went to the Southport Flower Show.

He brought a new world of horticulture to me.

Here I've got a lemon tree in flower.

I'd say probably that Percy Thrower was like the uncle you never had.

He knew it all, but he wore his learning lightly.

As we get into the spring, the summer and into the autumn,

no doubt we shall get greenfly.

He always seemed to be pruning things.

-He was obsessed with pruning.

-This one can be clipped off there,

-just above that.

-He was quite firm. A little bit strict.

He wasn't like the ones nowadays that want to be your best mate.

It was all about "you should do this or that".

Now, before replanting, peat, garden compost,

a little meal mixed into the soil, and then, planting these out.

You were constantly being reminded,

you know, that he was the expert, this is when you must do it,

this is how you must do it,

these are the rules, and you should stick by them.

He never actually does any digging from what I can remember.

He looks at an island bed that has got lots of heathers in it

and he goes, here we have this plant

and that plant, and sort of points at them, and then, he walks off.

But you never see him really getting excited.

Then he goes in the greenhouse and he hangs

up his coat and there's quite a bit of action in the greenhouse.

Televisually, it's very staid.

These days, you look back, but that's how television was, you know.

This is the attractive face of Britain.

And this is the less attractive.

Those of us who lived in 1960s towns remembered that they weren't exactly

the greenest places to live in.

Our towns needed cheering up, and fortunately, 1964

saw the arrival of a new idea

that would sort out our forlorn looking parks and streets for good.

Thing is, it wasn't really a British idea at all.

There was a very famous gardener called Roy Hay in the 1960s.

He went out on holiday to France,

and he couldn't believe every village and every town how they took

so much pride and everything else.

And he came back and thought, "Well, why shouldn't we be doing this?"

Flowers, gardens,

even window-boxes add a touch of colour to every kind of district.

It's the three words from hell.

Britain in Bloom. I'm sorry, it should be banned.

# Where have all the flowers gone... #

You're driving through the countryside, everything is green

and beautiful and serene and you turn a corner into a little village

and it's purple petunias, those wagon wheels

that they put in the middle of the village and each spoke

is a petunia of a different colour.

Some people think there is a Captain Mainwaring element,

that there's people going round

saying, "Your hanging baskets are not looking good enough."

I think there's a small element

of that but Captain Mainwaring is a very English thing.

They go flat out to put flowers on absolutely every surface.

And nobody seems to realise that this is so troubling to the eye

that it's actually floral chaos.

People are often snooty about Britain in Bloom because...

It's a class thing...

Because they see it as being really rather common.

For me, the crystallisation of the ghastliness of it all

is the hanging basket.

Which I would shoot down,

I would ride roughshod through villages at midnight

shooting down the hanging baskets.

They disfigure some of the prettiest buildings in England.

When I come up to London I get on the train at Kemble,

a fabulous, posh station, it's where Prince Charles gets the train.

It's constantly referred to as one of Britain's bloomiest stations.

They were decorating it the other day and to celebrate it took all

the hanging baskets down and put them in the washing machine.

But I'd never noticed. Because fuchsia are so repellent

in their natural state, I'd always assumed that these hideous,

throbbing, disco flowers were real but they are not.

They are made in China. You can see written underneath it.

I wonder whether the Britain in Bloom authorities know

Kemble station has non-real fuchsia.

So much for flowers in our towns, but what about growing veg?

Another essential element

of the 1960s urban landscape was the good old allotment.

Mainly located alongside railways and canals,

they were still in regular use.

Allotments have a tremendously honourable history.

They go back to the Middle Ages.

There were patches of ground given

to people to be able to sustain themselves and their families.

Your full allotment is a chain long,

a cricket wicket, 22 yards.

That is a big area.

I've liked allotments not so much because of the plants

that grow there but because of the people that grow them.

I like the camaraderie that springs up.

A great sense of community.

Our allotment site was a collection,

rather romantically, of ramshackle sheds,

bits of greenhouses made out of old windows, polythene, corrugated iron.

There's always an old Joe or old Fred at an allotment who knows more

than anybody else, and everybody else bows to his greater knowledge.

It was just like heaven.

When I got that allotment and it was mine,

I felt like I belonged to Britain.

It was my bit of land, my bit of England.

# I've been cheated by you

you since I don't know when... #

The '70s were here and the litany of strikes and blackouts didn't

stop us enjoying ourselves.

Television was now in colour.

Shorter weeks meant leisure was the new buzz word.

And when we could actually get petrol we went out in our cars like

never before, and drew inspiration for our gardens back at home.

In the '70s, people were out and about a lot more.

They were travelling, visiting gardens,

going off for a Sunday afternoon

in the local countryside.

It's an historical fact that Britain is renowned for its gardens.

Over the years, the gardens created have developed character reflecting

the inborn expertise inherent in this country.

And this idea of seeing a beautifully kept, beautifully manicured gardens

and planting schemes would then be the little catalyst to go home

and do something rather special.

It's a place of great beauty and charm, in which to spend

a relaxing day out with the family.

It must also instil in many the desire to return home and emulate

what they've seen.

It's very possible that the first time I ever realised

what a garden could be like

was when I went for the first time to Sissinghurst.

And then I realised something about the British.

Their true expression of their voluptuousness,

their love of pleasure,

is not to be found in a conversation

or the social relationships, but they garden like sensualists.

They garden in the most extraordinary, opulent, mad way.

I suppose it's something when you

see a garden on a big, big scale it takes your breath away.

You've only have to go and see some of those

great historical gardens to realise that we couldn't possibly do it now.

I think it's very profound in the British psyche that the garden

that you have is a miniature of the grand garden,

the great Capability Brown or Repton landscape that you visited.

Back in our '70s homes, our passion for gardening was gathering pace.

No longer content with just tending our back gardens,

we started to use our front gardens for a bit of showing off.

They quickly became a way of showing the neighbours how genteel,

prosperous and clever we were.

I always think that a front garden is the outside version of a front room.

It's a space that's incredibly over-formal, totally pointless and all about showing off.

It's got all the most ornate bits that you feel make you look posh.

You even get a lot of the cliches, a lot of the devices,

that most people associate with the National Trust but in miniature.

You get tiny, concrete, heraldic beasts by the side of a drive.

If you can possibly bend your drive, even though it's just that much,

enough to make it really annoying to negotiate in your Datsun Cherry.

But that's gracious to be able to do that rather than a straight line.

# Why do you whisper green grass... #

The best one was the '70s with the pampas grass, which is supposed

to mean that you are swingers.

If you had that outside it meant it was definitely worth knocking

on the door of an evening clutching a bottle of Babycham.

It's one thing my stepmother was exceptionally proud of.

I think she would invite people just to see her pampas grass.

She would count the plumes.

"This year we had 12.

"We only had nine last year."

It says lots about a garden and the garden owner.

Pampas grass, very, very difficult to eradicate once it's in your garden.

The only way of going about it is with a pick axe and a bonfire.

I do mean that.

More than ever we loved emulating the grander gardening traditions

in our '70s gardens.

One of these had enjoyed a huge revival in the stately homes

of the 19th century.

Topiary was something that you had a fleet of gardeners doing.

It really demonstrated your supremacy over Mother Nature because there

she is, she's growing you a bush

which is bush-shaped, but you are instructing

someone to turn it into a peacock.

When it all starts going absolutely horribly wrong

is when it happens in Swindon and it's actually the Flying Scotsman.

Men have got a bit of a thing about trimming hedges.

They quite enjoy it, getting that perfect level top

and the smooth sides.

It's the woodwork that they never did.

It's that coffee-table they never made, the shelves they never put up.

They can do that in the garden,

it actually doesn't require a great deal of talent.

But there is something about that tiny, pocket handkerchief garden,

and that it's got the entire

cast of Alice in Wonderland through the medium of bush.

Another of our little garden crazes in the 1970s

also had a long tradition.

These days, apparently, they're only stylish if they're ironic.

Gnomes and the broad question of gnomology

is a sort of vexed question, if you like, in horticultural history.

There's a long and venerable history to gnomes.

A very dear friend, who actually I thought had quite a lot of taste

gave me a gnome for Christmas.

When people walk up the garden and they see him, you can tell

they never quite know what to say.

Should I mention the gnome, is he there as a joke?

We all know the story of the eccentric lord going off and getting "gnomen figuren"

as they were called from Germany,

which are table ornaments, very smart things

like Meissen porcelain and so on.

Instead, he had an interesting moment and decided to go out and put them

in the garden, arrange them around in his grotto.

I absolutely, genuinely like garden gnomes.

I think there's something

really comfortingly pretentiousless about them.

You can't get any lower than a garden gnome.

With foreign holidays now taking us as far as the Alps and Pyrenees,

the alpine look became a signature element of the '70s garden.

You had, in the '70s, certain signature things.

You have a craze for something like dwarf conifers.

And dwarf conifers are the horticultural equivalent

of flared trousers nowadays.

If you look at these things,

they are so redolent of that particular time and place.

Glenda's garden is a geriatric unit.

Somewhere where, as we grow older, there will be less and less to do

and yet we should enjoy the colour and the pleasure of it.

Dwarf conifers were the thing, you know.

These were the things you should go for. Those mixed with heathers.

Lavish and lashings of heathers and lovely conifers

in every shape and size and colour.

We were always on the look out for ways

of labour-saving in our gardens.

Composting had long been one of the most arduous jobs.

Soon, pre-mixed compost became available on the market

and our lives got that little bit easier.

For generations, compost making was the sweat of gardening.

Yes, there were all manner of books that told you how to do it,

how not to do it, stop it turning out as black slime, how to make it,

you know, useful in the garden. It was hard work.

A team of experts with the resources of Fisons research organisation

at Levington around them, have put in a vast amount of work to develop

what we now know as Levington compost.

Suddenly, the greatest labour-saving device of the lot,

you could buy compost in a bag,

in the early '70s some time.

This was available through this new breed of garden centre.

Now, the fact that the compost you could buy in the bag has got nothing

whatsoever to do with compost that you made yourself.

I mean, it's a completely different substance.

It's for planting in, it's not for soil improvement,

it's not to give you additional nutrients into your ground.

It's just a planting medium but they called it compost.

People have been muddled up about compost ever since.

# Old MacDonald has no garden Ee, ay, ee, ay, oh!

# Did you know with help from Fisons He can make things grow? #

Pre-mixed compost in a bag led to an instant hit - the gro-bag.

It wasn't only a godsend for those of us who had gardens, it was loved

by many people living in flats or on estates who didn't.

# Bye bye Baby Baby goodbye

# Bye bye Baby Don't make me cry

For some people who are gardening in quite difficult circumstances,

people in tower blocks with just a balcony,

for example, it suddenly made it possible for them

to have a fully mature garden on the balcony.

-Did you put the guard round?

-Yes.

We thought they'd make it look like

a little garden, because we love flowers.

They grew their herbs, they could grow flowers, you know.

They could do that without having to, you know,

hump barrowloads of stuff up in the lift.

'I've had 17lbs of tomatoes out the grow bags which was amazing, really.

'For such a small bag, to have all those many tomatoes come out of it.'

Another great British gardening institution was

now essential viewing on the telly.

If you think back to the 1970s

and those vegetable shows, they were extraordinary because there were

these monstrous vegetables, quite unlike anything to do with reality.

We had leeks like that, potatoes like this, onions like that.

There are one or two dishes here which,

it's difficult to express the joy and pleasure in viewing them.

Most of the men who grew them were complete size queens.

They were desperate to grow something bigger than their mates.

How are you going to express in words the quality?

Almost as if they were tribesmen in the hills of New Guinea

who, if they didn't grow the biggest yam would probably not find a wife.

If you look here, you've got the length but not the girth.

What is it about vegetable competitions?

What is the point of growing something to see how big it can get?

I rather feel here

perfection, which has never been reached,

is approximately yes or apparently...

-We're almost there.

-Exactly.

I learned all the tricks about those vegetables.

You grew your leeks in a drainpipe

and you wrapped your celery in newspaper

as you earthed it up to keep it lovely and clean.

Oh, what a joy to look at those!

It was always the same. It was always old men.

Old men and their marrows. It's a size thing.

Just look at the length of shaft.

There's no semblance of a bulbous bottom.

It all gets more and more penile.

The longer the leek, the straighter the bean,

the huger the onion.

Nobody ever suggested tasting them.

That exhibit of celery I shall carry for the rest of my life.

Thank you.

Anticyclones like this one have suddenly become all important

and they're one of the main reasons why this country is now in one of

the worst periods of drought since records began 200 years ago.

You can say that again, Jack.

1976 was the most scorching summer in the UK for ages.

Hosepipes were banned. Standpipes went up in the street.

Out in the garden, everything burned to a crisp.

1976 was astonishing.

I remember coming back from Jamaica and things here were

all sort of pale yellow and the country

really did look burnt. I remember my mum desperately having to save water

from the sink to keep her beans going and the little rivulet at the end of

the garden looked as though it would never come back.

It was really astonishing.

It seemed very, very strange but it turns out to have been

a harbinger of things to come.

There was only one thing for it - the UK's first ever

hosepipe ban crack squad.

By driving round the town, in this case Devizes,

in a somewhat ostentatious van, the patrol men hope to discourage the use

of sprinklers and hosepipes without having to bring a prosecution.

However, suspiciously wet patches in driveways had to be investigated.

Good morning, Madam. We're from Wessex Water Authority.

There's a drought on

and we're asking consumers to conserve water wherever possible.

We've also got a Wessex Water saver, which you

fill up with water and place in your cistern, away from any moving parts.

Every time you pull the flush, you will save about two pints of water.

As the '70s progressed, we were getting

more adventurous with our gardens.

We realised that they could be as much a place for people as plants.

And today's programme is all about eating out of doors.

The garden was becoming an extension of the house, an outdoor room,

somewhere we could enjoy ourselves or even do a spot of entertaining.

If you're going to have a barbecue, the first thing you need is charcoal.

Charcoal comes in two different forms - loose like this -

which is much easier to light, or briquettes like this.

Before the '70s, and particularly before we

all went on foreign travel, nobody had a barbecue in their garden.

Really, all you have to do now is wait for 20 minutes.

And that, coupled with the idea of the patio, and the outdoor room,

outside room, meant that people did spend and still do to spend a lot

more time socialising and eating and just sitting in their gardens.

Oh, that's hot.

I'm really distressed to think that most people

regard the garden as an outdoor room.

Rather than the point at which they interact with the natural world.

Most people who have a barbecue

in the back garden are driving people mad around them for about a mile,

I'd say, what with the smell of their cooking and the rest of it.

-Is it ready?

-It certainly is. We're ready.

'It was when the barbie came over, wasn't it, really?'

And people started barbie-ing.

And you would go into shops and people would say, "Are you

"barbie-ing this weekend?"

Which was really a terribly new thing.

-Thank you.

-By the 1970s, we had more and more stuff

and our gardens and houses were smaller.

Therefore more and more stuff, including the furniture,

had to go outside.

Therefore we got lots of these sort of interesting bits of

garden furniture and we got things like Space Hoppers,

which really improved the look of the garden, with all sorts

of very brightly coloured plastic.

Oh, hello!

The 1980s came along and with it a whole load of money.

Everything in Britain started going swanky.

Our houses, our phones and our gardens.

I think it was Asquith who said a prime minister must be

a good butcher. Are you a good butcher?

No, I'm not a good butcher

but I have had to learn to carve the joint.

There was a lot of money floating around.

Suddenly, people were owning their own houses.

As soon as you own your own house you have a garden that you care about.

As soon as you care about it you want somebody to come

-and do something with it.

-Think power. Think shoulder-pads

think, you know, Thatcher has come to the throne.

Therefore, we want to be able to control our gardens.

Gardening was becoming big business and we turned out

at Chelsea like never before.

If you've got a few £1,000 to spend then how about a conservatory?

Just nine foot square and this one costs £3,500, if you have

a little more than you can get something a little bigger, perhaps.

With the gardening business

expanding, everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Even our Uncle Percy had got into hot water with the Beeb

just years before for denoting a brand of garden chemical.

And some vegetables to, grow them yourself?

Well, with the help of ICI Garden First.

Well, I've had no complaints with this lot so far.

I remember the absolute shock

when Percy lost his job, and it was from advertising chemicals.

-You're the expert, what's wrong with my roses this year?

-You haven't been feeding them right.

-I always give mine ICI Rose Plus.

-'And that was it.'

The BBC weren't going to tolerate that and Percy was gone.

With Percy gone, 1980s gardening telly had to go on without him,

and it did in the shape of Geoff Hamilton.

Very much the bloke next door, Geoff became the new man of gardening,

taking a more hands-on and perhaps less patriarchal approach.

He even put a little bit of romance in the garden.

I've just bought this bunch

of carnations for my wife for purely romantic reasons.

He was the first high-profile gardener, I believe, who really

embraced organic gardening.

And I think that, at a time when ordinary, you know, normal gardeners

were also beginning to get rather anxious about pesticides.

Look what I found. This actually is the caterpillar of

an elephant hawk moth, but that of course is going back in the garden,

another good reason, I think,

for trying to cut the use of chemicals down to a minimum.

I think he caught a public mood.

I'm replacing another disastrous rose down here and I've already dug

the hole which should be two foot square by at least a foot deep.

'He not only got his hands dirty, he, I mean he not only told you,

'he actually did it, you saw him actually doing it.'

I think he was the one who drew most people in, I think, to gardening.

Next week, we start building and throughout the series we are going

to show you how to turn this,

into this.

But that doesn't look like an uber modern garden at all.

Our 1980s gardens actually went a bit retro.

Was it a reaction against all the pin-striped, red braced, filo-faxed

clutching, champagne swilling, nonsense that lurked out there

in '80s Britain?

My guess is, probably.

I think this whole yearning for some sort of cottage garden

started in the '80s, it went on right through

into the '90s and it is still going strong now.

But it was this kind of yearning for something that never really was.

The cottage garden was an invention

of Wordsworth and his sister, it had never been like that.

But people wanted to create this sort of place filled with flowers

and perfume.

In a mews near Knightsbridge, Mrs Coat gardens on the pavement.

The effect I am trying to get is of an English cottage, country garden.

Colours must be relative and if they are

carefully matched together the beauty of each one is enhanced.

You also have the cultural influence of things like the marriage of

the Prince and Princess of Wales, you had new romanticism grumbling

along in the background.

Laura Ashley, you know, that was the big brand of the early '80s.

Frilly collars, you know, sort of Princess, mutton-chopped sleeves.

This yearning for something stable and glorious and lovely.

So we looked back into our past and do you remember in 1977

the Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady was published.

That went to eight reprints in just a matter of months.

It was an extraordinary hit and it was this need, this yearning

for a golden afternoon of the Edwardian age

and that was reflected in our gardens.

The quintessential part of any English garden in the 1780s,

the 1880s, or now the 1980s was the lawn.

Being British we can't just grow a bit of grass and sit on it, we have

to make a great big deal of it and obsess about it being perfect.

And needless to say that is very much the domain of men.

When I was a child, the business of starting

a lawn mower, you know, with the rope and the wooden

bobble on the end of it and you

wrapped it around whatever it was and pulled, and then it didn't start.

It was a tremendous palaver.

I think women very sensibly kept well away from that.

It's June, OK, the sun is shining, it's a Saturday,

you've had a hard week at work, you come back, Saturday morning,

how lovely. What you do? You go to the shed and bring out

this large, messy, dirty, smelly machine and you...

and all that stuff goes on and you walk up and down and up and down and

up and down, making a foul noise and what you end up in the end is a pile

of stuff that composts very badly and smells of petrol and dog's mess.

It's like men and motors, isn't it?

You wash the car and it has to be immaculate.

And the lawn is the same thing, if I am going to do it,

I am going to do this properly.

I am going to get the book,

the lawn expert and I'm going to aerate it and scarify it

and weed it and feed it and water it and mow it.

And if I'm going to mow it, I've gotta have a good mower, haven't I?

You know, I've got to have a really sharp, I've got

to sharpen it every winter and change the oil and everything

and it becomes a complete obsession.

Fortunately, someone realised there was a mower

that was perfect for women who are sick of waiting for their blokes

to go out and mow the lawn.

The hover mower.

-Quite literally took off.

-Flymo!

New Flymo DXE, first ever hover mower to cut and collect the grass.

And then suddenly they started to introduce the Flymo

and all the rest of it and they would

have some very attractive lady just swinging it gently around.

And, of course, the lady thought if she can do it, so can I.

They took an awful lot away from the man, he was totally deflated.

He was OK for a few banks, if you wanted to go up a few banks

like that,

but you couldn't get stripes on it and actually and if you picked up

a blade of grass after a hover mower has had a go at it

you'll see it's really badly cut and it goes a bit brown on the edges.

You need a really sharp cut with a sharp blade.

CAR HORN

No, I don't know, they're fun to use but no, I didn't approve.

1980s Britain was expanding.

Our towns grew bigger, land got scarcer and gardens became smaller.

Soon our hankering for privacy became a national pastime.

You wouldn't want to meet the neighbours, God forbid!

So one of the first jobs we are going to be doing is to show you how

to put up a proper fence.

In the good old days of gardening

fences were to lean on and to talk over.

Now they are barriers, to keep people out.

Now the very first thing you have got to do when you put up a fence

is to sort out your line.

Do take care over this, I have known so many disputes between

neighbours over an inch of land.

These days with these high fences you hardly ever see your neighbour

and I think that is indicative of today's enclosed people.

'We have lost the sense of community in gardens.

'We have almost lost the sense of community within neighbourhoods.'

That's the other one, exactly right.

I think by the 1980s, this little island of ours becomes

more and more crowded.

More and more people have their

own houses and gardens but they are smaller houses and smaller gardens.

So those become little empires which are fiercely, fiercely protected.

You've got to make sure this panel is exactly on the same level

as that one and it isn't.

My parents weren't the sort to gossip over the garden wall,

it just wasn't done.

And the first thing I did when I got my own garden, actually,

was to put fencing on top of the walls, to make it even higher.

I want my space. I want

a definite marker where my garden ends and someone else's begins.

And the same thing down the bottom

-if you put the hammer down the bottom now.

-All right.

You have this pretence that there is a wall, a bit like

in the theatre, the third wall, there is

an invisible wall and you don't acknowledge each other beyond that.

It is all bound up with our English need for our own space, if you like.

Well, I don't know, this is enough to put you off gardening for life.

Possibly, but you probably never had to sit through this.

The UK's first ever daytime TV show was in many ways a trail blazer.

But maybe not when it came to gardening.

Pebble Mill at One was always one of those very bizarre,

very guilty pleasures, because we only ever got

access to it when we were ill.

Because there was no way you would watch Pebble Mill at One

during school holidays.

But if you were lying on the sofa and saying, "Yeah, Mum, I'm feeling a bit

"better, I might be able to have some lemonade now."

Weeds are not the love of gardeners, I can tell you.

We thought we would have a look at that because this time of year

there are a number of weed killers you can used very effectively.

And Peter Seabrook had a tiny little border that was on the windy,

windiest corner of the Pebble Mill studios.

That he would then bore you so rigid for ten minutes about soil types.

We have weed killers

that will kill grass and leave everything else behind.

Very clever but if you are using weed killers it is quite useful

to have the right sort of container clearly marked.

It was nothing to do with how it looked.

It was nothing to do with actually making something that was stunning

and there was no reveal. It was all about preparation and, you know...

The 1990s arrived.

Our thirst for retail therapy

seemed unquenchable and we wanted everything in an instant.

'The '90s were the hangover created by the exuberance

'and the partying of the '80s.

'I've got a tremendously soft spot for the '80s.'

Can't bear the '90s.

The '90s, Take That and you know, minimalism.

Garden centres had turned into shopping centres

in which we were spending as much as £4 billion every year.

Now you could buy anything you could possibly want

and even one or two things to do with gardening.

Hello.

1990s gardening became something

that didn't necessarily mean dirty hands

but it did mean a lot of retail therapy.

It meant going shopping and bringing whatever you chose home in the car,

be it plants, furniture, lighting, pots, decorations,

wind chimes, anything that you could furnish the house with, you could

virtually furnish a garden with.

'It is now what is known in the trade as "tea and wee".'

It is a destination in its own right. You can actually get on

a coach trip, and go to a big garden centre for a cup of tea and a wee.

It just goes to show quite how powerful the term "gardening" is

in terms of retail in this country.

If you want to sell anything, make it sound like gardening,

and people think, "That's OK then."

Gardening is a good, clean, grown-up occupation which means that

I can trust it because it's about horticulture.

Gardener's World was booming as much as gardening itself,

and regularly drawing an amazing six million viewers.

No surprise there, given that it was now hosted

by a man whose TV career had started as a trusty expert on Nationwide.

He quickly became the nation's favourite

and rather fanciable gardener.

Alan Titchmarsh has conquered a series of rather dodgy hair styles

to become the darling of television, really.

Everything moved from gardening

to chat shows, to the whole lot, and there's a very good reason for that.

It's because it is very difficult,

in fact I would say it was near nigh impossible to dislike Alan.

The fork is fairly essential too, and on my soil, it is

very stony, it is easier to dig with than is the spade.

But I don't use a big one like this.

Not being particularly macho, I go for one of these, the lady's fork.

Alan was already a TV presenter.

Nobody knew he was much of a gardener, even though

he is a fantastic gardener

and studied at Kew and had worked on amateur gardening magazines

as an editor, so he had serious gardening credentials behind that.

But then he brought his presenting skills, his clever presenting skills

along with it, and a bit of

drama, a bit of light and shade, and really understood television.

They say that one orchid in your buttonhole

makes you look a million dollars.

This huge collection here, the like which I've never seen before,

is worth more than £1 million. Wish I had just

Wish I had just one of them.

Alan was always very informative.

I take away a lot from the programme.

But he also sometimes makes me think as if I'm slightly losing my marbles.

Rather than presenting a programme,

it's as if he's bringing me a mug of cocoa and my tablets,

saying, "There there, dear, you'll be all right."

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

she had so many children she didn't know what to do.

For me, Chelsea Flower Show is all about the gosh factor.

With Alan, yeah, Alan is pretty sexy. The women love him.

Quite a few men love him too.

I've seen Alan up at Gardeners' World Live at the NEC.

He's been mobbed, mobbed by the over-eighties!

Leylandii, what should be done about the tree

that caused more neighbourhood disputes than any other?

As our concerns for things like privacy and home security grew

in the 1990s, the boundaries around our gardens reached new heights.

Quite literally.

Thanks to our love affair with the fastest-growing conifer on earth.

Here's one at a year, that's the baby we saw at the beginning.

This is how it looks a year later.

This one is four years old. And this one is five.

It's the leylandii's rapid growth and the way it blocks out light

that's causing a staggering 17,000 hedge disputes a year.

What it doesn't say on the label, or it does in very small letters,

it says, "PS, does not stop growing after three years."

Obviously, the nurseries and garden centres pushed this plant

because it was easy to propagate and it grew very fast,

and people do want hedges that grow fast.

They just want it to stop.

It just turned into a monster.

A man has been charged with the murder of his neighbour

who was shot dead after an argument about a garden hedge.

One person was even murdered as a result, a dispute over a hedge!

Appalling stuff.

There could be a solution to that monster of suburbia, the leylandii.

New proposals would mean home owners

could get their council to chop down the trees

if neighbours can't sort out the problem.

Local authorities receive thousands of complaints

about hedges every year, most on leylandii.

Disgruntled neighbours can do little to have them controlled.

The government plans to give councils new powers

to intervene in disputes.

For the residents of this quiet corner of the English countryside,

the sound of the chainsaws marks a welcome end to a long battle.

-Hello, Lawrence.

-Hello!

Hopefully our film will persuade you to help us out. This is our cottage.

Oooh!

Gardening programmes trudged along doing worthy things about the earth

and what you do with the earth, and the plants and how you do seeds,

and what you do for winter and how you look after your lawn.

And then suddenly, bang! Diarmuid Gavin arrives.

I mean, I love this. I think the bed outside is absolutely beautiful.

That's the nicest thing, the view of that.

If I had my way, I would get rid of all this actually. If it wasn't...

Don't lean too hard on it!

Home Front was at the time very unusual, and still is unusual

because it wasn't... it never had a format to it.

Above the very simple thing, which was that

you had me doing the interior, and Diarmuid doing an out-terior.

We were working for the same client, working for one householder,

and it was supposed to be what they say in television is a "journey".

I can't wait to get on with it and see what he comes up with. Excited.

He comes into ordinary, perfectly nice suburban gardens,

and he just... Some people say he wrecked them, I don't.

I think he just caused revolution in them.

The bottom border has been completely butchered.

We were assured that the planting, the plants would be dealt with,

and looked after, and to be honest, it looks like someone's just gone in,

cut the tops off the plants and pushed it into polythene bags.

He would do things in one way, and I'd do them in another way.

There'd be a constant fight going on about who was doing it better.

Because we were always vying for attention.

But how do you feel now, that you have finally confronted

this whole issue of creating a contemporary garden

using a traditional idiom?

And done it so successfully?

Very happy.

'Diarmuid and I would just say things

'to see whether we could get away with it, which we often did.

'We were horribly over-indulged.

'We were fabulously over-indulged.'

I'd go, "Let's go and have lunch in Venice."

Diarmuid would go, "Let's go to the National Seed Collection."

We'd all go, yeah...

Sorry, were you expecting a design show?

We did have a constant problem with Diarmuid's gardens.

One of the classics was when he dug up someone's dead cat.

I hope you haven't dug up my little Snoopy's grave out there.

I did mention it. My cat.

It's very sad. Earlier this year, one of my cats died.

And we buried her here actually, underneath the tree here.

-The cat's in there.

-'The worst possible thing happens,'

he brings in a digger, and they're excavating,

and suddenly there is the dead cat

that has been in a beautifully tended grave

for the last 15 years or something. And it's just, oh...

So, the promise is...

I think we're going to need to be very diplomatic.

I'm not very good at that, Laurence.

Hand in hand with the makeover culture, if you like,

and the idea of gardens as an extension of the house,

went the idea that improving your garden

is money well spent, that it will increase the value of your house.

And of course, this was at a time of a great property boom.

I remember I was the editor of a magazine at the time,

we commissioned a survey from estate agents

who were telling us that, after the kitchen,

the garden was the biggest selling point of any house.

So it was an idea that it was investment,

to spend money on your garden.

And I think there is definitely an element of truth in that.

It does persuade you, as well as the kitchen and bathroom.

-BIG BEN STRIKES

-# Millennium! #

A new millennium dawned, and the world was starting to wake up

to the dangers of global warming.

Everything and everyone went green.

But there was only so much we could do as individuals.

And it slowly dawned on us that, just like 60 years before,

sustainability might have to start in our own gardens.

So who better to become head boy in this era of environmental angst

than a man whose passion for all things organic was infectious?

He wasn't a trained gardener.

He was an ex-jeweller, no less.

He was built like an oak tree, spoke like he meant it.

He persuaded us to love and cherish our gardens like never before.

Monty carried on the tradition of Gardeners' World,

of taking gardeners on.

So, he was the great composter.

He certainly got me composting, if not the whole country.

But also, the organic thing that Geoff Hamilton had started,

Monty took that along.

And here in the long borders, we are doing an experiment.

We're using just rainwater on this side, just grey water on that side.

We want to compare the effect on pretty much the same plants.

Particularly with wildlife, bringing it into the garden,

rather than getting rid of it.

And I associate Monty very much with that,

very much with natural gardening.

And for a chemical gardener,

you can paint the leaves with a glyphosate.

I am an organic gardener, I wouldn't dream of doing that.

Monty has got the most wonderful hands.

It's almost as if they're tattooed with topsoil.

All the middle-aged women in the world have the idea of

Monty's earth-stained hands running across their tender parts.

It used to send thrills through the whole of England on Friday evening.

With Monty to guide us,

our new interest in all-organic growing and all things green

meant that grow your own was the new big thing,

and the vegetable plot an essential part of every garden.

Suddenly, you couldn't get an allotment for love nor money.

I think the resurgence of the passion for allotments

comes out of a recognition of modern living,

what modern life is about, and people wanting to return to

the good old things in life, the things that really mean something.

-Eddie.

-Eddie! Oh!

'The camaraderie that comes,'

and you cannot be on an allotment site and be a loner.

It doesn't work.

People who do allotments, they are not made.

I don't think they're made. They are born. A special breed.

'I think allotments today reflect a wide cross-section of society.

'We have got everybody, sex, religion, age, money,

'it doesn't matter any more in the allotment society.

'They want to grow.'

Thank you for attending the meeting.

We are here tonight to discuss the show.

The committee can be a fearsome thing in the allotment movement.

The big, well-organised committees have real power.

-What time do we have to have the things in, 12 o'clock, is it?

-12.

'And there are rules about what you can grow, rules about

'how you can grow, how tidy it has to be.

'How long the grass is allowed to be on the path beside your allotment.'

There doesn't seem to be a rule on rusty corrugated iron,

because there is quite a lot of that about on most allotment sites.

That seems to get through the net.

They hit the right political agenda. It gives you instant organic food.

We are about to die of starvation because of the recession,

it will sort that out.

And it gives you green exercise.

You can look good when you reappear in your office,

cos you have a little bit of grime around your fingers. Very cool.

Decades of fashions and trends in gardening

had got us into loving our gardens like never before.

What's more, garden design

was something everyone could now try for themselves.

It was affordable and cool to redo your garden,

and makeovers soon went properly showbiz.

It's a nightmare.

It's that idea that you'll get home,

you will open the door and look through

and they have been in your garden while you're away and redesigned it.

Ground Force, the essential makeover programme.

It opened with chirpy band music and lorries running around the place.

You end up in this small garden somewhere...

Oh. They probably think I'm from a cosmetics firm.

'Mrs Smith decided that she really wanted to have her garden done'

as a surprise for Mr Smith, so Mr Smith, they quickly invented

some second cousin in Aberdeen, and he was sent off to Aberdeen.

Tommy, Charlie...

'Mrs Smith welcomed with open arms Alan Titchmarsh, Charlie Dimmock

-'and Tommy Walsh, who would come in and be chirpy, generally.'

-Crikey!

Fine, OK, I've got the solution. Forget the plan.

Two mountain goats, one tethered there, one tethered there.

They graze up and down.

'Alan would draw a picture and say, "Yeah, we are going to do that."'

And then it would be all action.

Charlie was the one...

This extraordinary Daily Mail phenomenon she became,

purely because she was sort of short on underwear.

There's this girl who was actually very good at doing what she did,

and building ponds and fountains,

and had this Pre-Raphaelite hair that cascaded around the place.

And then everything sort of swinging in various different directions.

And that more than anything else got more chaps out of their sheds,

and into gardening, than... There was a moment when

she was possibly the most famous person in the whole country.

The householder then comes back at the 11th hour,

is lured into the garden, and then suddenly, you know, there it is!

Oh my God!

-Oh!

-Hello, you. Nice to see you.

-And you!

It's not only completely changed, but there you've got

Charlie and Tommy and Alan, standing there with a bottle of champagne.

Meanwhile, the entire street,

the entire cul-de-sac has come out to be part of the celebration.

I didn't see a garden that looked better at the end of the programme

than it did at the beginning.

All I saw was things I really don't...

that don't belong in a garden.

There was a vocabulary of materials, if you like, in 1990s makeover.

There was a great emphasis on ornamental decoration.

So, mirrors, that sort of thing.

I really like the use of the mirror here.

You get double the value from your plants.

And the illusion that the garden is much longer than it is.

Anybody who puts a mirror in a garden is very cruel.

The birds just fly straight into it, bang,

and you end up with dead sparrows around your feature

which has cost a fortune.

Garden furniture usually comes in spindly geometric,

or else Mediterranean, again with tiley tops.

The cobalt blue planters, they became the biggest cliche of all.

And, of course, the water feature.