19th Century Alan Titchmarsh's Garden Secrets

Whenever I'm looking for new ideas, odd though it may seem, I turn to Britain's great historic gardens.

And there are four in particular that I can always rely on to fire my imagination.

These are the gardens that have inspired me, and which affect the way I garden at home.

They're a perfect example of the evolution of garden design, but in many ways every bit as

relevant today as they were in the centuries when they were first made.

In this series, I'm uncovering the secrets of these gardens,

to show how they directly affect our own backyards.

And there's one garden that, for me, typifies the bold and eccentric ideas of the Victorian gardeners.

Quite bonkers.

I'll reveal how it's extravagant design, filled to the brim

with exotic plants, continues to influence legions of gardeners.

This is traditional carpet bedding but with a 21st century twist.

They reckon that this is a thousand years old.

And I'll be taking to the soil myself, showing you how,

with a little help from the 19th century, your garden can be transformed.

And that really rather flat display suddenly become a bank of colour.

So join me at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire,

as I reveal the greatest gardening show-offs of them all...

the Victorians.

Today, technology, science and research are such an important

part of the way that we garden, we tend to think we invented them.

But it was the Victorians who kick-started the technological revolution.

The Victorians were obsessed with knowledge and status

and wanted their gardens to reflect their wisdom and their wealth.

Size mattered.

Ambition was everything.

And the more exotic the better.

And Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire is a fine example of Victorian one-upmanship.

Where else would you find an avenue of Wellingtonias,

a gilded water buffalo, an Egyptian tomb and a Scottish glen in the same garden?

It's big. It's bold. It's bling.

A salute to the Victorian spirit of empire, showcasing flora and fauna

from as far afield as Egypt and China.

Victoriana might be out of fashion, but you'll be amazed at just how

much it influences the way we garden today.

Biddulph Grange was the brainchild of James Bateman, who designed and built it with money he'd inherited

from his grandfather's coal and engineering business.

He and his wife Maria, both passionate gardeners, moved here in 1871.

They built a large mansion, and set about designing a series of themed gardens.

The result is a global journey that takes you through Italy to Scotland, through China to Egypt.

It's their passion for strange plants from far-flung lands

that is a Victorian legacy that remains with us today.

Today, many of the common plants that we see in our gardens

first came to our shores in the Victorian period.

This was the time of exploration and discovery, when the hero of the day was the plant hunter who

travelled the globe risking life and limb to bring back rare, never before seen specimens.

From his position as Head of Exploration at the Royal Horticultural Society,

Bateman could employ these plant hunters as agents of his own grand scheme for Biddulph.

Head gardener Peter Clarke has been lucky enough to witness Bateman's vision come to maturity.

Peter, how must Bateman have felt when he saw these plants appearing in his garden for the first time?

Things that nobody in Britain had ever set eyes on before.

I think it must have been excitement,

the pleasure of having this thing that nobody else had got.

I mean, look at that wonderful thing there, the bamboo.

Just think - the wonder of having that in your garden.

Some of the stuff came in as seed, and you were growing them, and suddenly you'd realise...

-Not knowing what would come up.

-No.

These Japanese maple must be among the oldest in the country.

They are.

And the great big larch we've got here, the golden larch, that is the oldest one in the country.

But at that time it was a tiny little plant.

They're actually in their prime, and they've still got lots and lots

of life to go, and he never saw that but we are getting that pleasure.

What was his secret of getting things to grow well?

This was actually a big wide open space until he

created all this and mounded it up to create this lovely microclimate.

It was a really important because we're in cold Staffordshire and it

was really, really hard to grow some of these things in the cold.

So he created this microclimate by building these great rocky outcrops to provide shelter, putting a good

shelter belt almost all the way round here, so the air just sat and allowed these things to come up.

Species that we now consider commonplace were rare novelties back then.

The intrepid hunters brought us the Hosta from northeast Asia.

The glorious Fire Bush from Chile.

The Shalom from North America.

And the Snowball Bush from Japan.

But plant hunting also had its darker side.

Nobody knew just how these plants from all over the world would behave when they were brought back home.

And some of them turned out to be monsters.

Rhododendron Ponticum, invasive, with toxic roots,

and a host for the now deadly Sudden Oak Death.

Plants like this, we realise now,

are most certainly better kept... Out!

But the rarest and most prized plant of all was the orchid.

Orchids appealed to the Victorian sensibilities.

They were difficult to acquire and a huge challenge to grow.

It's a love affair that continues to this day,

with easier to grow orchids being Britain's best selling pot plants.

I love orchids.

I have at least a couple flowering in my sitting room.

They're easy to grow, they last for months on end, but to Victorians, they were rarer than hen's teeth.

Pearls beyond price.

And Bateman was passionate about them.

Even in his 20s, he was one of the world's

most respected orchidologists, and had the finest collection of Guatemalan orchids in Britain.

Orchid hunting became a cut-throat business, where whole species were

wiped out, forests cleared, to gather this enigmatic bloom.

One plant hunter Thomas Colley, was engaged by Bateman to search for an orchid in British Guiana,

and knowing a rival was hot on his heels, he set to work

and stripped the tree, determined not to give the others a chance.

Going to such lengths, it's ironic that the only orchids left today at Biddulph are native and grow wild.

Tom Hart Dyke is a 21st century plant hunter who shares Bateman's love of the orchid.

He too has brought the world to his garden at Lullingstone Castle in Kent.

This is the world garden, and this is where I've got

a quite good selection of hardy orchids from all over the world.

And the idea is to show you where things originally come from

in the miniature land masses and who introduced them.

For Tom, studying them in the wild is the best way to learn how to cultivate the orchid.

They are the largest family of flowering plants on our planet.

Every single continent, you've got the orchid family on, except for Antarctica.

Some grow under ice within the Arctic Circle.

And it's the variety of flower colour, it's their exotic look,

their rarity, the challenging places that they grow, and when you do find them, it's fantastic.

And this one here, is actually a hybrid, originally from Table Mountain in South Africa.

It's a disa or desa uniflora.

It's a real sod of an orchid to grow.

It requires rain water.

The hard water here with all the chalk in it would kill it.

A sort of acidic mix, slightly peaty mix as well.

I've never flowered this before.

It's been two or three years waiting for it to flower, and it's only come out in the last couple of days.

The secret of his success is following in the footsteps of the Victorian plant hunters.

But Tom's quest to see orchids in the wild has led him to some of the most dangerous places in the world.

On a journey into the Colombian jungle, he was kidnapped, beaten

and held under threat of execution for nine months.

His parents presumed him dead.

For the Victorians it was a lucrative trade that led them to take risks.

But for Tom, it's something more fundamental.

I have green blood cells.

My heart is pumping chlorophyll around me.

I think it becomes an addiction, trying to find things in the wild.

And here we have one of my most exciting orchids, Encyclia pentotis.

But it's no ordinary orchid.

This is one of the family that I was looking for whilst being in captivity and whilst I was

travelling in that area after being kidnapped.

Tom had never had much success flowering this variety

until he'd made that ill-fated trip to its natural habitat in Colombia.

And you can read all the books that you want, you simply can't beat seeing things in the wild.

I've flowered this more in the last five, six years than I

ever have before, because I've seen the perfect drainage that they need.

In comes the rain, batters the shrubs with pouring torrential rain.

And within ten minutes, there is not a cloud in the sky,

blue skies and the sun bearing down on this plant, dries it literally to a crisp within half an hour.

So in cultivation, if you let them dry out between the watering, it's hugely helpful.

While many tropical orchids may be fussy plants to nurture indoors, there are over 50 native varieties

that grow wild here and enjoy our climate.

So it's not surprising that Tom grows some of

his most prized orchids in the coldest part of his garden.

And it's here, for me, that this is the most exciting hardy orchid that we've got growing at Lullingstone.

This is from two plants four years ago.

They are amazing, how they've spread.

Bletilla striata, known also as the hyacinth orchid or the windowsill orchid,

which is a misleading name because they are hardy outdoor orchids.

Here in the more purple form with their deep purply-pink centres

and lighter creamer upper part of the lip or labellum here.

Very attractive. And this form, in more of a whitish alba form, as you can see, with a lovely pink purplish

lip at the end, are really, really easy to grow in pots, on the patio, rockeries, they're excellent.

What I would say is not direct all-day baking sunshine. A bit of light shade.

It's a woodland plant, after all, from Japan.

So, hardy orchids can be just as exacting as their tropical cousins.

They're not always divas of the plant world, but you do need to make orchids feel at home.

That means recreating the conditions they're used to.

There's no reason why you shouldn't grow our hardy native orchids in your garden, provided

that you get them from a nursery and don't take them from the wild.

But quite a lot of them, the marsh orchids, demand moisture at

the roots, rather than that dry soil that's prevalent in so many gardens.

These beautiful little drumsticks here won't come up where

it's really dusty, they just need a constant supply of water.

Not a pond, but somewhere that's perhaps just a little bit boggy.

In common with all kinds of other good garden plants.

Those primulas there, Primula vialii, are a classic for damp

earth, as is Lobelia cardinalis and Astilbes, they just crisp up and go brown if it's dry.

Ferns, like the shuttlecock fern, Matteuccia, that also likes it damp.

There's a way round it if you're on dry earth.

It means digging a little bit of a hole, perhaps a foot deep, a shallow bowl, if you like,

and lining it with what I'm sitting on. Pond liner.

Just spread this right over the bottom of the hole.

I've took the trouble of cutting it to shape, so it just goes up the sides.

In every hole, there's a lower end.

You seldom get them level.

And in the lower end, although we want this to be boggy, we don't want it to have standing water.

It's not a pool.

So get a garden fork, and on the lower end,

my ditch is sloping in that direction, stab it,

just to make drainage holes.

You don't need too many of them.

And when you've done that, to prevent them being blocked up, gravel.

Now, the majority of this area, when it's filled back in, will hang on to moisture, but not excessively.

When it starts to rise, it will seep out of those holes, creating the perfect conditions

for plants that just like their feet to be a little bit damp, as though they've got wellies with a hole in.

What I need to do now is to get all the soil I took out back in

and to mix it with some organic matter to make it really spongy.

There's nothing worse than pond liner showing.

So make sure you cover it up.

And what I'm going to do here, just to remind myself

where this boggy area is, is to arrange logs around it.

These'll get delightfully covered in moss, and also help hide that liner,

and they just make it look a bit more natural,

especially with one or two plants around them.

You don't have to circle it.

But a few of them around the edge, especially when the plants go in,

will just make it look a bit more of a featurette.

Now I can place my plants.

The orchids, being the special and the choice plants, I'm going to sort of run down the middle.

A bit like a little river. Some of these have gone over now.

If you get them in while their seed heads are forming, the seeds can

sow themselves and extend the colony as the years go by.

Right.

Just got to get them in now.

I'm top dressing this with bark now, just to give it a better

appearance, but also help stop the water evaporating from it.

And it's important when you dress with bark to do it thick enough.

A good inch, inch and a half, but to be a bit careful about how

you put it around the plants, with just a bit of delicacy, otherwise they get swamped.

Give them a really good initial watering in,

to make sure that, quite literally, they do have a bit of a reservoir of moisture down below.

And keep coming back to them with the hosepipe in prolonged dry periods.

But a good shower of rain will help fill up this little reservoir,

and keep all your moisture-loving plants, and your native orchids, in really good health.

There were over 250 plant genera introduced to Britain in the 19th century.

But bringing these plants to our shores wasn't an easy task.

The solution came from one of the unsung heroes of the Victorian era.

His name is Nathaniel Ward.

Ward lived in the East End of London, a sooty, grimy place back then, where nothing much would grow.

One day, Ward was endeavouring to get the chrysalis of a moth to hatch in a glass jar.

The moth didn't hatch, but several grasses and ferns did.

He cogitated, he reasoned, he experimented,

and eventually, he came up with this, the Wardian Case, which

ensured the safe transportation of plants from all over the world back to Blighty.

This little glass and wooden box transformed the garden as we know it today.

Thousands of rare plant species that would have previously died

travelled back to Britain in this revolutionary way.

The first were ferns, and Biddulph's Scottish glen garden is home to more than 20 different species.

Back then, this plant we take for granted today had cult status.

Bateman created a microclimate perfect for their cultivation.

Following the success of growing ferns outside, the Victorians began to experiment

with growing them indoors, and so began a trend that would change our approach to gardening.

We began to grow under glass.

It really kicked off with the repeal of the glass tax in 1843.

Some of the biggest greenhouses in the country were constructed at this time. The bigger the better.

The godfather of the greenhouse as we know it today was Joseph Paxton.

His creations charmed Queen Victoria into calling him, "A very clever little man".

James Bateman wasn't going to be left behind and rose to the challenge of growing under glass.

That's not to say that all this enthusiastic experimentation didn't have its fair share of disasters.

Here at Biddulph, Bateman tried growing rhododendrons under glass, and burnt the lot of them.

But it was the challenge of growing ferns that really caught the Victorian imagination.

These mysterious plants from faraway lands had a magical quality for the Victorians.

So they designed special glass houses solely for their propagation.

Of course Bateman had to have one.

Sadly, the Fernery at Biddulph no longer exists.

In fact, very few remain today.

But on the Scottish island of Bute, there is a restored fernery, that shows just how

passionate the Victorians were about growing under glass.

Graham Alcorn's family maintain the fernery according to the original inventory of 1879.

Its construction shows the Victorians' remarkable technical expertise.

There's no heating in here whatsoever.

A lot of ferneries are buildings above ground, this one they dug down

into the ground, and then put the glass roof over the top.

And because it's below ground, it insulates it that bit more.

We can get minus four temperatures outside

and normally it would stay probably three degrees above freezing in here.

This was an ingenious protected environment,

where they could experiment with the positioning of the ferns.

Some liked it hot and some liked it cold.

This Culcita here, it can quite happily stand a good lot of heat

and light, so they'd probably get put up near the top of the glass.

On the terrace here, they'd probably like it a little bit cooler.

This is the royal fern and they can quite happily grow in water.

You know, they'll stand all the moisture you can give them. They don't like a dry atmosphere.

The biggest challenge is probably, of growing ferns under glass here, is probably just keeping them watered,

Keeping the moisture in the place.

When the sun comes through, there's a lot of evaporation.

The ferns need quite a bit of feeding as well, to keep them nice and green and lush.

In the past I suppose the Victorians would have probably used blood, fish and bone or something similar.

And today we use chemical fertilisers, osmocote,

which are slow release fertilisers, which will feed for the whole growing season.

The Victorians had a lust for ferns that were different.

A lot of people see ferns and think they're just that typical fern frond.

Well, you've got other ones, like this Asplenium here,

where the frond is completely different.

Some of the young fronds come out and they're red and different colours.

So it's not all just green.

This one here, from Japan, a Blechnum, and the fertile fronds,

looks like kind of a centipede, basically.

Even with the native species, it was the lure of the extraordinary that inspired them.

In the past, ferns were kind of treated as

mystical plants, because they didn't know how they propagated themselves.

They were trying to find the fern seed and could never find it,

and it was only in the 1800s they realised it was the spores

and they found out how they actually reproduced themselves.

When restoration began in 1995, one surviving fern from the fernery's heyday was discovered in the rubble.

It now takes pride of place.

It's called Todea barbara.

There was only about three fronds left on it and it was just hanging onto life.

And once they got the place re-roofed, it's just come away.

It's absolutely loving the environment again.

They reckon that this is a thousand years old.

This is what they reckoned in 1879 when the Gardeners Chronicle came and visited the place.

So it's a mighty old fern.

Thousand-year-old ferns in huge glasshouses

were all very well for the rich, but the middle class family also wanted a piece of the horticultural action.

The conservatory became the latest status symbol.

Unlike a greenhouse, it was an extension of the home.

For the Victorians, it was less about serious cultivation, and more about display.

Maybe there's something to be said for keeping up appearances

and bringing a little colour back to the conservatory.

The Victorians were masters of display, and what they wanted in their conservatories was impact.

They wanted you to walk in, escape the worries of the world, and

be faced with a display that would quite simply, in Victorian terms, knock your socks off.

You know, we're quite staid nowadays in what we do.

We have staging in our greenhouses, like this.

We arrange our plants on them, generally tallest at the back, shortest at the front.

And although it's pretty, it's a mere shadow of what the Victorians did.

And the way they did it was incredibly simple but hugely effective.

I just think, in a modern home, when there's precious little foliage,

how nice it is to have a bank of colour to look at.

It is ridiculously simple.

Flower pots upended supporting these boards.

But suddenly, from being quite flat, this will lift the display and give it much more impact.

Geraniums, or Pelargoniums, as they're popularly known,

were absolute stalwarts of the Victorian conservatory,

both the zonal kind and these regals here.

And they loved their colourful foliage.

This is Iresine with its bloodstained leaves.

And a lot of these would have been temporary, a dahlia in a pot that

could go in while it was doing well, and before it got too big.

Fuchsias they absolutely adored.

What they hadn't got were lovely things like the Cape Figwort, Phygelius,

which has got much more popular and a much greater variety recently.

And along the front, things like Begonia rex, enjoying the shadows down the front.

The trick of this kind of staging is to make sure that each row masks the pots of the row behind it.

And that way, in this day and age, it doesn't matter if you've got

plastic pots, and even if they're black, because they

sink into the shadows, as long as the ones along the front here, that you do see, are terracotta.

And that really rather flat display that was, has suddenly become

a bank of colour, and if your guests,

when they walk round the corner and see that, don't go "Wow",

I'm a Dutchman.

The Victorians loved display, and this China garden at Biddulph

is, quite literally, a story in a teacup.

Remember all those willow pattern tea sets?

Here we have a gigantic stage set and all the characters are plants from the Far East.

And no garden in Britain reflects this sense of statement or theatre as much as Biddulph.

It was a wonderful way for Bateman to show off his knowledge of the world.

Egypt garden, too, has a sense of melodrama and theatre, its path flanked by Egyptian artefacts,

probably picked up, or at least inspired, by the Great Exhibition of 1851.

And it leads you to an eerie passageway underneath a pyramid of clipped yew.

Mind you, this entire construction is not without a sense of humour.

Because you come out of Egypt, through a Cheshire cottage.

It's quite bonkers.

Love it or hate it, the Victorians started the "mock" tradition.

Back then, it was Tudor cottages, temples and sphinxes.

Today, it's fake Grecian urns and pillars.

While it was a forward-looking era, it also looked back nostalgically

to the formality of the past, taking old garden design ideas

and giving them a Victorian twist.

The Victorians were determined to put a bit of architectural formality back into gardens.

To them, the garden was a work of art,

never to be confused with nature.

So they took the old parterre and planted it up with funky monkey puzzles.

And on a stepped Italian terrace,

they gave us that lasting Victorian legacy...

bedding out.

Tender greenhouse-raised flowers adorned the newly-revived

parterres and beds of these Italianate gardens.

It didn't matter that they were seasonal throwaway plants -

display was all that mattered.

But the Victorians wanted more from their beds, so they went on to

create a feature that would dominate our gardens. Carpet bedding.

Glasshouse technology had led to an explosion in low-growing bedding plants

in a huge variety of colours.

This choice gave the Victorian gardener the scope to create geometric patterns and emblems.

So began a craze that still endures today.

At Biddulph, we see carpet bedding scaled down to fit in with the intricate Italianate style.

The design and plants used are as they were in Bateman's time.

Peter Clarke has faithfully maintained the garden according to the original plans.

-Well, Peter, you can't get more Victorian.

-Oh, no, you can't.

This is quite fun, actually, this little area, the geometric parterre.

-These are lovely, aren't they?

-Little echeverias?

-Yeah.

What triggered carpet bedding?

Well, I think it was the head gardener

wanting to do lots of elaborate designs and things like that,

and there were the glasshouses that started to come in, so you could actually grow a lot more exotics and

-things that you can actually make a nice carpet with.

-It was tapestried stitching, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was, cos you could have lots of fun. Lots of different designs.

Here we've got a little petal, but you could be a bit more elaborate.

You could have somebody's coat of arms.

So it was the fact you had the equipment to do it, but also it was showing off.

It was. As a Victorian, you wanted to have the best, and all the nice plants were coming in.

And then presumably it became competitive. Head gardeners trying to outdo one another.

In the winter you would be doing elaborate drawings on a bit of paper and you would keep it

a secret, you wouldn't tell the guy down the road,

because you wanted to have the best of everything.

But you must have needed a huge amount of plants and staff to look after them.

Well, you did. I mean, if you had miles of -

which they did - of carpet bedding.

Can you imagine doing that whole walk full of it?

The other thing is, you've got to clip these and keep them nice and neat.

You've got your sheep shears there.

Now, people come and watch you doing that, they think you must have lost your sheep.

Yes. Just look how neat it becomes when you're doing it.

I'm going to get stuck in here.

'The Victorian gardener might have spent months toiling over his carpet bedding design,

'but it was worth it.

'It was the horticultural sensation of the age.'

You know what they say is the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut?

-Oh, I don't know.

-Two weeks!

It'll be fine in a couple of hours.

Well, we'll be doing this in two weeks.

Do you want to come back? You've done a really good job there.

At Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire,

they've found a modern labour-saving way of recreating the splendour of Victorian carpet bedding.

This is traditional carpet bedding, but with a 21st-century twist.

Basically, what happens is, we send a design off to the nursery,

they actually put it onto a computer,

and the plants then become pixels where they can manipulate them.

And that's why we can do these fantastic designs and it's almost instant.

The Victorians would have actually drawn the design on the bed itself,

using sand and string and things like that.

Once they were happy with the design, then it would probably take about eight gardeners the best part

of a week to actually plant this, whereas, with this method, because it's all done on computer

and it comes flat packed, for want of a better word,

four people can lay this bed in less than a day.

They're planting more than 10,000 plants here, over 72 square metres.

And the designs were inspired by an exhibition of buttons on display in the house.

Traditional carpet bedding is a really flat medium,

but because we're depicting buttons, I wanted a bit of height

amongst the planting, to sort of bring out the bevel-ness of the buttons.

And we've used things like this ophiopogon, which is a black grass,

which isn't traditionally a carpet bedding plant,

to give it a bit of height.

And sedum, the gold mound, that will mound up quite nicely.

Kleinias, which are quite upright, a little bit like dead man's fingers.

So it begins to become almost 3D bedding.

Waddesdon shows us 21st-century carpet bedding on an impressive scale.

But in a domestic garden in Haywards Heath, West Sussex,

designer Tony Smith is experimenting

with an unconventional type of carpet bedding.

What I tend to do in my garden is to use it as a laboratory

to try out lots of different ideas.

Carpet bedding doesn't have to be predictable.

And Tony proves this, using a plant that might surprise you.

Lettuces.

4.3 million lettuces.

What we've done here is to sow seed onto a bed of compost,

rather than going to the expense of growing them in pots in the nursery,

covered it with fleece to keep the birds off for four or five days until

it's germinated, and then taken the fleece off,

kept it watered, and we've created this carpet.

All we've done is to sow two types of lettuce.

Salad bowl, which is the vivid green, and lolla rossa, the Italian red.

I haven't found any other type of plant that will give this vivid, lush, vibrant green.

There's something about this that's so alive and so fresh.

What I've done is paint the trees black,

put an edge to the gravel in black.

It brings out the vividness of the green far more and you get a much more impressive effect.

So it's really playing with contrast, is what we're doing.

One great thing about using lettuce as an ornamental is that you can harvest it and eat it.

And these are cut-and-come-again lettuces, so we can cut these,

use the lettuce, and in a week's time it will have grown again and we've got some more.

Whether it's with flowers or vegetables,

the problem with carpet bedding is that it's an annual display.

So how do you create a fantastic feature without the bother of replacing it each year?

You can do a perennial kind of carpet bed, except this isn't so much carpet as shag pile.

It's higher. What I've done here is made a circular bed in the lawn,

cut it out with a peg in the middle and this stick marking the radius,

scratching it out, cutting the turf out, and then digging it over,

working in plenty of organic matter, so it's well enriched.

It would have been quite impoverished, the grass having been on the top of it.

It's now prepared and I can put my plants in. What am I going to use?

Well, I thought I' d go for that lovely old tried-and-tested scheme of purple and grey.

The purple comes from the Heucheras, with these lovely frothy flowers.

The grey is from the lavenders. And there's this wonderful

purple and blue penstemon called Heavenly Blue.

In the centre, I'm going to use this, a cordyline -

a Torbay or cabbage palm.

Hardy in all but the most severe of winters.

And with that in the centre of my bed, it will eventually come up

on a taller stem, a single trunk,

and that'll give this even more height.

The nicest thing now is that I can just arrange my plants.

This is the bit I like the best.

This is a dwarf lavender

called Hidcote, which doesn't come up too high.

Some of them are really tall and floppy, so Hidcote, Munstead,

something like that, will stay quite low.

And because these are perennials and not annuals,

I'm still putting them fairly close, but you don't need to get them quite

so jam-packed together, because they will spread out even more.

Now, you could say, "Gosh, this must be costing an awful lot of money".

All these plants here you can propagate yourself from

cuttings and make your bed when you've built up a bit of stock.

You can also plant slightly more thinly than I am doing now because

they will then eventually cover it. They'll take slightly longer.

So with it all laid out,

all I have to do now is plant.

And I am wondering if it's all going to get very nicely watered in.

Thunder.

This Heuchera's called Obsidian.

It's a lovely rich purple.

There are now dozens, nay, hundreds of Heucheras,

bred in Oregon, in the States.

They all look very, very similar.

It makes you wonder if they've got nothing better to do, doesn't it?

It's very pretty.

I'm arranging the penstemons like sort of spokes,

so it divides it up into quarters

and then there's a little dot of a Heuchera

down in the bottom of each triangle of lavender.

I quite like that. It appeals to my Victorian instinct.

The great thing about this perennial bed is that you get the benefit

of a design motif but at half the cost

and the maintenance of a traditional carpet bedding display.

The colours are less brash and showy than the Victorians might have liked.

But I think they're more elegant and understated for today's garden.

As we can see at Biddulph,

the Victorians took the idea of display in the garden to its limit.

But they didn't stop at flowers.

Britain's landscape was about to change forever, as trees from the New World were introduced.

Bateman created a pinetum here, to show off his new and exciting specimens.

Garden historian Anne Jennings explains the Victorian contribution to our woodland.

Anne, we tend to think of the Victorians as giving us shrubberies.

But they gave us so much more.

They gave us so much more, and they gave us these giants,

the conifers, the evergreen wonders of the plant world.

So, pinetums, then - collections of pine, spruces and firs -

they were a Victorian invention?

Well, if you think back to the 18th century, we were an island full of deciduous trees.

It wasn't until the north east of America was really explored

for plants that we started to see the arrival of conifers.

Why did Bateman plant them on these enormous mounds?

I think there are various reasons.

A lot of the Victorian planting at this period is about displaying

individual plants for their beauty, as an individual specimen.

It was elevated, it was set off against the sky, and you

could look intimately at this really complex beautiful network of roots.

Wonderful. And, of course,

here is a conifer which typifies the Victorian era.

It's named after one of their greatest heroes, or it was.

Wellingtonia. Named after the Duke of Wellington.

It has this wonderful soft, springy, spongy bark,

-almost like insulation, isn't it?

-It's lovely. It's so tactile.

And I think when you see something like a Wellingtonia, you're reminded about the vision

of these great garden makers of the Victorian period,

because they, after all, were planting young saplings,

-newly introduced plants...

-About that big, I suppose.

..grown from seed, planting it here, and how privileged are we, 150 years

later, to see this tree is all its glory with this amazing stature?

What they also did was change the look of our gardens

by getting us used to planting conifers and evergreens.

Hedges in gardens all over the country now - even Leyland cypress

-is, in a way, an indirect legacy of the Victorians, isn't it?

-Yeah.

And, of course, all of these great gardens ultimately fed through to

the middle classes and, in later periods, into suburban and urban gardens.

And we've learned how to use conifers in the smallest settings, haven't we?

Clipping them to hedges.

But it's still lovely to come and see one like this.

A giant of the forest in all its grandeur.

Beautiful.

To the Victorians, wealth, taste and acceptability

were not measured just by your flower garden and your orchid house,

but also by the quality of your asparagus and your grapes.

There was a quiet revolution going on in the kitchen garden,

with competitive head gardeners vying with each other for size

and elaborateness of structure. There's a lovely little book,

Kitchen And Flower Gardening For Pleasure And Profit,

which shows that they didn't do it all themselves.

"Almost an equal amount of pleasure is derived

"from seeing the results arise from well-ordered instructions

"given to subordinates, as if they were literally the work of your own hands".

You see, that's what they had in those days...staff.

Bateman had an extensive kitchen garden, but it was away from his

showpiece grounds in Biddulph, and sadly no longer exists.

But when it comes to putting fine food on the table,

the Victorians left an indelible mark on the way we grow our vegetables.

The productive gardens at Heligan in Cornwall

operate in much the same way as they would have done in Bateman's day.

Garden supervisor Nicola Bradley heads up a team of nine gardeners.

It's quite unique at Heligan, in the sense that we're very similar

to the amount of staff they would have had in the Victorian period.

It's very labour intensive to keep the ground weed-free, to keep

the ground cultivated to the highest possible standard.

Remember, it was all done by hand.

So if we see caterpillar eggs on cabbages, you know,

we go through them very thoroughly and squash them.

And incredibly time-consuming jobs, training the fruit trees,

you know, washing the trees down in the wintertime

with a toothbrush and soft soap and all of these things!

You need a lot of members of staff to achieve that.

But it wasn't just about manpower.

One of the secrets of the Victorian success was the layout of the garden.

It's very much about precision, regimentation, neat hedges.

But it's not just about aesthetics.

It does have a practical reason behind it.

You're allowing the plants the maximum space to grow to

their full potential and produce the best possible crop you can.

Necessity drove innovation.

They refined the system of crop rotation to get as much value out of the ground as possible.

Of course, one of the most important things

for the Victorian kitchen garden was to produce food all year round.

So they had to create lots of ingenious ways of prolonging the growing season.

Classic is sea kale and rhubarb, in the lovely terracotta forcing pots.

You could use individual little lantern lights to cover salad crops

earlier on in the season, just giving them that little bit of extra warmth.

And in the burgeoning Industrial Age, there was no stopping the Victorians.

Technological advances meant that the Victorians could start heating

their glasshouses using hot water systems that were powered by boilers.

So you can see all these lovely pipes running through here,

which just meant they could extend the season and start heating the glasshouses

much earlier on in the year and providing the temperatures that they needed.

Within the heated glasshouse, they went to extreme lengths

to create flawless fruit to impress their guests.

They had the knowledge to understand how to nurture a plant.

So if you look in the melon house, you'll see they've got beautifully-made individual

little nets, melon nets, which support the plant as it grows, so it doesn't come away from the stem.

Obsession with perfection set a precedent for our exacting standards today.

There's nothing worse than having something at a table that wasn't at its perfect best.

And that brings us to the cucumber straightener.

The cucumbers hang from wires.

This would have been tied just below an immature cucumber,

and as it grew and developed, you get a lovely straight cucumber.

The only thing you need to be aware of is to keep a close eye on it,

because obviously if it swells to a huge size and you don't harvest it in time,

it's going to get stuck in your tube.

But their quest for excellence

had some seriously unpleasant consequences.

These fumigators were nicknamed "widow makers", unfortunately,

because obviously the chemicals that they were spraying -

things like arsenic and nicotine - were all incredibly poisonous.

And I think the average life expectancy of a gardener back in that time

was probably not much beyond, you know, their late 30s, 40s.

Heligan shows us how Victorian invention gave us the kitchen garden as we know it today.

But 19th-century technology had its limitations.

Today's kitchen gardeners are finding ways to improve on ideas introduced by the Victorians.

At first glance, this garden at Tresillian House in Cornwall brims with Victorian charm.

But appearances can be deceptive.

This is a real Victorian garden,

and I've just added a little secret or two of my own

to make it what it is - something very special.

Head gardener John Harris has a secret.

We do not water a single thing in this garden.

He actually combines Victorian with modern and ancient principles

to grow his produce in a completely radical way.

We work in harmony

with the four quarters of the moon.

It's an ancient practice known as lunar gardening.

He sows on a new moon, and harvests on a full moon,

the theory being the gravitational pull of the moon

draws moisture into the roots of the plants.

Look at that, mouth-watering.

And that is full of taste and juice.

Add to this ancient practice the Victorian principle of good

soil preparation, and John has found his plants have thrived.

Preparation of soil is like baking a cake.

If you get the ingredients right,

you'll end up with crops like we've got here.

If you dig down here, that is beautiful, look.

But we've done the preparation in the winter.

All our humus and our compost, which is acting as a sponge.

The Victorians were fanatical in their watering regimes,

and wildlife was seen as a menace.

John has a more contemporary philosophy.

The Victorians were absolutely control freaks.

There wasn't a bird allowed in the garden.

We now do the opposite.

Take, for instance, these sunflowers.

We put them in to attract birds into the garden, so the birds come in and feed off the seed head.

But while they're in, they'll eat the insects.

Contrary to the Victorian way of dealing with pests,

John prefers the 21st-century principle of organic gardening without the use of pesticides.

He uses companion planting instead.

We put marigolds next to our potatoes.

The marigolds attract the hoverfly, which in turn will eat the blackfly.

John's garden shows that you can combine ancient wisdom with modern sensibilities

and still enjoy the splendour of the Victorian kitchen garden.

If ever there was heaven on earth, then this is heaven.

Whether it's tried-and-tested techniques of the Victorians,

or the expertise of a modern kitchen gardener,

the choice of growing methods can be overwhelming.

So if you're creating your first vegetable patch,

then it's good to go back to basics.

Well, you may raise an eyebrow

when it comes to planting and sowing according to the phases of the moon.

But nobody can dispute the value of organic matter when it comes to growing veg.

This stuff is the fount of all goodness.

Wonderfully succulent - almost like fruit cake.

It holds onto moisture like a sponge when it's in the soil.

But the time to get it in is in autumn, so that it can break down slightly during the winter,

and when it comes to sowing time, all that goodness and that

moisture-retentive capacity will be there to enable your vegetables

to grow a darn sight better.

If rich soil is the first secret of success,

then the second secret has to be timing.

It's not worth putting little delicate seeds into the ground

when it's cold, when it's wet, when it's inhospitable.

The old gardeners used to do several tricks.

They'd see, first of all, when weed seeds were beginning to germinate in

spring, and then they'd regard the soil as being warm enough.

If they weren't sure, they'd do the test that you used to do with baby and bathwater.

Just see if it feels warm to your elbow, and in extreme cases quite

a few years ago, and I've never used it, is to drop your trousers and sit with your naked bottom on the soil.

And if you go, "Oh, that's cold!", it's too cold for seeds.

I think perhaps the elbow is preferable.

And then when it comes to sowing your crops,

only sow it in quantities that you can use it.

Lettuce, for instance -

there's a great temptation to sow an entire 20-foot row.

Well, unless you're a family of rabbits, you don't need that many.

Sow three feet of row at a time.

Taut line between two sticks,

stand on it with your feet to keep it firm.

And then with the corner of a Dutch hoe, lightly flick out

the earth alongside the line, your feet keeping it taut as you go.

Now, that will do, about a yard or a metre, for one sowing.

The depth of the drill depends on the size of the seed.

That's about a quarter to a half an inch deep,

which is absolutely fine for lettuces.

Tip them into your hand,

and then take a pinch

and just lightly trickle them in.

Ideally, you're trying to let the seeds fall about half an inch apart, if you can.

That way, they won't be quite so competitive

when they start to germinate.

Put the rest back in the packet quite carefully

and then flick over the drill

with your fingers, and there they are, sown.

Now, if the soil is very much on the dry side,

there's another trick you can use.

When you've taken your drill out with the side of the hoe, like that,

you can use a watering can to run along the bottom of that drill.

Now, this is far better than trying to water the seeds in

once they've been sown, because you displace them.

You can now sow your seeds on the top of that.

They're in contact with the moisture and when you flick, the dry soil

will absorb the moisture and keep them snug.

Of course, there are various old wives' tales for different crops.

Parsley, for instance - always sow it on Good Friday.

That's the only time it doesn't go nine times to the devil before it germinates.

And the other thing about being able to grow good parsley

is that they say the wife wears the trousers if it comes up well.

No comment.

The value of crop rotation has been recognised for centuries,

but you don't need a complicated system.

Just make sure you don't grow the same crop in the same place two years running.

That way, you won't get a build-up of pests and diseases.

And as soon as you can, utilise any spare piece of soil.

Potato tops here, cut down in July to avoid potato blight,

and in between the rows and the ridges

you've got sweetcorn planted, which will come to maturity later.

As soon as any ground is vacant, fill it.

These lettuces were sown in tiny pots three or four weeks ago,

and have now been put in where another crop has already been harvested.

This successional cropping is very important on the veg patch.

That three feet of lettuce being sown one week, three foot the next

week, will keep them coming right the way through the year.

But the one secret of success is moisture.

John, who sows by the phases of the moon, might manage to get away without watering.

Most of us don't, and a lot of crops will bolt and run to seed.

Keep all your veg well supplied with water,

and you'll have a patch that'll keep cropping from early summer

right the way through to winter.

Biddulph is a living testament to the sheer range of ideas

that poured into the Victorian garden.

Whether it's the grand statement of carpet bedding, the delights of growing under glass,

planting exotics, or the humble vegetable patch,

look beyond the brazen displays and you'll find a hive of ideas

that can be applied to any garden.

As the century drew to a close,

it was inevitable that there'd be a backlash against elaborate

Victorian style and a desire for more naturalistic planting.

But it's impossible to ignore the influence of our 19th-century ancestors.

It's thanks to gardens like Biddulph that we have a taste for the exotic,

a thirst for invention, and a love of bright colour.

Well, we all like to show off now and again, don't we?

Join me next time, when my journey across 400 years of design

brings me into the 20th century.

I'll reveal the secrets of a garden that I believe is the most beautiful

and influential of the modern age.

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