Northern Europe Around the World in 80 Gardens

I believe that a really good way to understand a culture is through its gardens.

This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.

Some are very well-known, like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra.

And I'm also challenging my idea of what a garden actually is.

So I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon -

a strange fantasy in the jungle,

as well as the private homes of great designers,

and the desert flowering in a garden.

And wherever I go I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens

on my epic quest to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.

In modern times at least, northern Europe has been the place

where gardens and gardening have been the most vibrant and dynamic.

There are hundreds of historic gardens across the region

that one can visit, and millions of people do just that every year.

There is clearly a common desire to walk through the past via the medium of a garden.

Yet there is an overriding paradox accompanying that.

How do you preserve the history of gardens and yet keep them alive,

and accept the fact that all gardens change all the time.

My journey begins with the quintessential English landscape garden.

It then takes me across the Channel to the grand and sumptuous gardens of France.

I shall then track back to Belgium and the Netherlands,

and the gardens of some of my own personal design heroes.

Finally, I will travel to the far north, beyond the Arctic Circle,

to a garden where for a few summer months, the sun never sets.

The immediate challenge facing this journey

was to whittle the gardens down to an acceptable number.

I mean, I could have chosen 80 gardens, just from northern Europe alone.

So, the way I've resolved that is to make it an entirely personal journey.

The gardens I'm about to visit are either ones that I've been longing to see all my life,

or ones that I've been to before,

I know well and I want to share with you.

I am starting with the only English gardens in my entire round-the-world journey.

I have chosen them because although they are very different,

I think that they represent the very best of British gardens.

In fact, both are amongst the very best in the world.

The first is Rousham in Oxfordshire.

Rousham, designed by William Kent,

is astonishingly little known or visited,

yet I think it's the best landscape garden in the country.

In 1737, Kent, then better known as an architect,

was hired by the owner General Dormer to make modifications

to the house at Rousham and to revamp the garden.

In the drawing room of the house is this plan of the garden.

We don't know who drew it but we know that it was drawn up

round about the time of Kent's death in the 1750s.

And it shows the layout as Kent intended it,

and it also shows it almost exactly as it is today.

It's hardly changed at all.

The head gardener at the time that this was drawn up, McCleary,

used to take people round down here, down this path

and then round, down there and then back up that avenue

and along the bottom.

And that's the route that I'm going to take.

Kent's radical contribution to garden design

was to include the landscape as part of the picture.

Up till then,

gardens had tried to be refuges from what was seen as a potentially hostile world around them.

And here at Rousham, he deliberately sculpted the land

with this beautiful curve down to the river, didn't obscure that.

And then the field and the meadow below and the cattle grazing,

which were meant to be seen.

The road left unobscured so they could see droves of cattle going across.

And then there are two buildings up there - one which was a cottage which he reshaped to look as

though it might just be a castle,

and the eye-catcher on the horizon, totally false.

It's just a wall.

This was revolutionary.

For the first time, a very English rural view was included

as an integral part of the garden.

I find William Kent a fascinating character.

He was certainly no gardener.

We know that he avoided visiting the site as far as he could

and was notoriously careless on details of construction.

He seems to have been a semi-literate, drunken Yorkshireman

with a knack of smoozing the aristocracy.

But I think he was also, on the evidence of his work here and at Stowe, touched with true greatness.

This route takes you through the woods and down here into what is known as the Vale of Venus.

That's obviously a beautiful, beautiful piece of landscaping but,

for Kent, it was much, much more than that because it's full of allegories and references.

Some of them architectural, like the shape of the cascade

which had Italian references that only people who'd been on the Grand Tour would have known.

And there's Venus herself, who is the Goddess of Gardens.

And the few hundred people that would have come here

would have known all that, they would have understood it.

It was a sort of kind of theme park, in the way that we go and we know about Disney,

we know about the films and we pick up the references.

And, of course, for most people now, there's none of that.

It doesn't mean anything beyond its beauty.

Now I think that's fine, I think the beauty is enough.

But there is one extra bonus that we get that they don't and of course that's the maturity.

Now, I think, on a rainy overcast day in June,

this is as beautiful as practically anything I've ever seen in the world.

And a complete genius to take water and formalise it,

and yet keep it sinuous, with the understory of the laurel and the box clipped,

but massive in conception and in scale.

The balance, the light, the simplicity.

Made in 1740, and I tell you it's as modern as anything I've seen.

Some of the layout of Rousham can be credited to Kent's contemporary,

the Royal gardener, Charles Bridgeman,

who laid out designs here some 20 years earlier.

In Bridgeman's design, this natural stream was allowed to run free.

But it was Kent's inspiration to formalise it,

and to add the octagonal cold bath.

And, like much in this garden, Kent's brilliance was to stimulate the senses as well as the mind.

What this garden has, more than any other garden I've ever seen,

is a sort of perfect greenness.

The use of green and the layers of it, and the layers of light

that filter through the green, is just sublime.

Now this arcade of the Temple of Prinesti, as Kent called it,

has alcoves and niches,

and originally there was a statue in each of the niches, and a seat in each of these alcoves.

The idea being, of course, that the visitor could sit and take in yet another fabulous view.

And what you get from all these views, and in fact all these scenes, is that it's a theatre.

The garden is like a stage set waiting for the actors to come.

And, of course, you the visitor are the actors,

and then the whole thing suddenly becomes alive and is made complete.

Rousham is my favourite garden in England,

and this visit has reinforced

the fact that it is a staggering work.

I think Kent was a genius, a true genius

and he's right at the top of his art here,

and it makes it one of the great gardens of the world.

And he uses practically just one colour and some very simple ideas,

and it proves the old adage - it's not really WHAT you do

but HOW you do it that matters.

And also, reinforces to me, that to a degree over the last 150/200 years,

British gardens have been hijacked by flowers.

We're obsessed by plants and their variety and their colour

and how to grow them, and we've sort of lost the big picture.

We've lost this sense of a big idea,

expressed with panache and very simply.

And if you want to find that again, well, you can do no better than come to Rousham.

It is a wrench to leave, but I must move on and my next garden

is another of the truly great ones, albeit very different from Rousham.

It is the world-famous garden of Sissinghurst in Kent.

Now, I've known this garden for 25 years and been visiting it regularly

because the current occupant is a very old friend of mine.

But it's been a National Trust garden for around 40 years,

and it seems to me the National Trust have a particular hold on the British psyche.

They completely understand our love for the past,

particularly as manifested by houses and gardens.

And, of course, Sissinghurst is the very best of the National Trust gardens.

Sissinghurst represents and exemplifies

all that the English aspire to in a garden,

not least because it is the setting for the kind of aristocratic romps that the British so love.

Gardening and sex!

Days out don't come much better than that,

especially if there is a cup of tea and a piece of cake thrown in too.

Sissinghurst is a collection of ten distinct garden rooms,

and it was begun in 1930 by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West

and her husband Sir Harold Nicolson.

This is the first of the garden rooms they designed, the Cottage Garden.

The Cottage Garden here at Sissinghurst

taps directly

into almost every Englishman and woman's perception and desire for the perfect garden.

It fulfils the need for charm,

for a rural arcadia and above all for colour - a profusion of plants.

But, of course, almost everything about this cottage garden is more than it seems.

It's very carefully designed.

There's a wide range of extraordinary plants that are very high maintenance.

And, like everything else at Sissinghurst,

there is so much more to it than first of all meets the eye.

Sissinghurst is, of course, no cottage

but a staggeringly beautiful Tudor castle.

And while the traditional cottage garden

was a haphazard jumble of flowers, fruit and lots of vegetables,

despite the look of informality,

the planting here is sophisticated and managed beyond the wildest dreams of any cottager.

The job of maintaining all of Sissinghurst's ten garden rooms

falls to the Head Gardener Alexis Datta,

part of the Trust's large team in charge of curating this piece of our national heritage.

How do you manage that sort of museum element of the garden?

Well, I think that's quite a good question,

cos "museum element" is just what I don't want it to be.

It is a living thing, it moves and changes all the time - plants live and die.

And so I don't want it to be at all museumy.

And the idea is that it looks like the sort of idealised maybe version of what Harold and Vita made.

So, we're forever changing things but we try and do it slightly, rather than in a big way.

So it's a lot of change in order that it might stay roughly the same.

-Yes. Exactly, yes.

-Yeah.

That said, in a historical garden like this, Alexis has to tread a fine line between

the inevitability of change, and the public's desire to see the garden remain exactly the same.

If Sissinghurst is one of the most famous gardens in the world,

certainly the White Garden is the most famous part of Sissinghurst.

It's iconic and has spawned 1,000 imitations,

none of which are as good.

The reason why the White Garden works so well, is actually not just to do with the white.

The first thing is it's to do with the volume.

It's got this wonderful high box hedges, and, in fact,

they're much higher at this end.

They get taller and taller as they go down, so that the overall level is constant,

and that creates these spaces that are very satisfying and which then spill over with white flowers.

And then the second thing is, it maybe called a white garden, but it's predominantly a green garden.

There's all these different shades of green, which then

just have a sprinkling of white and it's that very pure combination that makes it so satisfying.

Today, while the National Trust may own and maintain Sissinghurst,

Vita and Harold's grandson Adam Nicolson, lives here.

Adam you grew up here, what was it like as a child? What was it like all those years ago?

Well, you can never, you can never sort of take it seriously.

You know, you don't know you're living in a shrine, really.

So it's a great biking ground.

I had a very good track that came through the arch there,

down into the rose garden and then down to the herb garden.

About 57 seconds I could do it, you know, if there weren't too many people there.

-It's unimaginable.

-No, I know.

I'm quite tempted to do it again!

No, it is, but, you know, I think in the '60s when I was a boy,

probably 20, 25,000 people a year came.

And now it's 150, 180, 200,000 even, so it's a completely different kettle of fish.

Why do you think Sissinghurst has become such an icon,

and such a sort of archetype of the ideal country home and garden?

I think that now, you know, it's 70 years old now

and you can look at it at the moment it was made in the '30s,

when that great aristocratic sort of country house structure was actually falling apart

under democracy, a tax regime, whatever you like.

And this, in a way, completely intuitively, I think, models the end of a world.

And that is enormously attractive to huge sections of the population

as a sort of nostalgic loveliness.

You know, one of the strange things that I've noticed today, is that although Sissinghurst

is dominated by its architecture of both buildings and plants, people walk round it like this.

They walk round with their heads down and they take pictures like that.

And this exquisitely-orchestrated collection of plants changes its performance from season to season,

even from day to day, but the story, locked in the past, is always the same.

And perhaps only gardens can do that.

Perhaps gardens can refresh the past,

and yet nurture it in a way that nothing else can.

Sissinghurst and Rousham are both gardens heavy with beauty and historical significance.

But I scarcely have time to dwell on them, because immediately I'm off to catch the Eurostar to Paris.

I knew both these English gardens of old

but now I'm about to visit gardens that I have only seen in books.

It's not just their horticultural beauty I am excited about...

There we go.

'..I also, want to discover what they can tell me about northern European culture.'

Oh, look.

I've been blasted effortlessly into Paris in under two hours,

where I have to change trains

in order to get to my first French garden, down in the Loire valley.

I crossed Paris and changed trains with a quick spot of sightseeing on my way.

As I headed to The Chateau of Villandry and its famous garden.

Right in the heart of the Loire region,

Villandry is one of the grandest of the area's many chateaux.

I've wanted to see it for years because,

laid out behind this beautiful building, is a famous garden that enthralled me

from the very first time I heard about it.

I was told that before I actually go into the garden itself,

I should really go up and have a look at it from the top of the chateau's tower.

I was going to tell you about the history and the significance

and symbolism of this layout, and confidently came up here expecting to give a little lesson.

And the honest truth is that I'm almost speechless

at the incredible scale of execution, concept and above all,

the sculptural quality.

It's an immediate, visceral thing -

you just don't get that from photographs or plans.

This is a manipulation of spaces that is really exciting.

The existing chateau was first built on the site

of an earlier fortification by Jean le Breton, between 1532 and 1536.

Le Breton had been an ambassador to Italy and the garden that he made at Villandry was ornate, extensive

and drew on his experiences of Italian Renaissance gardens.

The current owner of the chateau is Henri Carvallo.

Now, Henri, perhaps you could explain to me the layout of the garden.

I mean, for example this garden here,

is clearly full of meaning, isn't it?

Yes, of course. You have here the music garden on the other side of the moat.

And just here, the Love Garden, which is really the extension of the main room of the chateau.

But this walk that we're on now, this platform really,

presumably is deliberately designed to look down on the gardens.

Ah, of course, and it's a general principle of all the

gardens in Villandry is that they are supposed to be seen from above first.

The beauty of this garden,

is mostly in the structure and in the geometry,

rather than in the content of the frame.

In 1754, the entire formal Renaissance garden was ripped out

and replaced with an English-style landscape park like Rousham.

In 1906, Henri's great grandparents bought the chateau

and began the process of restoring the garden to its Renaissance glory.

Quite a responsibility for you now.

It's always very nice and interesting to continue to pursue the work

of your ancestor, and I'm the fourth generation so, it's going on quite well.

And also it brings me always a lot of joy to receive visitors.

Now, this is a dramatic change.

Tell me about this area, Henri.

This is the water garden.

This was created after plants of the 18th Century, and so the water garden

which is centred around a nice water mirror in the side of the river

is really, I think, the most peaceful place of the garden.

So far, I have only viewed the garden from above.

Now I want to go down and get right in amongst it.

Down at ground level in the music garden, you can really

hardly make out the pattern except for where the lavender marks it.

So you have this extraordinary great slab of box hedge.

Now, I assume they would use this machine that they're using

for cutting the hornbeam hedge at the back

to get out over the box and cut it, because I couldn't think how else they did it, and I asked Henri.

And he said, "No, actually what they do is that they part the box

"where two plants meet in here, and then just carefully walk through."

And wade out thigh deep in box, cut what they can and then move on,

and then just push it all back together again.

And that's sort of charmingly human and sort of amateur in this

incredibly impressive professional set-up.

The lowest terrace of Villandry

is the potager and actually this is what I wanted to come and see.

This is why I've chosen it as one of my 80 gardens,

and I've been longing to come and see it for 20 years now.

Potager is taken from the French for soup - potage -

and essentially the garden grows the ingredients to make soup, including vegetables and herbs.

But there are also flowers and fruit and all is set in an intricately formal geometric pattern

delineated with box hedging.

The scale is breathtaking.

In two annual sowings they grow over 80,000 vegetable plants and another 30,000 of flowers.

My visit is at the cusp of two seasons, so it is comparatively empty

but it is easy to see why this is the most famous potager in the world.

Well, I've fulfilled a lifetime's ambition to visit Villandry and I'm not remotely disappointed, in fact,

I'm overwhelmed at how it's exceeded my expectations.

But the surprising thing has been that the reason for this pilgrimage -

the potager, the vegetables -

has NOT been the thing that's blown me away.

I had no idea that the rest of the garden was so beautiful, and so magnificent.

It's almost land art, and yet it's a historical monument, made with such

a degree of generosity and big mindedness.

So, put all that together in a garden,

and you have what is quite frankly an exhilarating package, and I've absolutely adored it.

I'm heading off now to another garden I have long wanted to see,

made by one of France's most famous painters.

This means going back north of Paris to Normandy.

This next garden is about as different from Villandry as could be imagined

and it's essentially modern, in concept at least, because it's over 100 years old now.

And it belongs to the painter Monet, at Giverny.

The queues to see the garden are building up

even though it is not yet officially open

and I have been granted a quick look round before the public are allowed in.

Giverny has become one of the most famous gardens in Europe, if not the world,

and it's visited by up to half a million people in the seven months of the year that it is open.

Monet was obsessed with this garden and painted it continuously for 40 years until his death in 1926.

It is the archetype of the creative relationship

between painting and gardening

and every aspect of the garden is driven by colour and light.

It appears like there's a sort of pair of borders, huge borders,

going up either side this path.

In fact, they're made up of a succession of small raised beds,

each one with its own mini theme,

each mounded up in a slightly chaotic, almost arbitrary pattern.

But then you start to notice that the colours are working together.

Now, it's been said that these are like an artists' palette in the way they're laid out,

but it seems more to me like the way that a picture is built up, a painting.

The overall effect has a sort of general theme,

but then individually you start to look at the way it's put together

and the whole series of little mini events happening, to make the bigger picture.

This is a huge cultural change, it really might as well be another country.

I've left the language of formality, of green layers and plains,

and come to a country where the currency is colour.

But actually as I walk around, it's clear there are surprising connections.

The layout here is very grid-like, it's formal.

It's just it's fuzzy. It's a fuzzy structure and a fuzzy framework,

in order that colour can be saturated into it.

This section of the garden, what was the original cider orchard, is only half of it.

Ten years after buying the house, Monet bought another plot of land

over the road, specifically to make his famous lily ponds.

Jan Huntley from the Claude Monet Foundation has offered to guide me round them.

Monet painted these lily ponds with a kind of simmering mania.

He would work on up to 50 different canvases at any one time,

moving from one to the other as he tried to capture the specific light at that precise moment of the day.

But the Claude Monet Foundation has more than just the constantly changing light to worry about today.

You now have, what, upward of half a million visitors a year?

-Exactly. Yes.

-They must impose problems and restrictions

that Monet never had to deal with, and couldn't have dealt with.

Monet's riverbanks were far more grassy, as you can see over there.

We've planted really close to the edges, simply to prevent the tourists from stepping over.

It's not only that, it's also public pressure.

The public expect to see a very famous garden in perfect condition.

Now you know that that's not possible, which does mean that

we have a lot of work that has to be done very early in the morning.

Literally on Mondays, the gardeners come in and anything that is no longer in good shape, disappears

and we put something else in.

I mean, what's the basic philosophy.

Do you think, what would Monet have done under the same situation?

Or do you say well, we have to make a decision for better or worse?

We...have to make a decision for better or for worse,

and the idea of what would Monet have done

does not come into line because Monet would never have had so many visitors.

He was a very private man.

Well, that was really interesting.

I've come away with mixed feelings

because, clearly, if there's a garden that you've been dying to see for a long time,

it's great to go there

but you risk challenging your expectations.

It's a tricky time of year, in between, and they've had some terrible weather so,

not the best time to judge it for its colour.

But what it did make me realise was that unlike any other garden I've seen,

that garden was created as part of the creative process towards painting.

It's a means to an end, however seriously Monet took the horticulture.

And now, they've got the job of maintaining that garden in a deadly professional and serious way,

but without that impetus of a single figure creating something from it.

Sissinghurst still resonates with Harold and Vita's spirit

but Giverney seems emptier, less a living garden and more a tribute to Claude Monet.

Anyway it is time now to move on from Giverney and France.

Bonjour.

Merci.

INDISTINCT SPEECH

The third country in this five-nation jaunt is Belgium,

and a garden just outside the city of Antwerp.

I bought this little book about eight years ago, just speculatively.

I took it home and opened it up and was blown away.

I love the pictures of the gardens inside which seem to combine

formality and tradition, and yet something that was completely

innovative and exactly chimed with what I love about gardens.

And it's called Le Jean And Le Jacques Wirtz, and it's the reason I'm on this train now to Antwerp

to meet Jacques Wirtz after all these years.

Jacques Wirtz is a designer who straddles the divide

between the traditional European garden aesthetic, and contemporary garden style.

And he is a fully paid-up hero of mine, so rather than visit one of his clients' gardens,

of which there are many all over Europe,

I went to meet him at his home, to see his own garden.

I've seen pictures of this, but I had no idea that it was so long.

This four-acre garden was once the walled garden of a great estate,

and the paths were lined with box hedging.

But by 1970, when Jacques bought his house, originally the gardener's cottage,

30 years of neglect had reduced the hedges to an overgrown, gappy sprawl.

Rather than ripping them out and starting afresh,

he used this raw material to make his cloud hedges,

transforming them into one of the great horticultural features of the 20th century.

In so many gardens that you visit

there's a style that you can latch onto,

and you understand it and you appreciate it, and that explains the garden.

What you have here is complete fluidity.

You've got the layout of a formal garden, you've got nursery plants.

There's wonderful flowers, there are vegetables, all growing without boundaries.

It challenges all preconceptions, but actually the elements are completely familiar.

What you've got here are these great specimens -

holly, box, some yew round the corner, like trees in a wood.

I mean, there's no attempt to make it like a garden.

And it's because they're stored.

This is, to me, like a stone mason's yard or maybe an attic,

full of marvellous things just waiting to go.

And it's got all the ingredients of a formal garden, but none of the self-consciousness

and it's that that makes it so magical.

They say you should never meet your heroes

and I was a little nervous before meeting Jacques Wirtz.

But there was also much I wanted to ask him.

Did you intend

to make a garden here or to use it as a nursery?

Well, my intention was not to make a garden,

to stock plants here for use in our firm, for planting outside.

But presumably this hedge here behind you now, that was already there and you clipped it.

Yes. But not only large shapes.

Why did you reform it in this cloud formation,

rather than in straight lines in the European tradition?

Yes, this was a inspiration of the moment,

not to go back to this traditional way and to make

it like...

clouds and what the French name - moutonnement, moutonnement.

Like sheep, you know?

Some people make copies of this in their garden

and if you do that you have to, you need to do it on a big scale, otherwise it is, you know,

it's not good.

Does this garden still please you and give you pleasure?

Yes. Oh, yes, it's very satisfying.

For me, it is a pleasure to every morning to take my breakfast here and

to look at the garden and to make the short walk to the greenhouse, and so on. No, no, I am very happy.

Often this is paradise for me. Yes.

Now, it's obvious that I absolutely loved this garden,

and I suppose it ranks as one of the great experiences of my life.

You know, one of the sort of fantastic artistic experiences,

like going to a film that blows you away,

or reading a novel that changes your life.

And what really seems to be special about it, is the way that space is

sculpted into these extraordinary beautiful objects made out of air,

and contained by plants.

And because the plants are living and changing and have to be clipped,

and also that the whole garden is so fluid, it has fantastic dynamism.

And that balance between sort of poetic delicacy and human energy

seems to be just perfect.

The exhilaration of that experience has more than compensated for the slight disappointment of Giverny,

and I am ready to move on to the next stage of this journey,

and the only other garden on this trip that I have visited before.

From Belgium, I catch another train to the Netherlands

and back 300 years to the Royal garden of Het Loo in Apeldoorn.

The last time I came here was in 1994, when a full restoration of the garden had just been completed.

I have returned because the garden is the best living history lesson that I know.

The garden was made in the middle of a vast forest,

which was pretty much untamed.

Now, at the end of the 17th century, forest or wilderness of any kind

that wasn't being used for productive purposes, was seen as hostile.

There was no romantic idea that it was a beautiful natural world, it was effectively the enemy.

So to make a garden in the middle of that was an expression of man's domination over nature.

William of Orange and his young English wife Mary came here in 1684

and set about creating a palace and garden in a high Baroque style

that above all expressed formality and control.

The Baroque evolved from the earlier Renaissance style but was more elaborate, and more theatrical.

Then in 1689, William and Mary were invited to take over the English crown from Mary's father,

the Catholic James II, and they moved to England.

Bringing with them a whole range of Dutch influences,

but none that was to be more profound, than in gardens.

So the garden here at Het Loo which was only five years old at that point,

proved to have a real and lasting effect on the landscape of Britain.

In fact, detailed aspects of Het Loo, like these golden swans, found their way as lead casts, to Rousham,

but it was the general Dutch influence that was soon seen in gardens right across Britain.

These narrow borders that ribbon the great parterres,

are not really flower borders as we understand them at all.

They're more like our displays of specimens,

which is why you just get one plant in a row,

spaced quite widely apart by modern standards, all the way along.

And the idea was just to enjoy them as they came, individually.

Much more, in fact, like china which, around the time of Het Loo

was collected obsessively in a cabinet or on a mantelpiece.

'I met the curator Ben Groen and walked round the garden.

'Although this is Baroque, and Villandry is high Renaissance,

'the similarity between the two gardens is apparent in broad content if not in detail.'

And like Villandry, Het Loo shared the indignity of the formal garden being swept away

and replaced with a landscape park.

From 1807, William and Mary's garden was lost, buried in the sandy soil.

But in 1970, work began to recreate the original Baroque garden, based on detailed plans and archaeology.

What really strikes me about this is that it looks

brand spanking new, which of course is how it would have looked

in about 1710, or 1720, ie about 20 years after it was made.

Is that deliberate? Are you trying to keep it looking new?

Yes. What we want to give is a frozen image of 1700.

Man is master in nature, that is the message probably sent out at the end of the 17th century.

At that time it was the first...

feeling that, "Yes, we can get it,

"we can master nature."

And now we know we can.

Do you know how many miles of hedging there is?

It's about 30 kilometres.

And that is quite a distance.

They start in the beginning of April and they go until the end of June,

and that means four gardeners are basically the whole day is clipping.

And they go on and they go on.

This garden is most certainly NOT low maintenance.

And to one side of the house, through the Queen's Garden,

is what must be the mother and father of all hedge trimming jobs.

This is the burso, which is my favourite piece of the garden.

The idea of a burso is to create a framework out of wood,

and in this case massive framework,

and then clad it in hornbeam from the outside, which

is then trimmed so it looks like a solid structure from the outside, and yet light filters through.

And the reason for it was so that the Queen could walk protected from the glare of the summer sun.

And the effect is to have this green light filtering through to make,

I think, one of the most magical places in any garden in the world, because you're inside the light.

You're inside the structure of the hedge and it's fragile,

and yet, of course, amazingly strong and I adore it.

But actually whether I like it or not, is not the point about Het Loo.

Unlike any of the other gardens on this trip, the critical thing about Het Loo is that NOT allowed to age.

It is a time machine, deliberately held, bright, fresh and new at the year 1700.

And, in garden terms, what you have here at Het Loo is the mould

that 40 years later, William Kent was to shatter at Rousham.

Leaving Het Loo it's time to pop onto another train back to Amsterdam.

I've got a few pictures on here of the next garden

that I'm visiting.

Now it's designed by a man called Piet Oudolf who I've met a couple of times in England.

He did a gold medal winning garden at Chelsea a few years ago.

And he's one of the leading exponents of, what you might call the new perennial garden,

which uses grasses to a very great degree.

And this garden, which I've never seen before,

is supposed to be a really good example

of a modern European garden.

I mean, clearly it goes without saying that this is a highly designed garden.

It's a designer set piece.

None the worse for that, that's not a criticism.

And based around this slab of water, which I guess if it wasn't starting to rain rather uncomfortably,

we've dodged the weather most of this week, would reflect the sky.

And then you'd have these very crisp lines.

I like the way that the garden is sort of anchored by great slabs of water and bed and hedge,

and then gently softens.

For the first time on this trip, I'm in a garden where everything has been designed from scratch,

and luckily Piet Oudolf has agreed to come along and talk to me about his work.

Do you think there is a sort of European, particularly a northern European

gardening language or style?

More in the planting I suppose nowadays.

It, er...

It's more about sustainability, you know, the word

it's almost fashionable, but we try to create gardens that last longer,

try to find the plants that work better.

Now here you've used grasses to huge effect,

is that part of that process?

No, grasses, I think, are part of the way I like to work.

I think it creates a sort of spontaneity, a sort of natural holistic look,

and that was how it all started.

But, on the other hand, grasses tend to need less water and tend to be easy if you use the right ones,

and they match very well with the plants I like.

Which plants do you like?

Plants that look very, come very close to the natural species.

And that's why I like grasses so much because I don't like big flowers and over cultivated plants.

Where do you see garden design taking us in the future?

I think we can find a way that we can, where ecology meets design.

So you can look for the plants that grow well on the site where you are busy.

And we don't want people to water three times a day so it is very important for the future.

I took a little bit of a punt with this garden because although I'd heard it was really good,

you never really know with a private garden.

But I'm jolly glad I did come because I think it IS good.

Remember, we're only about half an hour from the middle of Amsterdam,

and yet you have a garden that's private, it's domestic and yet it's open out to the landscape.

And, I'm sure that's at the heart of the future of gardening.

It must relate to the surroundings, and relate to the realities of modern life.

So on every level, it's been a really good trip.

I've come to the end of the familiar aspects of Europe

and gardens that I've certainly known of, if not actually visited before.

But before I finish, I want to go out of my European comfort zone,

and go as far north as possible where there still might be a garden to see.

So, for the final stage, I take a plane for the first time on this trip

to go to the island of Tromso in the far north of Norway.

And after weeks of constant rain and grey cloud, I find bright sunshine,

all day AND all night because at this time of year up here, in midsummer, the sun never sets.

This is taking some getting used to.

I've come one plane hop to another country and it really does feel like another world.

Here we are with snow on the mountains, the brightest sunshine you can imagine.

I mean, it's just almost impossible to see without dark glasses.

It's hot, much hotter than it was in mainland, grey rainy Europe,

and there's perpetual light.

It's light all night long it's as bright as this.

And yet I know that there is the flipside, which is this perpetual darkness in the middle of winter.

And although it's very, very different,

what it feels like is all those elements of northern Europe,

stretched out to the very limits that they'll go.

I have to pinch myself to remember that Tromso is in fact 200 miles

inside the Arctic Circle and is covered by snow for six months of the year.

I am fascinated to discover what it is like to garden with these extremes of light and dark

and of summer and winter climates.

If ever gardening was on the edge, it is so up here.

But as I come into the world's most northerly botanic garden

through its woodland park, it is clear that the restricted growing season has surprising benefits.

Everything here has a freshness like the very best of an early English May day,

but bathed in intense midsummer light,

which is a glorious combination and I have never seen it before.

This is a complete surprise.

Not quite sure what I had expected, actually, but it wasn't this.

It was much more a question of harsh weather and tiny plants clinging to the rocks.

Yet...I've walked through this marvellous flower-filled wood.

The hedgerows and the sides of the roads are smothered with flowers.

And here you come into the botanic garden

with bright colour and there are the mountains covered in snow and the fjord...

which is a delightful surprise.

The Tromso Botanic Gardens houses a wide range of alpine species from around the world,

collected into geographic groups and planted in amongst the boulders and rocks throughout the garden.

These cover a surprising range of shapes and sizes from the positively lusty to the minute and delicate.

What they all have in common is their adaptation to these surroundings

and all are completely at home in this most extreme of garden environments.

Arve Elvebakk is the curator here at Tromso and he specialises in Arctic plants.

One of the extraordinary things, you're open I believe, all the time.

Yes. All days of the year.

And not just all days, but all day too.

You can come here at two, three in the morning, can't you?

-Yes, yes. People do.

-Really?

That's quite extraordinary.

How is it possible to make a garden so far north?

Well, it's thanks to the Gulf Stream.

We are north of the Arctic Circle but we don't have an Arctic climate.

We are surrounded by forests, and I have visited Greenland at the same latitude,

and it's like a totally different world.

They have two, three degrees in summer and ice and polar bears and walrus,

and are far to the north of the forest.

So if we had changed place, if the Gulf Stream would stop,

we would have a problem.

There is talk of that happening, isn't there, with climate change?

Yes. They discuss if there is a balance and the oceanographers say

that, "Oh, we think it will last at least for 100 years or more."

So I hope they are right.

The warmth of the Gulf Stream means that it's not just alpine plants

that can thrive in this furthest outreach of Europe.

Brynhild Morkved is working on a collection of more familiar plants,

mainly gathered from local households

and these tell a unique gardening story from northern Norway.

This is the green cultural heritage of northern Norway.

The plants that the old women had had in their gardens for...

hundreds of years.

The colour of this ranunculus is incredible.

I mean, these bright golden buttons.

Yes. 50 years ago, you could find it in different gardens in the whole of Norway

but now it has disappeared from all the other places.

-But why has it disappeared?

-It's a field form of a weed.

-Yes, a weed. They perhaps have cleared it away.

-They just weed it out.

Yes. So today, that is the only old...collection

we have in whole of Norway of that plant.

It must be incredibly difficult to garden in this climate.

People from other places of the world, they think nothing grows in the north.

I also thought that when I come to Tromso, and then it was very big

flowers and very beautiful, so... And I think

people that are at the border for growing, they want to try to...

"Oh, I want to try this plant and I want to try this plant."

I confess that botanic gardens don't always thrill me,

but to put plants in context and to see them growing

in their natural habitat, especially one as extreme as this, is really inspiring.

And it feels appropriate to finish this journey as far from where I began as possible,

as though any further and the very notion of a garden would fall off the edge of the world.

I've come up this hill just outside Tromso,

literally to give myself a little bit of distance on this trip and to take stock.

Because, down there is this town, 200 miles into the Arctic Circle.

Behind me is the midnight sun.

It literally is midnight, this bright light

which is the sun skirting over the Arctic and beyond there's nothing.

No more gardens, hardly any more people at all.

Just the frozen waste for most of the year.

I began this journey wondering how gardens can best serve history.

Certainly, gardens can bring the past alive in the most vivid way possible

because, unlike a building or a painting,

the components are constantly changing.

But, as my journey progressed, I began to realise that whatever

their history, however powerful the cult of personality behind the garden

the gardens of Northern Europe seemed all to be shaped most by light or the lack of it.

How the Northern European gardens sculpt, reflect, harness or play with the available light

is the creative bond that runs down through all the years.

And to come here, a place of perpetual sunlight in the summer,

and its flipside, perpetual dark in the winter,

takes that northern European obsession with light to its extremes, and I can go no further.

Join me next time as I travel east

to experience the diverse cultural influences of South East Asia

on a quest to find the real tropical garden.

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