Episode 14 Gardeners' World

Welcome to Gardeners' World.

Quite a lot of us have had pretty miserable weather

so far this spring and summer.

But we've reached that peak of the year.

A couple of days ago, we had the longest day.

On Sunday, we've got Midsummer's Day.

Now is the point where we have most light.

And that's not just daylight to do jobs in,

it's light to look at things,

light for plants to soak up and be resplendent in.

So now is the time to make the most of it.

Carol is showing how any garden can grow trees and climbers

that will encourage a whole range of wildlife into our gardens.

Even in a short length, just the boundary between you

and next door, you can pack in all manner of species.

And Joe is picking up tips at Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire,

a grand garden that has a particularly English informal elegance.

Look at this, this hedge has taken on a life of its own,

it's been let to grow all wonky and knobbly,

so it's become this wonderful piece of living architecture.

And I shall be doing a big changeover in the Jewel Garden,

cutting back and taking out the spring flowering plants

and adding in tender annuals and perennials.

I will also be harvesting my garlic too.

I think at this time of year,

definitely, my favourite flower is the rose.

There is no other plant that combines sumptuousness,

elegance, grace, voluptuousness, even,

all within one tightly furled pack of flower.

My favourite roses are the old roses,

the classic roses - including the gallicas, the centifolias,

the bourbons, the damasks, the mosses.

They really have everything you want from a rose,

all together in one quite tough shrub.

They are good, easy plants to grow.

But at this time of year, there can be a few problems.

Something you want to watch in a year like this,

which has been very wet, is balling.

You can see here, for example, this moss rose -

and you can see the moss on the rose that gives it its name -

is a good example, because we have got a nice,

fat bud waiting to open. Now, that's very wet.

And if the sun really blazed down today,

the outer layers dry out quicker than the inner layers

and they form a sort of cap. And that will stop it opening.

So you need to pull the outer layers off,

otherwise the whole bud just drops off.

The other thing that it's a good idea to do at this time of year,

as well as cutting flowers to take indoors -

I love doing that, once a week, go round, cut a basket full of roses

and just make little posies of them - is to deadhead.

This is 'Cardinal De Richelieu'

and it's very prone to looking scruffy when it's wet.

So what you have to do is just cut the flowers off.

Now, deadheading is not just pulling the petals off, that's not enough

because the seed will still form and that will take goodness.

Get a pair of secateurs and cut right into a bud.

There's another one there, that's going over,

that's just about had it. So cut right down to there.

That will form sideshoots so you'll get more flowering.

Most of these roses are not repeat flowering at all.

They flower from now until the middle of July.

But while they're doing it, they're just fantastic.

If you remember, I planted up these pots a few weeks ago.

And not only are they growing well,

but the dahlia's flowering in June.

That's 'Arabian Night'. Looking really good.

And the Cosmos atrosanguineus has got this fabulous,

rich colour, so it's looking really well.

I love the combination of the dark foliage of 'Bishop of Lander'

and the colour of the flower of the cosmos.

There is a risk that the nasturtium will be too dominant.

Nasturtiums in good soil grow very rampantly

but don't produce many flowers, so I might pull a few of those out,

otherwise the cosmos' bright lights in there will get swamped.

Talking of swamped, we've come to a point in the Jewel Garden

which is really a turning point in the year.

All the flowers that were so spectacular in May

and early June are now over.

You can see here, it looks fine.

It's got a kind of energy and vitality from its exuberance,

but it won't stay like that. Nothing ever does.

You've got to be planning ahead.

And if I left that, it would start to slump and fall and squash,

and you pay the price in as soon as two weeks.

So now is the time to make space,

take out the old plants that have done their stuff,

cut back where appropriate

and then start planting and planning for later on in summer.

So you can see here that there is a real mixed bag of plants,

which is what I like.

But look closely and they're looking quite scruffy, and these

wallflowers, all grown from seed last year, have done their stuff.

I'm going to pull that out.

Wallflowers are actually short lived perennials,

and they could be left. I could cut them right back

and they would grow and they would flower next year.

But they would not flower so well.

If I had left that in the ground and cut that back, like that,

so it was sticking up from the ground like that,

that would grow back, that is an option.

But I'm looking for space.

You can see how we've got Allium sphaerocephalon growing up here

and it's flopping everywhere.

And the aquilegias around it. The aquilegias, I can cut back.

I'm going to cut right back.

This is Geranium 'Ann Folkard' and I don't cut that back,

I want it to twine through.

I don't know if you can see the yellowy, lime coloured leaves,

and it's got a little magenta flower,

just about appearing about now.

And that will go right through summer.

And it's a wonderful plant for linking other plants.

It just works its way round.

Whereas other geraniums,

that have really been at their best in around mid-May, you can cut

back right to the ground and they will grow back and flower again.

Before I get too carried away,

I want to clear up the mess I've made and then take stock,

because there might be a few things that could do with cutting back,

another few things I might want to pull out, just to make more

room, but if I get too enthusiastic, I could undo good stuff.

For example, the Oriental poppies

should be cut right to the ground when they've finished flowering,

but I've got one or two buds on there,

so we'll leave that for the moment.

Having cleared away or cut back the set of plants I know

I want to remove, the next job is to support remaining plants,

so I can see clearly the available space to put new plants into.

Now, these are the plans that I've got set aside to fill the gaps

and the one uniting feature of them all is that they're all tender.

We've got salvias, tithonias, cannas,

cosmos and zinnias. You can buy all these from a garden centre,

and a range of other tender plants. In fact, we've raised all these,

so we've got seed, cutting, seed, division and seed.

And the tithonias were grown from seed too.

Tithonia is really good value,

for the intensity of the colour it gives out.

Bright orange sunflower. It's got a sort of velvety touch to its petals.

It will go on flowering from July, right through

until the first frost at the end of October.

So a good, hard-working plant and very dramatic.

And we use that orange to set off all the purples and the blue.

So when positioning it, you want to think where the purples

and blues are going to be to get the right effect.

So rather than plant them individually,

what I'm going to do is set them out,

but I won't actually plant them until everything is in position.

As well as tithonia, I'm putting in Cosmos 'Dazzler'.

Like all cosmos, it's easy to raise from seed

and as long as it has some sunshine, will grow in almost any soil

and give you an intense magenta colour right through into autumn.

I took lots of Salvia guaranitica cuttings.

These have an intense blue, almost purple flower which will

contrast vibrantly with the orange of the tithonia.

When you're happy with the position of your pots,

put them in the ground. Take your time, think about

how they're going to grow and how they move in

and adjust them accordingly.

And of course, the effect that you're after is a seamless web.

They should look as if they've just arrived at that point.

They won't look anything at all for a few weeks,

so give them a chance, but by the end of July,

they should be really kicking in with all their colour.

Now, what do you think of when you think of the RHS?

Probably Wisley, Chelsea Flower Show and the other flower shows.

But not that many people know about the partner gardens.

These are nearly 150 gardens around the country that,

if you're a member of the RHS,

you can go and visit when they're open and special times of the year.

Joe has been along to Northamptonshire to visit one of these partner gardens.

Kelmarsh Hall was built in the 18th century

and the estate is set in 3,500 acres of rolling Northamptonshire countryside.

Although at first it feels rather grand and formal,

the garden itself is the epitome of English country garden style.

The gardens at Kelmarsh were created in the 1930s

by the late Nancy Lancaster,

a doyenne of interior design whose signature style

was to create a house and garden that didn't look too new or too old,

but had a relaxing atmosphere that looked lived in.

To Nancy, the garden wasn't a monumental showpiece

but a beautiful, restful space.

So walking around it was a bit like putting your comfy slippers on and saying, "Aah!"

It's frightening when you think of the hours gardeners put in

up and down the country, getting their hedges as perfect as possible.

Well, why bother? I mean, look at this.

This hedge has taken on a life of its own.

It's been let to grow all wonky and knobbly.

It's had the lower branches pruned up

so it's become this wonderful piece of living architecture.

That's what adds the character to this garden.

I caught up with head gardener Esther McMillan to find out

how she achieves Nancy Lancaster's relaxed country style.

Well, it's supposed to be like a shabby chic,

so we try and tread a fine line between

some sort of dishevelled elegance and utterly shambolic.

But within quite a strict structure?

If you think about interior decorating,

you've got a very, very grand house -

very formal lines, symmetry, et cetera -

and then you've got soft furnishings, so you can translate that into gardening terms

with the herbaceous plantings as the soft furnishings

and your hedges as the formal structure.

Nancy Lancaster became queen of the "English country house" look

and, you know, her style of living went outdoors.

In this style of garden, you won't find razor-sharp hedges

and neatly preened plants.

Instead, nature is allowed to have the upper hand.

Well, just a little.

It's definitely a very romantic style

and it takes a lot of, sort of, passion to do it.

It's...probably harder than tidy gardening, ironically.

How do you keep this look going?

Letting things billow over,

so edging plants that tumble over the edge.

I think the phrase is, "Like old ladies' petticoats."

You need to stake things, like hidden corsetry, basically,

and create these little structures around clumps of plants

and using the natural materials helps.

So to create this seemingly effortless style, what does it take?

Well, you've got to start with formality and then you've got to put quite a lot of effort in, actually.

You've got to hoe your beds,

you've got to keep your edges of your paths nice and clean

and you've got to stake your plants, too.

But then you can let the plants rip.

You can let your roses just grow wild and your hedges go all knobbly.

After all, it's nice not to have to be perfect all the time.

Hello. You waiting for me?

Come on, then.

I've got some garlic here, which I planted in September.

It's a very early variety called Sprint.

Now, it might be ready, normally, by the end of June but normally,

I would look to harvest that

in mid-July. But, if you look closely,

you can see that the foliage is looking very yellow.

You can see these orange blotches on there - and that's rust.

That's leek rust.

You very often see it on the outside of leeks.

It's a fungus.

And it's been caused, or at least increased dramatically,

by this very wet weather we've had.

It's been warm and wet,

and that's lovely conditions for a fungus like that.

It's attacking the foliage. It shouldn't attack the bulbs but it'll affect the bulbs

because if there's no foliage, they can't get any bigger.

Whereas if the foliage was really green,

the bulbs would go on swelling for another few weeks.

So if your garlic's looking healthy, leave them,

but if you've got this, it's time to dig 'em up.

When you're harvesting garlic, always dig it up.

Don't pull it, because you don't want to damage the basal plate

where the roots attach to the bulb.

So if we take that out of the ground... See, it's not bad.

It hasn't got that sort of tautness that you get on mature garlic, but that'll be fine.

That's perfectly OK. What you have to do is dry it.

Dry it thoroughly and then store it.

The smaller ones, we'll eat fresh.

Fresh garlic is slightly milder,

sweeter and it's got a real taste to it - flavour,

rather than a sort of accent.

There's a very garlicky taste that we all recognise, but this is subtler and deeper.

And if you roast it and just eat the heads whole,

they're absolutely delicious - or you roast it with a chicken, say -

and it's perfect.

So don't feel you have to store it all. Garlic is a greedy plant.

It really does do well on rich, well-drained soil,

which is sometimes hard to combine those two.

But it really repays adding plenty of compost

to ground that's got garlic.

CUCKOO CHIRPS

Do you hear the cuckoo?

That's almost the last cuckoo of the year.

A few more weeks and then she'll be gone. Oh, there we are. Listen.

Well, I'm not that disappointed by that. I see it as a rescue mission.

We've salvaged a crop of garlic which will get eaten.

They just won't get stored very well.

We've got some more that should store better later.

Now, talking about storage and getting eaten,

there's a tradition in the Don household whereby we lift

the first new potatoes - whatever variety they are -

at the beginning of July, on July 8th,

because that's my birthday and it's like a little birthday treat to myself.

But this year, I'm doing a trial - I've got six different varieties

of new potatoes and I want to compare how they get on.

I'm going to leave that for another few weeks but I thought,

seeing as it's Midsummer, I'd have a little sneak preview.

Now, everybody loves rummaging around to see what potatoes they've got.

So if I just dig in under there and lift...

Oh, look. There are some.

There we go.

Now, this is a variety called Foremost.

There we go. Look at that.

They're not very big and they're a bit scabby

but they probably taste quite good, although there aren't many of them.

Now, one of the immutable laws of nature

is that however much you rummage around for potatoes,

you always miss one - usually quite a big one -

but you leave new potatoes in the soil until you need them.

They don't store at all well and when you lift them,

the sugars start to change to starches quite quickly.

So to get that lovely sweet taste,

dig them just an hour or so before you eat them -

minutes, even - and then you get a sweetness that you can't buy.

Maybe a little bit of garlic, a little bit of potato -

that'll be good.

As well as harvesting,

here are some other jobs to get on with this weekend.

# It don't mean a thing

# If it ain't got that swing... #

It's very common for broad beans, at this time of year,

to suddenly be smothered with blackfly.

This is not a disaster

because it will not affect the production of beans.

And the easiest way to deal with them is simply pinch out

the growing tips, which is what the blackfly are attracted to.

This will reduce the number of fly

and will even encourage the development of more bean pods.

# What good is melody?

# What good is music

# If it ain't possessing something sweet? #

If you've got grass growing up to a hedge or an edge of any kind,

it's very difficult to keep it clipped or mown neatly.

The answer is to create a gutter between the mown area and the edge.

Use a board or a line and cut a strip of grass away,

and then you can keep that clean and trimmed

and it makes mowing a lot easier.

# It don't mean a thing

# If it ain't got that swing... #

The June drop is when apples shed their excess fruit,

and it's an indicator that it's a good time to thin them.

Reduce each cluster of fruit

to just two healthy, well spaced apples, and that will ensure

that they are in best possible condition when you harvest them.

Now, these three wigwams of sweet peas are a little test I'm doing.

Nothing scientific - just out of interest, really.

They're all the same sweet pea. They're all Monty Don sweet peas.

And the ones at this end were sown in pots last October.

The ones in the middle were sown in pots in March.

And these ones were direct sown - I think it was the end of April, beginning of May.

And I just wanted to compare, A - how they grew,

and B - how many flowers they produce right across the year.

Well, you can see, for starters,

that the autumn-sown ones are twice the size

and producing flowers already.

They've just started and they're really getting into their stride.

Spring ones are looking quite healthy but it'll be a while before they flower

and the poor old direct sown ones haven't really got going yet.

So I think you can say that if you want to have sweet peas

to pick by midsummer, you'd better sow them in autumn.

However, that doesn't mean to say you'll get more sweet peas across the year. So we'll see.

Maybe the May ones will catch up by August and September.

Now, Carol is answering your dilemmas this week,

and she's had a letter from someone who loves trees and would like to include them in their garden,

not least because they attract so much wildlife.

But how do you do that in a normal-size garden?

Trees are the most important feature in my garden

and I'm not the only one who feels like that.

Dulcie Warren has written to us from Hampshire, saying that,

like me, she's got mature trees in the garden

but she's distressed about the amount of habitat and big trees

that are being cut down and destroyed,

and she wants to know what we can suggest -

especially for people with smaller gardens -

in the way of trees and shrubs

that are not only going to provide them with pleasure

but provide food, shelter for all those creatures with whom we share the garden.

If you're gardening in a smaller plot,

you might think you just haven't got the space to start planting forest trees.

But this bit of native hedge illustrates that,

in actual fact, even in a short length -

just the boundary between you and next door -

you can pack in all manner of species.

There's hazel here, sloe, field maple, and the beautiful oak.

It actually supports literally hundreds of invertebrates

and you can have one in your garden!

And hawthorn offers food and shelter for so many creatures,

and it makes a brilliant hedging plant.

It's thick and it's thorny - it's wonderful. But...

let it do its own thing

as a specimen tree in the middle of your garden

and it can become the focal point of the whole place.

If the hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna,

was a tree from a foreign land that was introduced, we'd all want one.

This tree lights up the countryside from the north of Scotland

right down into the south. Every May, the whole place

is iced with its beautiful blossom along the hedgerows.

And yet, we tend to take it for granted.

Not only does it offer you the most beautiful skeleton in the winter

but later on, its leaves are shiny and brilliant

and then they're followed by this glorious blossom.

We call it May where I come from!

And that blossom provides so much food -

pollen and nectar - for insects.

Those flowers are followed by a crop of bright red berries.

Those berries are feasted on by our blackbirds and thrushes

but they persist right the way through the winter

and flocks of redwings and fieldfares enjoy them en route to their final destination.

If you're going to go for just one tree, make it a hawthorn.

It's not just trees and shrubs that are important for bringing in the wildlife -

lots of climbing plants do exactly that, too.

And to that end, I'm going to plant this lovely honeysuckle.

This is Lonicera periclymenum,

a native honeysuckle,

and this is a cultivar of it.

It's called 'Graham Thomas', named after the great plantsman,

and it's got much paler flowers with none of the crimson within.

And that means you can see it even more

at the time when it's at its best, in the evening.

I'm going to put it behind this tree stump and all I've done,

really, is just to add a bit of leaf mould -

cos that's what the plant likes.

It loves deep, woodsy sort of soil.

A lot of people think that this is a plant which needs sunshine -

not a bit of it.

This plant is so accommodating. You can plant it out on a wall,

on a fence - wherever - as long as it got its roots

and a bit of shade and it's got that lovely stuff underneath.

I'm hoping this is going to find its way up into these trees.

It just twirls itself around, just gently climbing up into the canopy.

Whereas lots of our flowers and trees and shrubs

attract wildlife during the day,

this attracts all those things that we don't see in the night.

All those moths - there are many more species of moths

than there are butterflies in this country but we don't see them.

If you look at the individual flowers of this,

you'll see these great, long corolla tubes.

And so moths have a much longer proboscis than butterflies

so you can bet your sweet life

that that's exactly what this plant provides nectar for.

And it's at night, just as we're going to bed,

that this plant comes into its own,

belting out that perfume

and bringing in all those lovely, special creatures.

Well, thank you so much, Dulcie, for raising this very important issue.

There are more than 11 million gardens in this country

and if each of us, every time we go to put a plant in,

thinks not only how much we love that plant

but just how it's going to benefit wildlife, everyone wins.

These are the Zantedeschias I bought at Gardeners' World Live.

At the time, I knew it was a bit of a gamble -

it was a bit sort of out there and not my normal thing.

I also knew that they may not get a rapturous reception

when I brought them home.

And I wasn't wrong!

The reception committee was, er, muted, to put it politely.

However, I'm sticking to my guns -

I still think they have great possibilities.

I've agreed to not plant them in the border but pot them up.

I've got some nice terracotta pots and they won't hurt.

If I was going to plant them,

I was going to sink them in pots anyway so they're very movable.

The reason you sink them in pots is because they don't like root disturbance and they're tender.

So you've got to move them in autumn anyway,

because they're not frost hardy.

It's better to lift the whole pot and maybe plant it out of the border

in spring. As it is, they're going to stay in pots.

They'll be moved around, they'll find a home somewhere.

That's it for today's programme.

Now, we shan't be back, I'm afraid, for four weeks

because of various sporting activities.

But life will go on at Long Meadow.

We'll keep gardening - I hope you do, too -

and we'll meet again in a month's time. Till then, bye-bye.

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