Episode 15 Gardeners' World

Hello, welcome to Gardeners' World.

Last week I spoke about stopping

and allowing yourself time to enjoy the peak of the year.

But what happens from now on in is really exciting.

All the colours are intensifying and the whole garden,

every nook and cranny, is starting to fill up

with glorious, rich colour.

Joe visits the home of the designer John Blake

who reveals his tips for creating a stunning garden

where there's not much room to play with.

We tend to go in large clumps of things we really love.

It's a terrible mistake to put too many small things in a small space.

We visit the house and garden of High Glanau Manor near Monmouth

where colour and design work perfectly together.

The garden's typically Arts and Crafts,

and the beauty of designing a house and garden as one

is that you line up the windows with the garden features,

so it's a perfect view.

And I will be revisiting my grass borders,

making sure they're looking as good as they possibly can

for the rest of the summer as well as sowing some more carrots.

Colour is a very personal thing.

You choose what works for you and your garden and the situation.

But there are certain rules that you can follow and which do help.

For example, pink and orange don't work terribly well together

but contrasting colours set each other off.

As the sun is rising and it gets hotter

and the light gets more intense, rich colours work well together

and that's what we've done in Jewel Garden.

So, rich rubies

and oranges and blues

and also there have to be in-between linking colours

and one of the absolute key plants

in the Jewel Garden is this geranium.

It's Germanium Ann Folkard because it does two things.

On the one hand, the flowers, which are a really rich magenta,

tie together pinks and reds and purples.

They span that colour divide.

Also, the way the plant grows, it weaves in and out of other plants.

It does this all summer long.

Over here, we've got the clematis.

Gypsy Queen.

What is fascinating about this is that when it is open

and mature, you can see that it is distinctly violet purple

but when it's young, it's much more of a plum colour.

It really changes as it grows.

You need to take into account,

the colours of the plant right the way through its performance,

when it flowers and critically, what it's flowering with.

# A little bit of me and a whole lot of you

# Add a dash of starlight

# And a dozen roses too

# Then let it rise for 100 years or two

# And that's the recipe for making love... #

Of course, the best linking colour is foliage.

Foliage will always last longer than any flower.

There's always more of it than any flower,

so in the Jewel Garden, we use purple foliage from the Purple Hazel

the almost chocolate colour of the cannas and the dahlias,

which is a brilliant backdrop against oranges.

You get an intensification of colour and then, a very different colour,

but just as dramatic, you have the lime green,

almost golden touch of the sambucus.

That contrasts with the purple foliage

and it's great to intensify blues and whereas purple foliage,

can, if the light is low, suck in light,

the golden foliage throws it out.

What you're doing is playing with colour, creating it,

using flowers, using foliage, and I love that process.

# If you've made it right you'll know it

# It's not like anything you've made before

# And if you've made it wrong you'll know it

# Cos it won't keep you coming back for more... #

Now, of course you don't have to make sure that everything

is perfectly in accordance with a pre-laid plan.

For example, these foxgloves.

Self sown and almost everything about them is wrong

as regards the Jewel Garden.

The colours don't work - too pale, too pastelly. Some white ones,

no white anywhere else in the Jewel Garden.

But everything about them as a flower is right.

They're wonderful, I wouldn't dream of taking them out.

Just remember, all rules are made to be broken.

# That's the recipe for making love... #

I've been talking about exercising discrimination

and choice about colour.

You can do that in any-sized garden

and it always makes things better

but if you've got a very small garden,

some of those decisions have to be more radical.

Not just about colour too,

everything has to be considered and edited down.

Joe has been to a small London garden

where the choices seem to be all dead right.

If you've got a tiny garden

and think there's nothing you can do with it, then think again.

I'm here in north London

and I've been invited to a garden that measures just 12 metres by 5.

I'm told it's a real gem and makes the most of its small proportions.

This tiny garden lies nestled in the shade

between two towering Victorian houses.

I can instantly see that it uses a classic design solution, diagonals.

Putting things on a diagonal gives you more perspective

so you can look through things from one angle to another.

It means you don't waste space.

It's a clever technique because it brings the planting

right into the middle of the garden,

rather than having a paved area with all the planting around the outside,

which is a common mistake, I think.

Another trick that John has used

is to plant upwards into all that free space above the ground level,

with trees and tall shrubs.

I think a lot of people are scared of putting trees

and large shrubs in a small garden but they are absolutely key

for a bit of drama and drawing the eye through and around them.

It's a terrible mistake to put too many small things in a small space.

"I'd like one of those and one of those."

You get a very, very bitty thing.

We've been quite sparing in our choice of plant.

We tend to go in large clumps of things we really love,

rather than have a bit of everything.

Now, hostas.

You're the only man I know who can grow beautiful hostas

in the middle of London without much slug and snail damage.

How have you done that?

I have to own up.

I am a hosta addict and my wife has insisted that I can't have any more.

I think I have 45 different hostas.

Basically, I go through all the tricks but the main one,

is watering the ground with nematodes,

that is a natural bug that eats other bugs.

The other key thing, I think, is copper.

Slugs and snails hate crawling over copper

and I keep pots off the ground with copper rings

and I put copper wire or copper banding around the tops of the pots.

In a small garden, every plant has to really earn its keep

and the fine details come to the forefront.

Look at this combination here,

I absolutely love the way it holds the corner,

it's like a pivotal point as you come down the stairs.

We've got this heuchera in the pot here, sitting nice and upright.

You really get up close to the foliage and next to it

we've got this Sedum 'Red Cauli', a beautiful plant and the colours

link nicely together

but the forms are very different.

What I like about it is, it draws the eye in.

In a larger garden, a composition like this could easily get lost.

The smaller a garden gets, the more important the boundaries become

because they are what you see around you at eye level.

Here there is a mixture of boundaries.

We've got a lovely frosted glass screen through there,

creating privacy on the top balcony.

A lovely rendered wall, which links into the architecture

of the house, and then these beautiful old brick walls,

which have been exposed in some areas and then covered in climbers

with others, so there's a good variety through there.

But at the back of the garden, Virginia creeper

and ivys green it up completely and what that does is trick the eye

into not knowing exactly where the garden ends

so it makes it feel even bigger.

I can never understand it when people say it's difficult to create

an exciting garden in a small space.

Sure, you need to do some research, get your plants in the right place,

think about your boundaries and your layout and somewhere to sit.

But that's the fun of it -

creating something that is a haven in the city

and a beautiful place to be.

I think that does just prove that a small garden, a tiny garden,

can be full of interest,

full of beauty and delight right throughout the year.

And talking of good design,

there is a new competition

being run by the BBC and the RHS

called Designs On Chelsea,

which will be open to any amateur designer or gardener

over the age of 18.

And if you think you could design a Chelsea show garden

as good as the professionals, now's your chance - enter.

You can get all the details on our website.

If you think you've got it in you, go for it, do apply,

and it could be a life-changing decision.

Now, talking of life-changing decisions,

time to sow some carrots.

When you're preparing soil for carrots

there are two things to consider.

The first is it shouldn't be freshly composted or manured,

and if you do that you'll find that the carrots will fork and split,

and the same applies to parsnips.

The second thing is you want well-raked, free-drained soil.

They don't like great clods of heavy soil,

so break it down, dig it and rake it fine.

It might feel a little late to be sowing carrots, but it's not.

You can sow carrots in March

and you can sow carrots as late as the beginning of July

and you'll get a succession of crops.

And carrots sown now will be ready to harvest in September and October.

Now, there are two ways that I sow carrots.

One is in rows and the other is broadcast.

When I sow them in rows I actually always use a plank,

partly because it's good to stand on

and means you're not compacting the soil,

and it also makes a very useful spacer.

I just draw a drill with the side of my hand, like that,

and then again, the other side of the board.

And that's pretty good spacing

and then you can see really clearly where you've sown them.

And sowing them couldn't be easier.

I've got a variety here called Nantes 2.

And carrot seed has a corky quality

and sowing them is one of those things

that I have very, very fond memories of,

from quite an early age.

And very thinly

sprinkle them along the row.

All the way along.

And then the other row.

And there is nothing to be gained by sowing thickly,

because the process of thinning attracts carrot fly.

And carrot fly can be a bit of a nuisance.

Now, cover them over.

Carrot flies lay their eggs on the ground

and then the larvae hatch out

and bore into the roots as they grow.

They're attracted by the smell of carrots,

and when you thin the carrots you get an incredible aroma.

Anyone who's grown carrots can immediately notice

how even the smallest one smells beautifully carroty.

Well, if you can smell it, the carrot fly can too.

So I also sow broadcast to avoid thinning.

The advantage of that is it's easy, you just scatter seed,

the disadvantage is that it's hard to tell the difference

between carrot seedlings and weed seedlings.

So what I do is I measure out spacing

with two boards, like that.

And then I broadcast in the gap between the boards.

So I've got a nice sharp edge.

So I know everything in that area is carrot,

and everything outside it can be hoed and weeded,

and that tends to work pretty well.

I'm just going to broadcast that thinly.

And this is a variety I've not grown before, called Oxenhall.

As long as I just thin to eat,

the ones left in the ground get bigger and bigger

and, by the time you get to November,

when the effects of carrot fly really start to kick in

and you get these honeycombed carrots with black holes in them,

they've all been eaten up.

If you don't want to do that,

simply put a barrier up and you can do it two ways.

You can either put a physical barrier over the top

and keep it firmly pegged down and only lift it to harvest.

Or you put a little fence around them of fleece.

It only needs to be three-foot high

because the carrot fly flies very low to the ground.

Just rake over them lightly,

gently covering them...

So they're in the ground,

we're not getting too worried about carrot fly

because we're going to eat them before the larvae can.

But the final thing to do...

is give them a good soak.

Now, this is just to promote germination,

and the seed will go against warm, moist soil

and will germinate really quickly.

And that's one of the advantages

of sowing carrots at this time of year as opposed to spring.

There we are. Job done.

Now, you may not want to sow carrots this weekend,

but here are some other jobs that you can be getting on with.

If you planted a hedge or trees this winter or spring,

it's important to water them regularly,

especially in dry weather.

Don't use a sprinkler,

but make sure the water goes straight to the roots

and give them a really generous soak.

Better to do this once a fortnight

than a light sprinkle every day.

You only have to do this for their first year

and it sets them off to a long, healthy life.

At this stage of the season,

it's important to encourage your tomatoes

to be strong, healthy plants.

You can help with this by tying them in regularly,

using soft twine,

so there's no stress or strain on the grain stem.

Pinch outside shoots that will grow at 45 degrees

between the stem and the leaves.

Water them regularly,

giving them a really good soak at least once a week

and, if you feed them, do so with a general-purpose feed.

In the summer months,

don't worry about your greenhouse getting too cool,

but overheating is a real problem.

First thing in the morning,

open up the doors, windows and any vents

and let the air flow through.

And as well as watering plants,

also water the floor every day

and this will get humidity into the air.

A combination of ventilation and humidity

will help prevent most greenhouse problems.

I planted this vine last April.

It grew well last year but, of course, had no fruit.

This year we've got four bunches of fruit.

Now, you could remove those

and the vine will grow stronger

and future years might give you a bigger harvest,

but that's very purist.

Come on, it's too exciting to get some grapes just to get rid of them,

and who knows what'll happen next year!

So I'm keeping these,

but it is important to prune back the side shoots.

These side shoots, in time, will bear fruit.

But to prune them back to about four or five leaves each,

like that...

and like that...

So we're putting the energy into the main stem

rather than the side shoots.

So that can come back to there.

We'll take that off.

So what I've got is a nice stem going along that wire,

and that will go to the end of the greenhouse.

Another one going up there,

and in time I'm going to train that right along the top

so we've got two tendrils running along the length of the greenhouse.

And the idea is it'll be festooned with glorious Black Hamburg grapes,

and that may come in a year or two's time.

One of the heydays of greenhouse gardening

was the Edwardian era,

the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century.

It's one of my favourite eras of garden design.

And High Glanau Manor in Monmouthshire

was one Arts and Crafts garden of that era,

but it had all but been lost

until new owners discovered and resurrected it.

When we actually bought this house we had no intention of moving,

we were very happy in our other house.

And one coffee time my husband was rather bored and he said,

"Well, shall we go and see that house?"

The designer of the house and garden

was Henry Avray Tipping,

and he was the architectural editor of Country Life magazine.

When he designed this house and garden in 1932,

it was just after the end of the First World War.

He bought this land

and then he decided it was the ideal place

to make his sort of retirement cottage.

The garden's typically Arts and Crafts.

The Arts and Crafts movement

really believed in getting back to nature,

it was a sort of reaction to the Industrial Age.

The house has got lots of stone, oak,

local vernacular architecture,

and the planting in the garden matches, in that it was

sort of big drifts of herbaceous plants,

which softens the hard architectural lines.

When we bought the house,

there really was no herbaceous planting left.

The top of the pergola had fallen down

and Tipping's famous ribbon parterre

had been replaced by a hideous turquoise swimming pool.

I wrote to Country Life and asked if they had any photographs

of the house and garden, and eventually,

24 wonderful black-and-white images came that Tipping had taken

for Country Life in 1927,

and that gave me the most marvellous steer for putting the garden back

to the original 1923 design.

In an Arts and Crafts house, the beauty of designing

a house and garden as one

is that you line up the windows with the garden features

so it's a perfect view.

Tipping, in every single house he had, had a garden room

where he could eat outside in the spring,

when the weather was clement and he could have doors slid back

so he could really enjoy nature.

We love this garden room, because this faces west

with the view out over the Vale of Usk,

and you get the sunsets on this side,

and we stop every night at six o'clock

and have a glass of wine in this room,

and it's actually one of the nicest rooms of this house.

So, all along this upper west terrace,

I've planted roses with Arts and Crafts names -

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris, Gertrude Jekyll.

They're all in hues of pinks,

and I think they look so nice against this natural stonework.

I've tried to keep the same atmosphere

with the really blowsy planting

and the big drifts of colour in sort of soft hues.

When I plant something in the border, I put seven plants in.

I never put one in because it doesn't give it the right feeling

or the atmosphere.

The proportions of these Arts and Crafts gardens

is really important.

These mirror herbaceous borders are exactly 100 feet long,

the dry-stone wall on the lower terrace is 50 feet long,

and the big columns on the pergola are exactly ten feet apart,

so you've got proper proportion and scale in the garden

and that gives the stonework a real harmony with the planting.

I love delphiniums so I use those as focal points

all down the borders because I love the sort of stateliness...

I've introduced lots of things but they're in the style of Tipping.

Tipping said that you must never put too much in a garden

because it spoils the simplicity,

so I listened to that as I designed these borders.

Well, if you like High Glanau as much as I do,

then you can go along and see it for yourself.

It's open tomorrow afternoon. Get all the details on our website.

Now, you wouldn't find borders like this

in any Edwardian garden. It's a style that

evolved round the use of grasses about a quarter of a century ago

in Holland, Belgium and Germany,

and I love it. I love the way that you get the structure

from these strong verticals of plants like the calamagrostis

and the delicacy of grasses like the stipas.

And then, amongst them,

you can interweave perennials and annuals and climbers

in a very, very loose way.

Up until this year, that looseness was contained,

corseted even, by tightly-clipped box hedges

and I like that contrast very much.

But we got box blight

and I was forced to dig up the box hedges,

to stop it spreading even further, and burn them.

Do you know what?

I prefer it without the box.

Although I never would have chosen to do it voluntarily,

I'm glad that it happened,

because it has allowed this part of the garden to breathe.

However, there are still one or two things

that I need to do as a result of removing those hedges.

Where I took the hedges out,

in their place are hedges, if you like,

of poppies. These are opium poppies that have been stimulated

into germination by the digging up of the soil,

and if you think of the poppies in the First World War

that suddenly came into flower

because all the shells churned up the ground,

and it's that disturbance of soil, the exposure of seeds to light,

that triggers germination.

Now, poppies are lovely

and I don't want to get rid of them,

however, they will pass and I do want to add some grasses,

and I sowed some annual grasses -

this is Briza maxima, quaking grass -

with these lovely little flowers, and then seed heads

that look like delicate bobbling bees.

They're called quaking grass because they move and they shimmer

and as they dry they make a little sound,

and that's one of the real bonuses of growing grasses in a border -

you get fabulous sibilant sound, as the wind sifts through the foliage.

Try saying that when you've had three glasses of gin and tonic!

I can pop probably a couple of brizas in there -

you can see they've got a good root system -

and put them in some sunshine, there.

Of course, a packet of seeds gives you scores of plants.

I've got three trays of these from one packet of seeds.

And they look pretty hidden at the moment

but they will grow and they will work.

I'm going to plant a few little clumps all the way along.

These will grow and look good. They won't grow very big -

just maybe twice the size they are now -

and as we go into autumn, they'll start to turn and dry

and in fact, like many of the grasses,

they're probably at their very best from the middle of September

till the middle of October,

and then when the cold weather comes they will die back,

but that doesn't matter. They will have given us really good value

for their short growing lives

and we can grow more seed next spring.

Now, obviously, any plant at this time of year,

any annual grass that you grow, water in really well.

Give it a soak, give it a good start in life

and then they're all tough plants

and they'll need very little care and attention.

That's it for today. We'll be back next week

at nine o'clock, after the tennis.

Till then, bye-bye.

Come on, then, Nige.

HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE