Episode 16 Gardeners' World

Hello. Welcome to Gardeners' World.

I always feel that July is the start of the harvest season.

And, of course, that means lovely vegetables from the garden,

but also don't neglect the flowers.

I try and, every few days, cut some roses,

just from whatever is out.

In the hot sun, that won't last more than a day.

But if I take it inside into a cool room,

that will give me an extra 24 hours of pleasure.

'This week, I'll be continuing to develop the wildlife meadow

'that I sowed last year.

'Joe gets an exclusive behind-the-scenes

'tour of the private gardens at Eton College,

'where Prince William and Harry went to school.'

It's like a secret garden in here.

I came through the gate and what a beautiful space!

It's a centre of excellence for education, isn't it,

so we try and do that in the gardens.

Carol is looking at the wildlife that is

so beneficial for our gardens.

This week, she's dipping below the surface

of a garden pond.

What's actually important for the creatures that live in here

isn't the species of plant,

but it's the variety of structure and shape,

because each one of these will then create a different niche or habitat,

if you like, that particular types of insect will prefer.

Go on.

Go on.

Every year, I try and plan it

so I have new potatoes on my birthday,

which is at the beginning of July.

Now is the time to see if they're ready.

You can tell if potatoes are likely to be ready

by a number of things.

The first is, they must flower.

And these have flowered and finished flowering,

so I would expect there to be tubers.

The second is, as a pretty good guide,

the first earlies take three months,

main crop four months

and second earlies somewhere in between.

So, this is Charlotte,

which is a second early.

Oh, look at that.

Now, I challenge anybody,

it doesn't matter how many years you've gardened,

doesn't that make your heart sing?

If they're wet or damp,

leave them on the surface of the ground to dry off.

But these are actually pretty dry,

so they don't need it.

There we go.

A little bit of green on that.

The green is poisonous, of course.

You shouldn't eat that.

Charlotte is a variety that I've come to love.

It is a French variety,

slightly waxy and they're really good

just plain boiled,

eaten either with some butter or olive oil

and plenty of salt and pepper.

It's worth taking some trouble to get every last little one out

the ground, because the chances are they will grow new plants next year.

That might sound like plants for free, but there are two downsides.

One is that you grow potatoes on a rotation.

So they'll be growing up through a different crop next year.

And two, potatoes can accumulate viruses.

So, it's not a bad idea to buy fresh every year

from a reputable grower.

Right, that's enough potatoes to keep the Don household

going for the next few days.

The rest can stay in the ground.

Over here, I've got some courgettes.

And courgettes have done really well so far this summer.

I wouldn't want a courgette any bigger than that

and I'm very happy to take them quite a bit smaller.

This is a variety called Black Beauty.

Obviously, the more you pick,

the more that will grow.

And, of course, you can eat the flowers on the end, too.

There's a delicious dish,

which is to deep-fry them in a very light batter

and stuff them with a soft cheese.

So you have this hot, deep-fried flower

and then the warm cheese and then that sort of melts through it

and it's slightly crispy.

It's absolutely delicious.

These are vegetables ready for eating now,

but I want to clear a bed so I can plant out some veg

that will give me a harvest later on in the year.

This looks pretty scruffy by now. It's rocket.

Sowed it on the 1st of February, planted it out in March

and we've been eating it since mid-March.

You can see that it's producing more flowers and leaves now.

That's not a terrible thing,

because rocket flowers, like courgette flowers,

are very good to eat.

But it's a law of diminishing returns.

So, pull up the plants...

There is already a lot of organic material in this raised bed,

but it's a good idea, every time you clear a crop,

to add a thin layer of compost.

And that just recharges it.

I'm going to plant some sweetcorn.

It needs a sunny position

and good, rich soil.

And I'm going to space it quite widely apart in a grid.

And the grid is really important.

That's because sweetcorn

pollinates via the wind.

The wind blows the pollen from plant to plant.

If you have them in a grid,

it doesn't matter which direction the wind is coming from,

they will all catch it at some point

and they will all be pollinated.

Now, those are in the ground and will be quite happy and need

no attention at all, but they'll grow slowly.

But I can use the space.

And a really good companion crop...

are courgettes.

Because they will share the same growing conditions

of sun and nice, rich soil,

but provide their fruits before they get shaded out by the sweetcorn.

And I'll just fit four plants in here.

Nicely spaced out, so they can spread.

You could plant lettuces or anything that will give you

a quick harvest in amongst the slower growing sweetcorn.

And it's not too late to directly sow

courgette seeds or sweetcorn, cos the soil is warm.

But it will depend on nice, warm weather for

the rest of summer for them to grow fast and to ripen.

This is all very practical.

But over the last few weeks,

Joe has been looking at the beautiful decorative gardens

that lie behind some of our more famous institutions -

often gardens which people rarely get the opportunity to see.

And, a few weeks ago, he went to a school,

but not just any old school.

Eton is probably the most famous public school in the world.

It has a long list of distinguished former pupils,

including 19 British Prime Ministers

and the future king Prince William and his brother Prince Harry.

'The college was founded by Henry VI more than 500 years ago.'

Today, the grounds cover 900 acres,

including numerous sports pitches...

..and several private gardens.

These hidden gems are only open to the public

one day a year for the National Gardens Scheme.

The job of keeping these gardens looking at their best

falls to head gardener Michael Long and his team.

-Hi, Michael. Lovely to meet you.

-And you.

It's like a secret garden in here.

I came through the gate and... What a beautiful space.

It is, it's fantastic, isn't it?

This is the headmaster's garden.

It's only for use by the headmaster.

The pupils don't get to come in here.

So, you've been involved in the design of this garden.

Why have you designed like this?

Basically, the headmaster's wife likes flower arranging.

She does it in the house and in the chapel.

And the idea is to cut the flowers from the garden.

We try to make it a bit of a cutting garden.

It's a centre of excellence for education, isn't it,

so we'd like to try and do that in the gardens.

So, which one of these gardens is your favourite?

Luxmoore's, the island garden.

Put the tools down.

-Wow, this is a beautiful bridge, isn't it?

-It is, isn't it?

-Stunning.

-So, this is the River Thames?

-Yes.

OK. You'd never know it.

Beautiful.

Welcome to Luxmoore's island.

It's a very exotic name, isn't it? Why is it called that?

The garden was originally started by Mr Luxmoore,

who was a housemaster at Eton.

He taught here for about 50 years in the 1800s.

Why is it your favourite?

I think, partly, it's so different to the other gardens,

because they're quite formal and this one is very informal.

And it's just so peaceful

and you can come over here and if everything's quiet,

you could be anywhere.

-So are the pupils allowed onto the island?

-Yes, they are.

The older boys are allowed on the island,

for study, quiet time.

And the younger boys can come on with a tutor to do private lessons.

Does this garden have a specific planting palette?

There is a book called Luxmoore Letters

which we've looked through and we have picked out

plants that Mr Luxmoore used.

So, we use similar plants to those.

There's things like Hemerocallis,

roses, irises.

So traditional English garden plants, really.

Yeah, a lot of these plants have been here quite a while.

In a way, you're gardening in a snapshot in time.

Do you feel a real responsibility?

Yeah, absolutely.

This garden's hopefully going to be here another 100+ years.

We've got to look after it for

the next generation of gardeners to take over.

Eton hasn't just educated British royalty.

Members of royal families from around the world have come here -

including, many years ago, the King of Siam,

who donated money which was used to build another garden,

which feels quite different from the others.

This is beautiful, this garden.

I love the sunken nature of it.

This was originally done in 1929,

but it's recently been redesigned.

-You can tell it's got a slightly modern edge to the planting.

-Yes.

But a lot of harmony. It looks fantastic, I have to say.

It's nice. They're all small beds

so you can get to everything quite easily.

That, the iris and the catmint

and the hesperis with the cow parsley.

That is beautiful!

It's very nice and, I mean, it's the one everybody sees.

This is the one garden that everybody walks past and sees.

-Because, yeah, the public can walk past here.

-Yes.

'Another garden is for the use of the Provost,

'who is officially in charge of the college and appointed by the Crown.'

This is my first time ever in these gardens.

I think it's fantastic that you open them to the public

on a Yellow Book day.

We love to see the public here,

because we're proud of what the gardeners do.

It's lovely to see people coming through,

real experts, a lot of them, talking in horticultural Latin,

which I'm afraid is beyond me.

THEY LAUGH

They're incredibly lucky, the boys here,

to have this beautiful surroundings.

And the fact is that we do seem to produce

a steady stream of good gardeners.

So some of it gets into their minds, I think.

And a lot of them do appreciate just the sheer beauty

and the luck they have to be in these surroundings.

The gardens will be open again next year,

so maybe that's a date to put in your diary.

Now, the garden that I'm making here

on what we call The Mound is very different.

This was a rubbish heap for nearly quarter of a century.

And, last year, we thought we would sort it out and try

and make a wild flower meadow.

And that's work in progress.

But it is at last coming along.

And the theme of this piece of the garden is to encourage

as many wild and indigenous plants as we possibly can.

And it certainly is beginning to look a bit wild.

But this was sown just about a year ago.

It may look like the sort of growth you get on a rubbish heap

or by the side of a road,

but, actually, there's

a lot of really interesting stuff in that.

Now, the seed mix

that I sowed in the middle of last July

contained grasses, which are here,

and although they've been bashed by rain,

they've established and grown quite strongly,

but they also had some wild flowers in it,

like these clovers

which have come through.

The Silene, both the white Silene and the pink.

And Viper's bugloss was in the mix.

You can see here.

And this will seed, in turn,

and then spread.

A wild flower meadow needs careful tending.

Needs gardening.

You do need to let the plants that you want to keep seed

and to make sure the plants that you don't want to keep don't seed.

This dock here is developing seeds and I don't want those to spread so

I can put the hoe down at the base of the plant and jab in like that.

That cuts it off at the roots, I can pull it out and importantly,

the seeds won't spread and germinate.

This plant here is hemlock.

It's poisonous, really quite poisonous and you can tell it,

it's got these lovely white Umbelliferae flowers

and then the very distinctive purple blodgy stem.

If you have got it, I'd wear gloves when you handle it.

So we'll just chop that out like that

and I will collect that up with gloves.

Here we have a sow thistle and they can be a bit of a weed.

So I'm going to chop that out.

There we go.

And I'll gather that up.

There you go.

Out you come.

This is the meadow's second summer and each year,

after the grasses and wild flowers have set seed,

it must be cut down and all the mown material taken away.

This will reduce the nutrients for the grasses

and allow the wild flowers to compete

and gradually, over the years, to thrive.

This is one of those weeding jobs that I really like

because it gives you a chance to get in and enjoy the garden,

to see it up close and from the inside rather than always

looking on it from the outside.

And it's something to do slowly,

something I'll probably spend another half hour or so doing.

But even if you haven't got any weeding jobs to do,

here's some other things to get on with this weekend.

If you grow chives,

they may well not be looking very good at the moment.

However, you can easily rejuvenate them

by cutting them back hard to the ground.

Give them a really good soak,

and within days, you'll have a fresh flush of foliage.

By now, your autumn fruiting raspberries

should have sent up plenty of new shoots.

But before they become top heavy,

it's a good time to support them.

Put some stakes securely into the ground,

and stretch string between them, which will keep the canes upright

and make them much easier to pick.

So far, it's been a wonderful year for clematis

and they've really enjoyed the wet winter and spring.

But this has resulted in a lot of extra lush growth

and it's a good idea to gather them up now and tie them in

to any support to give them extra protection against summer storms.

Increasingly, more and more of us are learning to appreciate

both the wildlife we see in our gardens

and the value that they add to the health of our gardens.

And over the coming few weeks,

Carol is going to be looking at the various creatures that we can

share our back yards with and the best ways of enticing them in.

In sunny borders and in shady corners,

under rocks and amongst the trees and leaves, live a myriad

of creatures, part of an intricate chain to which we all belong.

I want to find out what this means to us,

our plants and the sanctuaries we call our gardens.

In Britain, we've created more than 2.5 million garden ponds.

Water plays a very significant part in the designs that we love,

but what more does it contribute, other than its visual appeal?

Steve Head is a zoologist who, for the last 15 years, has been

developing and studying his garden pond to attract wildlife.

It's incredibly beautiful, but what are the real reasons

for having a wildlife pond in your own garden?

Well, I think you want a pond in your garden

because it's such a source of life in the garden,

because so many specific insects like the pond, need the pond,

but then there's all the other creatures that will make

use of it, including some quite unexpected ones.

Bees on a hot day, a honey bee hive needs litres of water to keep

the hive cool and air-conditioned, to evaporate.

When you think of a wildlife pond,

immediately you think about native plants

and yet you've got lots of plants that are ornamental, haven't you?

-Non-native.

-Yeah, things like the Astilbe are in there

because they're just so extraordinarily colourful.

But we've got some native species in here as well.

There's the lovely thing, bogbean, in here.

It has an extraordinary triple-leaf,

but the most gorgeous little delicate white flower...

and the Veronica beyond.

But what's actually important for the creatures that live in here

isn't the species of plant but it's the variety of structure and shape,

because each one will have its own shape of stem,

its own shape of leaves, its own shape of roots particularly.

And each one of these will then create a different niche or

a habitat, if you like, particular types of insect will prefer.

To look at the intricate habitats that lie beneath,

we're using a special camera to glimpse a newt's-eye view

of the underwater landscape.

Oh, that's an extraordinary shot,

going in under the surface and you can see the submerged leaves

and there's a root there appearing at the bottom.

When we look around,

it sort of emphasises just how much structure there is underwater there.

So if you're starting a pond,

how does all this life get in there in the first place?

Insect life comes in of its own accord almost immediately

and it's remarkable how many plants will come in just on the legs

of birds, you know, seeds and so on coming in that way.

-Oh, there's a snail, can you see it?

-Oh, yes, there we are.

Of course, that's a snail which is confined to the pond, it doesn't

come out and eat your cabbages so it's completely safe in the garden.

But, you know, everything else that we get in the pond,

like the newts and the frogs and the toads, even, are tremendous

predators of those unfortunate things like slugs which we all love to hate.

What we could do now is see if we can find some of the creatures

we've been talking about so we can look at them a bit more clearly.

-Let's have a look at what we've got.

-Let's see what we've got in here.

Got quite a few bits and pieces.

I think the star in many ways is that caddisfly larva,

or rather we're not actually seeing the larva which is hiding away

inside this case which is made out of little, tiny dead shells

and bits of vegetation glued together.

You can actually see snails' shells, can't you?

Yes and of course we've got lots and lots and lots of snails in here.

Snails live close to the surface, don't they?

And they hoover everything up?

You even see them actually upside down, feeding off the surface

layer and generally keeping the pond really clean.

But the most, the MOST handsome things in here are the newts.

Yeah, these are the common newt.

Newts have got a fascinating life cycle.

What happens is that they come into the pond sort of February or

March and they mate and then the female lays her eggs,

one at a time generally, on a little bit of flat pond weed

which they then fold over to protect it.

And when the eggs hatch, they turn into an extraordinary tadpole thing

and it's got external gills

and they'll live as a tadpole usually for six months or so

and then they lose these gills, they become air-breathing

and they climb out of the pond

and they stay out of the pond for anything up to two years,

feeding completely as if they were terrestrial animals.

Then, of course, when they're ready,

as the first warm days occur in late winter, early spring,

back they come to the pond and they start the life cycle over again.

We've got something else in here which I particularly like

-and that's this wonderful, big dragonfly larva here.

-Yeah.

This is the tiger of the pond world.

They're significant predators on just about everything else in the pond.

Where are their eggs laid?

The females lay their eggs directly into the water at the top

of the water and they hatch out to make little tiny nymphs

and they grow up, they shed their skin several times

-until they get to this sort of size...

-How long does that take?

Well, it can take six months or, depending on the weather

and again the species, it can take actually anything up to five years.

And when they're ready,

they then crawl through the water surface off a steep stem

and they break the skin over the back

and after this, a really quite ugly, strange-looking aquatic animal

bursts forth, an adult dragonfly

and they have to pause while they inflate the wings and get ready

but within an hour, they'll be off, flying into the sunshine.

I think the thing is, even if you've got a really tiny garden,

-you can still have water in it, can't you?

-Yes, you can.

And both the wildlife and us

can really rejoice in this beautiful habitat we've created.

And isn't it just gorgeous?

There's no question that adding the pond to Longmeadow

has dramatically increased the wildlife

and the pond is bound to make your garden healthier and much richer.

Now, I've been contacted by Tracey from Yorkshire and she says,

"Dear Monty, I was given a quince tree for my birthday

"and I planted it last autumn and it was doing really well.

"However, over the last few weeks, it's developed nasty brown spots

"all over the leaves and is now looking very sorry for itself.

"Do you know what it could be, and can it be rescued?"

And the answer to both is yes.

Now, this is quince leaf blight

and I've got it on my own quinces on the other side of the pond.

It starts out as rather browny red blotches but then spread

and become black.

The leaves quite often then turn yellow

and fall off but actually, it's not a total disaster. The trees recover.

Next year, there's no guarantee they will get it

and they will give you a really good crop of quinces.

But collect up all the leaves and burn them.

We've had a very wet, mild winter and spring

and this has encouraged the fungus that causes the blight.

It's also encouraged powdery mildew

and my quinces on the other side of the pond have got both.

This quince has got a really clear case of leaf blight.

The leaves are splotched with brown and they're starting to crisp

and die back and these will fall.

But this one isn't too bad, I'm not too worried about it,

but I've got four quinces here and one of them is much worse.

Now, the blight and mildew won't kill my quince trees

but to reduce the spread of the fungi,

I've decided to take the drastic action of cutting down

the worst affected one, which will help the remaining three.

Now, this one in particular is really bad.

I've planned to take it out.

That will let ventilation in, air, a little bit more rain, light...

And just take that off...

Look at the combination of blight and mildew on that.

The mildew is a powdery, felted covering on the underneath

of the leaf and the blight is there, too.

If you're cutting down any tree, do it slowly, bit by bit,

a really sharp saw and just take control of the operation.

Don't hack at it and then hope it falls where you want it to.

One quince less in my life.

Now, I could dig out the stump but I don't think there's any need.

I'll plant around the roots and chop through them.

And whilst it's sad, it's done well,

I've eaten of the quinces

and hopefully everything else will do better.

That's part of the cycle of the garden.

But that's it for this week.

Next week, we're still at nine o'clock

because we follow the athletics but before then,

Rachel, Carol, Joe and myself

will all be at Hampton Court Flower Show,

we've got three programmes coming from there

and I'll join you here, back at Longmeadow, next Friday night.

Till then, bye-bye.