Episode 22 Gardeners' World

BEE BUZZES

Hello. Welcome to Gardeners' World.

Well, here we are.

It's the end of August, and summer is slipping away.

And that might be a sad moment, but actually,

I love this time of year for the combination you get

of the intensity of colour from the summer plants,

the vibrant oranges and purples and blazing reds,

combined with the delicacy of the autumn light

that is starting to come in.

So, there's a lot to enjoy.

Quite a lot to do, too.

This week, Carol is visiting a plantsman

whose garden is devoted to a dazzling display of heleniums.

Well, that's what you call vivid, isn't it?

-Yes, really puts on a show, doesn't she?

-She is lovely.

-Well, I'm bonkers about them all, aren't I?

-Yeah, I had noticed!

Joe is continuing his visits to remarkable allotments

around the country, and this week, he's in Birmingham.

I can tell you really love it here.

I love it more than anything else.

Don't tell the missus that!

THEY LAUGH

And I shall be working in my grass borders.

This is my dry garden, and obviously,

this is on a very different scale to the one that I saw

last week at Hyde Hall, which was enormous.

This is unusual for Longmeadow,

because underneath a very, very thin layer of soil

is solid bedrock, but that bedrock is old red sandstone,

which is very porous, so it drains well.

It gets lots of sunshine for almost all of the day, so it is ideal

for a certain group of plants that relish hot, dry conditions.

But, to be honest, it hasn't been a great season for dry plants.

Although we had the lovely weather in July, August has been harsh.

It's been wet and cold, and that's not a good recipe for dry plants.

So what I want to do now is do a little bit of weeding,

take out those plants that are either bullying others

and getting in the way, or simply aren't thriving,

and add a few more.

Now, this is an onopordum.

You wouldn't think that that is an incipient monster.

But that can grow eight, nine, ten feet.

But in the right place, that's a magnificent plant.

This is an Origanum, a marjoram.

You can see all the growth there waiting to come through,

but the bees love the flowers,

so I'm going to leave that for the moment.

The dry garden started, actually, to house the sedums

that, at the time, we were growing in the Jewel Garden,

and they were flopping everywhere, and you can see

that this has flopped a bit.

But on the whole, sedums love dry conditions, and they stand upright.

Grow them in lush soil, and they just go, "Ooh!"

The effect that I'm trying to achieve here is a gentle tapestry.

But I don't want it to be regimented and laid out

so you can admire each plant individually.

It should weave in and out in an easy, unregulated way.

Now, I've got two lots of plants I've grown from seed.

The first is a grass, Stipa tenuissima.

And the second is a verbascum

'Flush of white.'

The 'Flush of white' actually was intended for the Writing Garden,

and I think some will go up there,

but verbascums love really good drainage and quite poor conditions,

and that's where they flower best.

And the stipa must have good drainage and lots of sunshine,

and this is really the only part of the garden

where stipas can flourish.

You can see that in clearing,

I've actually uncovered a couple of stipas.

There's one there.

They're surviving, but they're not flourishing.

And to flourish, they must have full sunlight,

plus good drainage.

I'm going to plant these ones that I've grown from seed

and plant them along the edge.

And of course, you can buy them, and probably the ones you buy

will be a little bit bigger than this.

The Stipa tenuissima has one great virtue

above almost any other plant you can grow,

and that is its tactile quality.

It develops the most beautiful, silky head,

and you just can't resist touching it as you go by,

so therefore you want to have it in a place where you can touch it.

Maybe actually plant them in a clump,

plant three in a clump to bulk up,

and of course, that's one of the beauties of growing from seed.

One seed packet, and I've got about 40, 50 plants.

If I went to buy 40, 50 plants, that's a lot of money.

What I'm doing here is just gently introducing textures

and colours to create an overall effect.

But, as part of a series of looking at plants that

dominate our gardens and the people who are passionate about them,

Carol has gone to visit a grower of a plant

with one of the richest colours of the season.

The late summer border offers a wealth of colour and texture.

It's a real gardener's delight.

And one plant in particular carries that show on

right the way through to the autumn.

Heleniums!

Martin Blow has spent years collecting the very best heleniums.

His in-depth knowledge of the genus has led him to introduce

many new exciting forms, perfect for our gardens here in the UK.

One of the great things about heleniums is that

they're such good mixers, aren't they?

-They're good company.

-They are, they are.

They go with so many different plants.

They look great with other daisy plants,

things like the helianthus and the rudbeckia

really do sort of come into their own at the same time,

and really do add to the show.

And they've got the same sort of habit.

You never feel as though there's a fight going on,

you feel as if they're very happy to mix and mingle.

That's right, yes.

Well, that's what you call vivid, isn't it?

Yes, you can't get more shocking than this, can you?

Lovely golden Helenium 'El Dorado'

-with the bright pink of Phlox 'Miss Mary'.

-Bright pink!

-It's kind of shocking, lipstick, isn't it?

-It is.

But they both like the same conditions.

-They grow together quite happily in a moist, rich soil.

-Yeah.

So, an ideal combination?

-Absolutely. Perfect partners.

-If you can take it!

THEY LAUGH

-This is a lovely combo.

-It is.

I think the lovely red jewel-like of the 'Red Army'

with a moor grass, moor hex or moor witch,

if you want it in English.

I love the colour now.

It's just beautiful in the way that you can see through these,

but later on, this is going to go gold, isn't it?

Yeah, golden brown, and the helenium will still be flowered,

-and it will look wonderful together in October.

-Yeah.

I love the way they are all up and down.

-You know, some are high and some are really low.

-Yeah, that's right.

I mean, they're all hybrids to a certain extent in the garden,

but they show the characteristics of their original wild parents.

Take this lovely tall one.

It comes from the eastern seaboard

and central parts of the United States,

and closely related to autumnalis, the common species out there.

They grow in damp meadows and do well in bright sun.

And the shorter ones, like this one,

have got ancestry coming from California

and the west coast of America, where they grow in pinewoods.

They all need a good moisture-retentive soil,

they all like what I call a sticky loam,

if you can give it to them.

But they make do with sand here, and they do OK.

Lots of compost, loss of feeding.

Well, I divide mine in the spring, and they just fall apart.

That's right. The taller ones will tend to break apart

into separate rosettes very easily,

whereas the shorter ones, you're going to need to perhaps

pull them apart or cut them with a knife.

-But the spring is the important bit, isn't it?

-That's the key.

If you divide in the autumn, you're more likely to lose them over winter,

so leave it till spring. I always say,

if you can sow a parsnip, you can divide a helenium.

THEY LAUGH

It's a well-known saying, that, isn't it(?)

I think the structure of the flowers

is one of the most fascinating things about them.

I mean, I call these "mahogany doorknobs".

That's a great name for them, isn't it?

I mean, if you want to get technical, these are the discs,

each made up of hundreds of tiny flowers known as the disc florets.

So, the centre of the disc florets, and these on the outside,

are ray florets.

These are the ray florets, or what we call the petals.

The bees are after that centre.

The ray florets guide them in, and then they look for the pollen

and the nectar on those tiny flowers in the centre.

And if you watch the bees, they'll go round and round and round

the newly opened florets looking for the most fresh pollen and nectar.

-And they open from the base up?

-That's right.

So this one is fairly newly opened.

If you look at this one here, it's nearly completely opened now.

It's made a nice ball, and the last few florets are opening now.

And then, of course, it'll form some seed.

That seed will drop to the ground and you'll get seedlings coming up,

you can collect it, as well.

So it's the sort of thing that any enthusiast

could try sowing some seed?

Of course, the plants won't be like their parents at all,

that you'll get a big range of colours and shapes and forms.

And do you get people actually sending their plants in?

You are the national collection holder, after all.

I do, I've got some contacts around the world

who send me new plants to try out and to compare.

And I suppose the very fact that you know so many heleniums

so intimately, you can instantly recognise

-if a plant is something special.

-That's right,

you can spot that little something that makes it different.

This is Oldenburg, sent to me by a friend from Germany

who's a really big helenium enthusiast.

He sent it to me cos it looked quite interesting

and, boy, is it a new colour break.

Normally, when you have yellow knobs in the centre of the flower,

you just get plain yellow petals, but this is a world first, really,

with orange and yellow petals.

Doesn't it look wonderful?

This is the most exciting thing in the garden for me

at the moment, Carol.

This is my as-yet-unnamed seedling which is flowering properly

for the first time after three years of growing.

I love that citrus zing on the petals with the orange underneath.

It really shines out in the evening light,

really puts on a show, doesn't she?

She is lovely and I tell you what, if I were her I'd be really thrilled

that a helenium nut like you thinks so highly of me.

-Well, I'm bonkers about them all, aren't I?

-Yeah, I had noticed!

Martin's garden is open this Sunday under the National Garden Scheme,

and you can find all the details of opening hours

and how to get there from our website,

and if you want to see heleniums at their best, then try and get there.

These are our grass borders, and you may remember that they

used to be edged with quite a high box hedge that went round them all.

That looked lovely because you had the crispness of the box

and the profusion of the grasses.

But box blight has done its worst.

We've taken out the hedges and haven't replaced them,

the idea being to have an experiment to see what it looks like

if it's allowed to spill a little bit more.

On the whole, I like the spillage, it's good.

But, at this time of year, as we come to the end of summer,

spillage can become a little bit chaotic.

One of the things that stops it looking too chaotic

are touches of colour.

I love the kniphofia, for example,

and the angelica just adds in touches of pink.

And on the Rosa moyesii

the hips are beginning to get their lovely orange.

But I used to have heleniums in these borders.

As we saw from Martin's garden, these are American meadow plants,

and I like the idea of big, daisy-like flowers,

rich with colour in with the grasses,

making a kind of mad meadow.

But they're gone, they've all disappeared.

I think it's for a number of reasons.

First of all, it's too dark in here, it's very shady.

-Secondly, you can see the growth.

-DOG WHINES

Compare it to the dry garden -

this is about two, three times as much,

and the poor old heleniums couldn't compete,

-they weren't getting any light. And thirdly...

-DOG WHINES

What is it, Nigel?

He's put his ball in here.

Do you want to see what's in there?

Why did you put it in?

The final reason why I think we've lost our heleniums is...

He's going to put it back in there, right now.

..is that we had that very wet winter and I think a lot of them

just drowned, even though they're moisture-loving plants.

So I'm going to plant some more.

Come on, you horrible dog.

I've got two of perhaps the most popular of all heleniums.

There's Moerheim Beauty

and Sahin's Early Flowerer.

And they both have roughly the same colour range,

but then there are a whole variety of heleniums

that all riff on the marmalade-y theme.

And that's what I want to add in,

because then I'll pick up the colours of the kniphofias

and the rudbeckias,

and just add the energy of orange and yellow to the grasses.

My nice heavy soil will suit them fine.

I'm not going to add any goodness underneath,

because this soil is rich enough.

And, in fact, we never mulch these grass borders

because we don't want to suppress seedlings.

Out of the pot, you see a nice plant, a little bit of root,

so we're going to tease that,

just to stimulate some root growth away from the pot,

pop that in there,

and I'll get another one in.

If you deadhead them they will repeat flower.

The important thing is to cut them back until you see a bud emerge.

I don't wish you can see here, there's a little bud there

that will develop into a new flower.

So don't just take the flower heads off

but go back down until you see a side shoot, and then new flowers

will develop from the side shoot, rather than the main stem.

Now, Joe has been going around the country looking at allotments,

and looking in particular for anything

that is idiosyncratic or unusual.

And this week, he's gone to Birmingham.

At first sight, these allotments all look pretty similar,

but when you look closely, they're all distinctly different.

People stamp their marks on their plots in all types of ways.

I've been told to listen out for one in particular.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

HE CHUCKLES Look at this.

Hi, Carol. How are you doing?

-Hello, Joe.

-The shed is fantastic.

I love your shed, in fact I love the whole plot.

What is it about the classical music? You've always been into it?

Yeah, I've been listening to it since I was a young, young lad.

It's just grown on me, sort of thing.

I mean, I like my reggae music, as well,

but I wouldn't play that up here cos I'd never get work done,

-I'd be dancing all over the place all the while.

-THEY LAUGH

-So where are you from originally?

-I'm from Jamaica.

And when did you first come to the UK, then?

I came over when I was a 12-year-old with my brother and sister.

Why did you want to get an allotment?

Well, I've got a garden at home,

but I can't really put my own stamp on it, if you know what I mean,

cos there's always someone to say,

"I don't want that there, don't want that there."

But here I can, you know, put everything where I want it

and design it all like you see it now.

-Do you want to show me around a bit?

-Yeah, no trouble.

-I'd like to have a little look and see what you're growing.

-No problem.

-You've got some nice pumpkin.

-Yeah.

Oh, there you go, look at that. Beauty, isn't it? Fantastic.

I don't do too much watering.

Nobody waters anything in Jamaica,

just leave it and it grows on its own.

JOE LAUGHS

Feeding, you get the stinging nettles, put your gloves on,

chop them up, put them in your water,

that helps promote growth in the plant,

and then we use comfrey, and that produces flowers and fruit

and makes your fruit really swell.

Stinging nettles first, and then the comfrey...

Yeah, as soon as the fruit starts coming on, comfrey.

-OK.

-And we're laughing.

So these are the sort of crops we'd see in Jamaica?

Yeah, we've got sweetcorn, and over here we've got callaloo.

-Callaloo?

-Yea, we grow a lot of this in Jamaica.

-Right.

You can fry it, steam it...

-I'm going to cook you some later.

-Seriously?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just like spinach.

Where did you get the seed originally for it?

Well, sometimes when people go to Jamaica

they bring the seeds back, you've only got to bring a few,

and once you've got the crop itself, that's where the seed comes from.

That's why we call it Rastaman callaloo,

because it's got dreadlocks, and these go really, really long

and they go right down to the floor.

So this is going to be as high as that one there

and then the locks will hang down halfway down the stem.

-But you can harvest it at any time?

-Yes.

-But you don't have to wait for the dreadlocks to get too long before you eat it?

-No, no.

It's good to eat it before they get that big anyway,

because it's more tender. This probably would feed one person,

because once you cook it, it just shrinks down.

-Right.

-Just like spinach.

-But there's two of us, right?

-Yeah.

-We need more.

-Come on, then.

-Yeah, pick some more.

-I'll look forward to trying it.

-Yeah, I'll cook you some later.

-So you say.

-I will.

-Promise?

-Yeah.

-So these tin cans all part of your crazy decorations?

-Yeah.

Well, they serve a purpose really, cos when the birds land

and they try to eat your stuff...

CANS RATTLE

..it scares them away.

Lovely bit of colour.

Your carrots are looking good, Carol, really nice.

These are white ones.

I don't grow them in the ground no more cos of the carrot fly.

Flies two foot - this is higher than two foot.

So that's why it's planted up here. No problems. There you go.

-Oh, yeah, that's a beauty. We got callaloo and carrots now.

-Yeah.

You've got to have a shed on an allotment, haven't you?

Some people survive without a shed, I couldn't.

Where'd you get all this stuff anyway?

Well, sometimes my friends are moving house or

moving from a house to a flat, and they've got nowhere to put their

stuff, so they usually bring it down here for me, like, know what I mean?

-How's it going? Nearly there?

-Yeah, doing pretty well.

-Good, cos I'm ravenous.

-I know, yeah.

-I'm hungry, I'll tell you!

-Allotment cooking, eh?

-Yeah.

-Lovely.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Go for it.

-Green callaloo.

-Green callaloo.

Mmm, that's delicious. Can see why you grow this stuff.

We used to have this for breakfast in Jamaica.

I can tell you really love it here, but why'd you love it so much?

It's hard to explain, Joe.

It's just a feeling you get inside you, you want to come up here,

I don't know what it is,

but there's plenty of people feel the same way I do,

but I think I feel it more because I love it more than...anything else.

Don't tell the missus that, though!

I do love it when an allotment takes on an individual idiosyncrasy

and comes alive. It's inspiring.

Now, a few months ago I took some streptocarpus leaf cuttings,

and I've a confession to make to you.

Not one of them worked and they all rotted.

And that was because I had them up on top of the propagating bench

and they got too wet, and critically, too hot -

they were exposed to too much sun.

So I took another batch a couple weeks later,

and these have done really well.

There were two types of cutting.

Those along the length of the leaf,

so you take a leaf and basically split it in half lengthways.

And then take a leaf and cut it across.

And you can see they've both produced nice new baby plantlets.

I've had a letter from Robin Barrow, in Louth, in Lincolnshire,

who also took some cuttings at the same time I did.

"About two weeks ago, some of my cuttings had fairly big leaves,

"about three quarters of an inch."

Yeah, about that sort of size.

"And I decided to put these into separate pots,

"but when digging them out with a cutlery fork,

"I found the roots of many cuttings were entangled.

"So I also had to pot some with small leaves.

"The large-leaved ones have grown on a bit,

"the small-leaved ones look a bit frail.

"Was this a correct decision of mine or should I have left them

"longer all together in their trays?"

Well, sort of, Robin.

Because the best way of dealing with them is not to try and separate

all the individual little babies, but to pot on the whole section.

And obviously this is an unusual way to propagate plants.

Leaf cuttings are pretty rare, and in the case of streptocarpus,

it's because right along the leaf, you have the auxins that will

promote new root growth.

If you've taken a cutting along the length of a leaf,

the way to deal with that is to cut them into separate pieces.

And I'm going to use my penknife so it's sharper.

And now that's separated, take that out.

There aren't many plants that you take leaf cuttings from,

but African violets are another.

And that will grow as a block.

And I'll put them somewhere cool but not cold where

I can water them from below and not get the leaves wet.

We've got the parent plants underneath

the staging in the wooden greenhouse,

and they seem to be very happy, but a windowsill would be fine as long

as it's not south or west facing, cos that's too much direct sunlight.

Water them by putting them in a saucer and giving them

a drink from below a couple of times a week, and that will work fine.

This is a fairly specialised job, but here are some

others you can be getting on with in your garden this weekend.

Hardy annuals like these calendulas are normally

sown in spring for a summer display.

But if you sow some seed now you'll get a much earlier flowering

which can then be followed by the spring sowing.

I'm sprinkling these on a seed tray which will then be grown on

and planted out individually.

But you can sow directly into the soil where they're to flower,

or even into a favourite pot.

Cover the seed lightly and put them somewhere sheltered to germinate.

Check strawberry runners to see if there are signs of new growth.

If there is, cut them free from the parent plants

and they can be planted in a fresh site.

I like to clip back the foliage of established plants

and weed around them to let light

and air in and allow new leaves to grow before winter.

If you grow chillies or peppers,

harvest any ripe fruit as soon as they're ready.

This will speed up the ripening of green ones as well as encouraging

the development of flowers and more fruit for months to come.

It has been a wonderful year for figs - still is a wonderful year

for figs, and so often you get lots of figs growing,

but they don't ripen.

And you get to October and they're just not quite ripe enough to eat.

But we've been eating figs here at Longmeadow for the last month,

and these are 'Brown Turkey'. Delicious, delicious figs.

And, of course, they loved the weather we had in July.

And that started to ripen them.

And when you're looking to pick figs...

Got one here that's a good example.

You can see it's nice and big,

but it's still held out horizontally, and that's not ripe.

You want to pick them

when they're falling under their own weight, and I've got one...

There we are, a perfect example.

Brown, drooping down, and if I just take it away...

I don't have to pluck it to pick it.

And the more you pick the quicker they'll ripen.

We should have another month of harvesting,

and by the way, you can see on the figs here, that's this year's fig

about to come ripe,

these ones here want to ripen about January/February time,

and they would do if we were in North Africa

or southern Spain, but they won't here, so those will get taken off.

But right at the end are tiny little figs and those are next year's crop.

I don't think there's any fruit you can grow that is

so frankly sensuous or redolent of hot sun as a fig.

They're wonderful sliced and eaten with cheese,

and if you've got enough, try roasting them.

You get a sort of caramelisation, and that's really good too,

but, however it is, they are delicious.

That's it for this week. I'll see you back here

at Longmeadow next week -

don't forget, at 9.30 - so, until then, bye-bye.

Mmm.