Episode 15 Gardeners' World

BIRDS SINGING

Hello. Welcome to Gardeners' World.

They say that for those born when the sun is in Cancer,

they are always home-loving.

And there's no doubt about it, that home at this time of year,

if you have a garden, is where you want to be.

And here, in the cottage garden, it's reached new heights -

all these pinks and mauves and lilacs sifting and dancing

and weaving together are a complete joy.

This week we're paying our final visit to Sissinghurst Castle

in Kent, to find out how the team are getting on

as they work to reconnect the garden

with Vita Sackville-West's original vision.

We recently unearthed this really amazing photograph,

in Vita and Harold's time,

of this vista in the rose garden.

For me, it just instantly says beauty and romance.

And, in the fourth and last film of Carol's series,

finding the right plant for the right place,

she's been to East Sussex

to look at plants that thrive in coastal gardens.

This is a sea holly.

It can withstand any amount of hot sun and driving wind.

It's perfectly at home here.

And I shall be harvesting garlic, new potatoes, lettuce,

broad beans, beetroot...

all for a birthday feast.

It's sad, but the Oriental poppies have come to an end.

Now, obviously, the annual poppies,

the opium poppies,

are just kicking in and they're fantastic.

But...

the Oriental poppies, which are herbaceous

and come back year after year, have done their stuff,

and it's taking up space without any flowers.

And they can be cajoled into a second performance.

If I take that stake out...

..and cut this back,

that will regrow

and there's a real chance of re-flowering in September.

So, the thing to do is to cut back hard.

And I'm going to go right down to the base,

and cut there.

Now, having created some space, I need plants to fill it.

I've got some annuals that I've grown from seed.

Come on.

And if you haven't grown any from seed yourself,

you can go and buy small plants or plugs from a garden centre

that will do the job just as well.

The advantage of seed, of course,

is you've got a wider range of choice, and it's much cheaper.

And what I have is two types of Cosmos.

I've got Cosmos bipinnatus, Click Cranberries.

I've got Cosmos sulphureus,

or, as I call it, Cosmos "furious".

And I've got some Tithonia.

Tithonia is a Mexican plant,

and I love it.

It adds an intensity of orange

that is bright and brash,

but somehow really works

in the jewel garden.

Now...

I want a really vibrant display but, on the other hand,

you've got to give plants a chance to breathe

and have a decent root system.

And the healthier the plant is, the better it will grow

and the less trouble it will have with slugs and aphids

and all the slings and arrows of outrageous nature.

So, we've got space in here to plant in.

So if I put a little group of this sulphureus in there, like that,

and I definitely could get a tithonia or two in the back

so it will grow up, reach about three, four foot tall,

and then it will get the sun.

I probably could get one in there too, and then I've got

space to pop the Cosmos bipinnatus,

which is quite tall, around it.

Cosmos too comes from South America,

so we've got a distinctly Southern American feel, here.

And you can see I'm planting quite close to the poppy,

cos I can do that,

because when the poppy grows back it won't grow back so big.

And these plants will have established by then,

and be able to compete for themselves.

And these are annuals - they will flower

until the cold stops them.

And that's it - then they come out.

Whereas the poppy is about three or four years old,

and will come back next year

in full, glorious, silky, flamboyant colour.

Right, let's get this tithonia set in.

Other plants that I use for exactly this purpose

are zinnias, dahlias, cannas...

Now, these are all plants that are tender,

that come from near the equator, and will grow

and flower really vibrantly right up until it gets too cold.

So, although it looks a bit bare now, go with it -

plant up and then the garden will look so much better for it,

towards the end of summer and into autumn.

Right, I don't need to do anything else to those at all.

They will look after themselves and, hopefully,

look really good, very soon.

Now, a garden which I reckon

looks really good all the time is Sissinghurst.

It's one of the great gardens of the world.

And, over the last few months, we've been visiting the head gardener,

Troy Scott Smith, to see how he's subtly changing it -

nothing radical, but he's trying to return it to being

nearer to the original spirit of Vita Sackville-West

and Harold Nicolson, who originally made it.

And today, we make our final visit.

The garden's changed in small parts over the last 30, 40 years

but, accumulatively, it threatens to overwhelm Vita's garden,

and it's just really now trying to look at all those changes

that have occurred and say, "Well, can we do it differently now?

"Can we do it better?"

And I think in many cases, actually, we can.

Essentially, Sissinghurst is a garden in the country, actually,

and the views out of the garden were very important

to Vita and to Harold.

And so we're starting to work, actually, outside the garden.

Here, we've sown wildflower meadows where it was just short grass

and hopefully very soon

we will be bringing cows back to graze right at the garden gate.

Here, within the rose garden,

we want to create opportunities for people

to leave the rose garden, into the wider landscape,

and then come back into the garden.

So this artificial boundary that surrounds the garden

is almost just dissolved,

and so people can, very naturally, walk from one space to the next.

What we're also trying to do is just to soften the planting,

so the planting becomes more this idea of fine carelessness

towards the garden peripheries.

And then you quite naturally move from this kind of

treasure box of flowers that Vita had in the heart of the rose garden

to very much more naturalistic kind of plants on the edges.

And we've also recreated the farm pond,

which was right at the garden gate.

So it really just suggests that this was once a farm and, actually,

those qualities are still very important to us today.

The rose garden really is quite an integral part of Sissinghurst.

It only flowers for a brief, spectacular moment,

but, boy, isn't it good when it does flower?

And Vita wasn't afraid of that -

to really, really enjoy that moment.

Sissinghurst wasn't about wealth or power, for Harold and Vita.

It was about much more subtle things -

things like emotion and intimacy and romance,

and so I think the roses, more than any other flower,

really sum those qualities up perfectly.

We did find that, of Vita's nearly 300 roses that she grew here,

we only really had about 100 of her collection, still.

We really set about trying to bring them back to Sissinghurst.

So, you know, we're bringing in lots of old roses,

but we're also bringing in new roses.

This is called Eglantyne, and it just has the appearance

and the look of an old rose,

and it just fits in quite well with the old roses around it.

We recently unearthed this really amazing photograph,

in Vita and Harold's time, of this vista in the rose garden.

For me it just instantly says beauty and romance.

There's an avenue of cherry trees, actually, down either side.

And the path that we're walking on was a turf path.

So here, I'm really very tempted to want to recreate

the idea of the dappled lights through the canopy of trees

onto this grass would be just a magical experience.

The bearded iris are really the shooting stars of the plant world.

And very much like the old roses here at Sissinghurst,

they arrive in one brief but glorious moment.

And Vita loved them.

She loved their intricate beauty,

she loved their historical connections,

and she loved their intense colouring.

And she amassed about 100 bearded iris,

which we now have only about 60 of,

so we're on the hunt for around 40 missing irises.

Now three years into the project, it's tangible, actually,

I think, not just the support we're getting from visitors and volunteers

but actually, people seem to be kind of in a state of excitement

that there's changes here, there's improvements in planting there...

there's a whole batch of new roses flowering there.

I think that excites people because, you know,

sentimental though we all are about gardens and plants,

we also like to see change and we like to understand how

gardens grow and evolve and I think for too long, actually,

Sissinghurst hasn't changed in the ways that it had to do

to really keep going and remain relevant.

We need to grow and develop, and so people are really enjoying this.

I've been to Sissinghurst many times, but seeing that

makes me realise that I'm desperate to go back again.

I can't wait to see what Troy has done, and be inspired once again

by what is truly one of the great gardens of the world.

Right. First, the good news...

It's time to harvest garlic.

Garlic planted in September or early October

is normally ready for harvesting by midsummer.

And home-grown garlic is a lovely thing.

The bad news is that last year, when I was harvesting the garlic,

I found onion white rot,

and that is a disaster for all allium crops

cos it stays in the soil, it rots the neck,

and you can end up with a mushy, rotten bulb,

whether it be a leek, a shallot, a garlic - any of the allium family.

So, what I did was sow my garlic this year - or plant it, rather -

in a container. This is an old cattle trough,

and I used a mixture of garden compost,

bought peat-free compost,

and lots of grit to give it good drainage.

Now, these are new varieties I've never grown before.

This is Red Duke...

..which is supposed to be a little bit spicier than a lot of garlic.

Never ever pull garlic up by the stem -

always dig it up. And that's true for onions too,

because you want as much root on it as possible.

And then you dry it with the roots on, and that stops

any damage to the basal plate, which the roots attach to.

Then you can trim the roots, when it's properly dry.

Shake that off.

And keep all top growth on it.

When you store it, you want to store it with as much on it as possible,

and then dry it.

And, if you want to know when to harvest your garlic -

as a rule of thumb, when the foliage starts to yellow naturally,

it's time to lift it.

But you can see, that's a perfectly good garlic.

Now, here we are. Have a look at this.

You can see the fungal spores on there - the white rot.

The roots are broken and not growing properly.

The top is starting to rot and look bad.

And what happens is, you get this slimy, rotten outer layer.

If you just found one like this,

you would burn it,

dig the soil out,

get rid of that, bring fresh soil in,

and you MIGHT be able to stop it.

The fact is it's endemic

in this garden, now.

But we can eat that fresh.

So we'll put that to one side.

It is disappointing that this garlic has become infected

and, as onion white rot is soil-borne, it is possible that it

came in on the garden compost that I added to the trough.

OK. Those are Red Duke,

of which only one seems to have been afflicted.

However, it's very likely the spores are on all of them.

So just because there's no sign of it, it doesn't mean to say

that it might not appear later during their storage period.

But this other variety, the other side of the central bar -

Extra Early Wight - clearly is in not such good shape.

Now this one, you can see, the top has rotted right back

and the clove has opened out and is a little bit slimy.

Onion white rot and the fungal problems that the allium family get

don't transfer to other families.

So, now, for example, I could top this up with a little bit of

compost, plant some lettuce, some French beans, parsley, basil,

and they will all grow well and crop well for the rest of the summer.

And I have to say, although they may not store as well,

I will eat all those and they will taste delicious, I'm sure.

Now, as well as being the season for lifting garlic,

here are other jobs that are timely this weekend.

At this time of year, with lush growth being battered

by wind and rain,

plants can fall all over the place,

and they certainly need rescuing.

But the trick is to make it look as natural as possible.

So get your support in place and then,

like putting flowers into a vase,

let them fall a bit so that they look natural.

It is tempting to leave masses of young fruit, particularly apples,

developing on the tree.

But to maximise your harvest, it's important to thin them now,

leaving just two fruits to each spur.

This way, you get a good crop of high-quality apples

rather than a mass of low-quality fruit.

We all know that we should be deadheading roses,

but actually, almost any flowers can usefully be deadheaded,

particularly if they've been spent

or they've been damaged by the weather.

Cut back to a side shoot and they'll quickly regrow,

carrying fresh, new blooms.

These fuchsias I bought three, four years ago,

to plant exactly on this spot,

and they didn't work at all well.

However, this year, because it's been mild and it's been damp,

they've loved it.

There will be a plant that likes whatever weather we're having,

even if we don't like it, and fuchsias love moist air,

light shade and mild temperatures,

and it's just finding the right spot for a plant.

Now, Carol has been going round the country,

looking at different situations where plants can thrive

whatever the given conditions.

This time she's gone to the seaside.

If we want our plants to thrive and flourish, we need to choose

plants that will enjoy the conditions we can offer them.

A happy plant is the right plant growing in the right place.

For plants that live within sight and sound of the waves,

there are lots of difficult conditions to contend with.

There are howling gales.

There are high light levels and really hot, beating sun.

But there's one unique problem, too.

And that is salt.

Any plant, with very, very few exceptions,

needs fresh water to survive.

This sea kale, Crambe maritima, has long, questing roots -

sometimes they're metres and metres long -

and it delves down until it finds fresh water and brings it up.

But it's got another way of collecting water, too.

Watch this.

When it rains, and the rain runs onto these leaves...

..it's channelled right down the leaf

and into the crown of the plant.

So it makes use of every bit of fresh water there is.

These leaves are really splendid.

They've got this heavy, glaucous covering,

which reflects light and heat.

And these lovely green seed capsules which are on the plant now,

almost like little beads, were preceded by dainty white flowers

with the most exquisite perfume.

And if you're a plant living here

and you want to attract pollinating insects,

then that's one really good device for bringing them in.

Once the seeds are set they turn brown and they're distributed

here and there, and the sea will very often wash them away

and bring them up further down the beach,

where they'll make brand-new colonies.

What a wonderful plant.

Most of the plants that live by the seaside have tiny little flowers.

But this is an exception.

This is Glaucium flavum, the horned poppy.

It gets its name from these great long seed pods.

But you look at these flowers and you think,

"How can that flower possibly withstand these belting winds

"and this hot, burning sun?"

But unlike most poppies, which have very papery-textured flowers,

if you feel these petals, they're satiny -

they've got a real sheen to them -

and it's that that protects them.

And, like the crambe, it's also got these undulating glaucous leaves.

But in this case, instead of being solid and smooth,

they're covered in fine hairs, which is another way of

protecting the leaf against the wind and the baking sun.

It's all about water loss, really,

and just hanging on to whatever water they can.

Few gardens are right on the beach,

but there are thousands around the country

that are close enough to the sea to still be under its influence.

At first sight, this might not look like a garden,

but it decidedly is.

This is the promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea,

and this garden was put in by the local council, just a few years ago.

And it's a revolutionary success.

When you look at this lovely, silvery planting here,

your eye's drawn immediately to the blue Eryngium.

This is a sea holly, but it doesn't come from the seaside.

It actually comes from way up in the mountains

of the Pyrenees and the Alps.

But it loves the same conditions

as these plants that grow by the sea.

It likes thin soil, really well-drained.

It loves hot, baking sun.

Its leaves have this thick cuticle,

so it can withstand any amount of hot sun and driving wind.

It's perfectly at home here.

Rosa rugosa and its many varieties are widely used and well loved.

It does particularly well at the seaside.

There are a large single flowers with masses of pollen for bees,

and they're followed by squat, orange hips.

If you want to make your own coastal garden, perhaps a raised bed,

with really well-drained soil -

or maybe your soil's like that anyway,

sandy or gravelly, full of stones -

then this is the plant to go for.

It comes from the eastern Mediterranean.

It's a beautiful architectural plant,

and it's ideal for that kind of planting.

It has whorls of these lovely, creamy coloured flowers,

one after another up the stem, which give it a strong structure.

And the leaves too are soft, felty and aromatic.

It's a real touch of the Mediterranean.

A real touch of the seaside in your very own garden.

And you know what?

It's the right plant in the right place.

The great thing about a plant that feels at home

is it will always be more healthy.

It's extraordinary how a plant that is in exactly the right spot

will be more resilient for every kind of pest and disease.

And sometimes they tell you where they want to be in your garden,

rather than you selecting that perfect spot.

These primulas, this is Primula florindae,

which I intended to put in the damp garden

because they like damp conditions and that would suit.

But there was no space - it was the wrong time of year.

So I lined them out along the edge, here,

intending to grow them on and then move them.

And ever since then they have just flourished.

They are completely at home here.

They do not want to go to the damp garden,

even though I would like them in there.

So, they've chosen their home, not me.

And that's where they'll stay.

Today's my birthday,

and one of the traditions that's evolved over the years is that

I harvest my first early potatoes on my birthday.

And some years I have a bumper crop,

and some years a few little marble-sized spuds

to celebrate with.

Now, this year, I planted some in a bag

at Easter, which is the traditional time to plant potatoes,

and I put two in one bag and one in the other.

Now, because it was Easter,

it was cold, I kept them both in the greenhouse.

But after about a month, one bag I put outside.

And that was this one, here.

But we'll see how they've got on.

So let's start with this one, which was in the greenhouse.

So we can pull that up...

And then what I'll do is tip it out into the barrow.

Now, there's a lot of compost in here,

because I topped it up as I went along, instead of earthing it up.

There we go.

Right.

Let's have a look.

Well, I shan't go hungry tonight, at least.

So...

..that's new potatoes, Duke of York, fairly good size.

Exhibit A.

Now for exhibit B which, remember, was put outside

about sort of the end of April, early May,

after the last risk of frost went.

Tip it out.

If I put these...

..at this end...

..if we lift that up we can see...

there is a bigger harvest from exhibit A,

which was grown indoors and had two seed potatoes.

Exhibit B, which was largely grown outside and only had one...

..is less, but not that much less.

So what I would deduce from that, and this is not a serious trial,

is that as long as they're protected from frost,

there's not much advantage in growing them in a greenhouse.

Put them outside,

earth them up so that the tubers don't get frosted,

and the tops are slightly protected,

and you'll get a perfectly good harvest.

Well, that's the result of my effort to grow spuds in a bag.

I know many of you have tried it too,

so do let us know how you got on.

If you go to our website, you can either drop us an e-mail

or go to our Facebook page.

And if you can send a picture, so much the better.

Now, it's good to have some potatoes, this day of all days,

but not enough -

I want to see what else I can have for my birthday treat.

Come on, Nell.

Nelly!

Don't need that basket.

I love broad beans when they're young and sweet.

Now, let's have some beetroot.

Small but delicious.

Well, that's the main course sorted.

Now let's get some pudding. Come on, Nelly - now's your chance.

Come on. Good girl.

There's a good girl. Thank you.

That's really good, cos I can put raspberries in that, now.

Good girl!

I know everybody loves strawberries and cream,

and sees it as a big treat,

but for me raspberries are the real treat.

And they're just beginning to ripen.

Mmm...

That's so good.

Now, that's it for today, and next week we're back on Wednesday,

not Friday - a couple of days earlier -

but we are on at our normal time of 8.30.

So, see you next Wednesday.

Till then, bye-bye.